What was it like growing up in China?
I would say, number one, at least coming from the foreigner side, [China] is a whole lot less pressure. It felt a whole lot less busy. The culture is very different.
Another thing that's hugely different is transportation. In the US, we use personal vehicles. In China, there's so many people living close together, literally hundreds of thousands or even millions depending on the city or province, that subways and other modes of transportation are not always the best quality and good roads are a rarity. Consequently, you can't have everyone driving a car. Instead, you have to use bicycles or subways or buses. So that was a bigger adjustment– kind of learning how to drive not having grown up in that, because my parents didn't drive in China either.
You said you lived in China for 13 years, what was the transition like after you moved back to the States?
It was definitely hard, just kind of living in two different worlds at the same time. Obviously growing up in American household, that makes the transition easier, but definitely got some of that culture shock coming back to the States and just getting really accustomed to life here.
Where are some places that you’d like to travel to?
I'd love to go back to China again, even some of the other Asian countries. I've been to Thailand and South Korea as well. I would love to go to Canada if I could somehow get there. My parents and I used to live in Detroit before we went overseas, so we were pretty close to the Canadian border, but never got the opportunity to go.