I Didn’t Think I’d Ever Belong Until My Kids Waved Paper Flags

For most of my life, identity felt like a border I lived beside rather than inside. As a political science major, the hardest subject for me was never theory or methodology; it was belonging. I learned this early.

In middle school in Toronto, where I had just arrived from Hong Kong as an immigrant, we sang the national anthem every morning and decorated bulletin boards for National Day. I understood the significance of the ceremony and the sacrifices behind the symbols, but nothing in me recognized the celebration. When the class stood up, hand over heart, I stood up too, but it felt more like their birthday party than mine.

In high school, I learned to craft belonging on paper. While my classmates groaned about writing essays on patriotism every year, I wrote mine easily by inventing different versions of myself who embraced the Canadian identity. I wrote about hockey, poutine, beavertails, and how I lived for the Canadian winter with hot chocolate. But my comfort food was still dim sum and wonton noodles, and I felt most at home crowded in noisy Chinese restaurants during weekend lunches. This was before the internet or AI; the library was my only guide, and I borrowed the vocabulary of other people’s belonging and made it sound like my own.

University did not change much. In my political theory seminars, I finally had permission to question what home meant without the pressure of arriving at the “right” conclusion. I could map the theories of multiculturalism, quote scholars on diaspora, and interview fellow students for the campus paper. No academic text, however, could explain why I felt nothing for the country that had given me so much, and none of them could tell me what to do with that absence. I moved through my teens and twenties convinced that some people were simply built for rootlessness.

That belief made moving easy. I learned to travel light, fully knowing that I would not stay in one place for long. While my friends worried about staying close to family or keeping long-distance relationships alive, I floated from one place to another: summers abroad, internships abroad, and eventually a return to Hong Kong to see whether my sense of belonging might return. I thought that perhaps I might rediscover the missing feeling in my birthplace.

It did not. I had been gone too long to recognize the city, and English had taken over my internal world. Local dramas did not captivate me and the jokes were not funny in the way they were supposed to be. I spoke Cantonese with an accent and was treated more as an outsider than a local. I wasn’t disappointed nor was I relieved. I was just ‘blah’ as I’ve always been. A friend once called me the most relativist person she knew, and I did not disagree.

At some point I stopped waiting for “home” to arrive. I accepted that I might live permanently between languages, passports, and versions of myself that fit nowhere completely. Belonging became something I knew how to study, write about, and respect in others, but not something I expected to feel for myself from the inside. 

After graduate school, I got married. My husband and I were working in two different countries, both burned out from careers that looked impressive on the outside. We quit, bought new backpacks, and decided to travel for a while. Taiwan was supposed to be a brief stopover for Christmas with his family, a pause to catch our breath before we chose the next place.

We did not plan to stay. We found a small apartment on the edge of Taichung, where you can still see mountains and smell the farms on windy days. There is a direct bus downtown, mornings were simple, and errands did not consume the entire afternoon. We took up triathlons, biked along the coast, and let the weeks pass. Nothing felt dramatic or final. It was just one good day after another.

Weeks became months, then years. We had children, Tim, now five, and Ivy, four. Life here was humane and straightforward. Daycare was subsidized, and healthcare rarely took more than an hour from the moment we left the house to the moment we returned. A routine doctor visit was simply that: routine, not a logistical or emotional crisis. The systems worked, and because they worked, joy began to show up in the most mundane parts of our routines.

I didn’t call it belonging at the time. I simply recognized it as “this works for us for now.” Hong Kong was slowly changing and many of my friends moved elsewhere. Canada remained a place I was grateful for and would visit from time to time to see my parents. Taiwan sat somewhere in between: familiar enough to make everyday life work, distant enough from my parents’ expectations, but fragile enough politically that no one took its stability for granted. Taiwan felt precarious, in-between, yet strangely gentle.

This past August, a generous relocation package to Vietnam with real financial upside arrived at our door. On paper, it was everything expat dreams are made of: a high salary, international school for both of our children, housing, and subsidies. We flew out to look at apartments and schools. Everything we saw was shiny and aspirational, the kind of global lifestyle that photographs well. The city was described as “the next big place,” and it pulsed with possibility and growth.

As we walked through the expat districts and gated compounds, however, I found myself wondering whether our days would truly unfold inside the city or only beside it. The school tours were impressive and the apartments had pools and playrooms. But when I tried to picture our children walking to a park, I immediately imagined traffic. When I thought about Ivy’s asthma, I asked myself whether she could receive the care she needed quickly if something escalated.

Friends abroad were buying what they called “forever homes.” We looked at our life in Taichung and realized that ours had already taken shape, not through a mortgage or a milestone, but through the daily agreements our routines had made with us. In Taichung, we had predictability, a reasonable level of efficiency, and community. There was a kind of practical generosity embedded into the culture that we had come to rely on. We did not need more space or a kitchen island. We needed days that did not drain us.

We said no to Vietnam. In that no, something shifted. For the first time, I understood where I stood in the long geography of my life. I had always lived in the borderlands; now I realized I had quietly crossed into something that looked and felt like home.

A few weeks later, at school pickup, Tim and Ivy burst out of their classrooms waving handmade flags painted with blue sky, bright sun, and red earth. The paint was still wet and their hands were smeared with color. They recited verses about freedom and sacrifice in a language that still sometimes catches me off guard.

Standing there at the school gate, I felt a quiet jolt, not of nationalism but of recognition, the kind I had spent years pretending to feel in Canadian classrooms and never could. No one was asking me to prove anything. No one was checking if I knew the right words. My children were simply bringing home the symbols of the place where they were growing up.

What washed over me that afternoon was not pride in a nation-state. It was trust in a place. I trusted that when my children crossed the street, drivers would stop. I trusted that the cashier at the stationery store knew their faces well enough to help them find stickers while I read labels. I trusted that if Ivy wheezed at night, we could be at a clinic within minutes, and that the building security guard would buzz them up if I were late coming home from work. I trusted that their bodies were safe enough here for them to grow.

My Chinese is imperfect. At home I still default to English. I do not follow every nuance of local politics. Yet I have come to love this small, precarious democracy, one that holds its freedoms tenderly because it understands they are not guaranteed. Beneath the differences in language, I recognize the values that shape daily life: practical care, honest work, everyday generosity, and an unromantic efficiency that quietly protects families like mine.

Some people belong through anthems. Others belong through ancestry or struggle. For me, belonging arrived late and quietly, by the accumulation of ordinary days, the safety of small systems, and the moment my children waved paper flags in a place I never expected to love. It turns out that home, for me, is not the loud feeling I was taught to look for. It is the gentle, steady trust that our days can unfold here, one simple afternoon at a time.