I didn’t mean to end up in Taiwan.
At 24, I was fresh out of college, crashing on a friend’s couch in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, sending resumes into the void.
It was early 2009—maybe the worst time in modern history to be job hunting in New York. The city was reeling from the global recession & my inbox stayed empty.
I picked up an unpaid marketing internship at Sounds of Brazil and worked nights at a bar—chef, barback, party animal.
Most mornings, I’d catch the sunrise on my way home, riding the J train from Marcy Ave in Williamsburg to Kosciuszko St in the heart of Bed-Stuy.
I realized pretty quickly: I needed out. A reset. A new story.
So I moved back into my parents’ house in Tucson, Arizona. For six months, I worked, saved & stared at the ceiling. I knew I wanted to see the world—but I wasn’t sure where, or why.
Asia kept tugging at me.
The seed had been planted the summer before. My graduation gift—a generous, loving send-off from my proud parents, as the first in my family to earn a college degree—was a trip anywhere in the world.
All my friends went to Europe. I chose Japan.
Why? Because I wanted a story that didn’t sound like everyone else’s. It helped that one of my closest friends had a brother who’d been living in Japan for over a decade and had offered up a month-long apartment rental to anyone who wanted to visit.
Six weeks in Tokyo & Kanazawa with some of my best friends cracked something open. And let’s be honest—what 25-year-old wouldn’t be enraptured by countless izakayas, the Fuji Rock Festival, incredible nightlife & beautiful Japanese women—all set in one of the most modern countries in the world, with a deep cultural history as its backdrop?
Asia’s allure fully stole me.
I didn’t know what it all meant yet. But I knew I wanted more.
Fast-forward to April 2009: I bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong. My friend Davy & his family welcomed me into their home while I figured things out. Soon after, I enrolled in a teaching certification course in Harbin—a "small town" by Chinese standards (just over ten million people) in northeastern China.
I didn’t know what I was doing. But I was doing something. And it was a start.
Harbin was gritty, industrial & a crash course in culture shock. When the course ended, I returned to Hong Kong & began to plan. I had a shiny new TEFL certificate & no idea where to go next.
China wasn’t calling me back. Mandarin, though—that still felt like a smart investment. I had studied marketing in university & I figured learning the language could be a valuable asset down the road.
Davy said, “Why not Taiwan?”
I knew next to nothing about it.
A few Google searches later, it looked like paradise. Mountains. Ocean. Friendly faces. And Mandarin to make it feel like I was still heading in the right direction.
So I packed a bag & booked a flight. I met with a placement agent and, over the next few days, we worked our way down the island:
Hsinchu.
Taichung.
Changhua.
Yunlin.
Douliu, Yunlin, to be precise.
I didn’t know it then, but that’s where everything would begin.
I knew precisely zero Mandarin. On my first day, someone greeted me—and I instinctively responded in Spanish. My brain panicked and reached for the closest foreign language it had.
Somehow, though, Taiwan felt like home.
I couldn’t explain it. Still can’t, really. It was nothing like El Paso, Texas, where I grew up. And yet, there was something about it—something warm and familiar.
I thought I was just passing through.
But I’ve now spent the better part of a decade here over the last fifteen years—mostly in Tainan.
It’s the only place I’ve ever lived that comes close to the feeling of home.
And it all started with a one-way ticket, a generous gift, a recession & a gut feeling I couldn’t ignore.
And, boy, am I glad I followed that gut feeling.
