The strange ache of starting over in a place that looks perfect.

---

When I think of California, I think of people who don’t apologize for existing.
Confidence. Volume. Space.
Freedom like it’s their middle name.
After all, isn’t that what America sells?
Volume. Expansion. No shrinking.

Growing up, we had satellite TV, a whopping twenty channels to choose from.
And with that, a choice between cultures.

I went to a Chinese primary school, but my Mandarin was never good enough.
I didn’t speak it at home the way my friends did.
It was never my first language.

I learned early that difference had to be smoothed out.
So I did.

I tried to learn the culture, to be more like my Chinese friends.
I watched Taiwanese and Hong Kong shows, series, movies, trying to keep up.
But it never stuck.

I always felt slightly behind. Slightly off.
Like trying to put on a suit that didn’t quite feel like my own skin.

So I leaned west.
More and more.

More TV shows and series.
I remember pausing the screen and writing down scripts in my little notebook,
because the English I learned in school felt stiff by comparison.

And MTV.
I spent more time with Britney Spears and Beyoncé than my own mom.
I printed out lyrics, memorized them.
I absorbed Hollywood confidence secondhand.

Being mixed meant never landing fully anywhere.
There was always a jagged edge to me,
so I learned to smooth it down.

I was already living between labels.

London came later.
Western, but restrained. Polite. Controlled.
Years of navigating sarcasm and surface niceness.
I never quite cracked it.
I rarely knew what anyone really felt about me.
I lived there for ten years, yet my closest friends were other expats.
My British friends always felt just out of reach.
Close, but not quite mine.

That familiar sense of drifting between places never really left.

Then California.

The first thing I noticed at the airport was the spelling.
Familiar words, wrong letters.

In a changing room one day,
I heard women talking outside, sharp, animated, unmistakably American.
It felt like the TV had come to life.

On the street, strangers told me their life stories within five minutes.
Relationships. Health. Trauma.
Everything offered freely.
Too freely.

Their voices were piercing.
Their openness felt invasive.

This was the opposite of everything I’d learned.
Where my instincts were calculated, theirs were expansive.
Where I’d been taught to read the room, they filled it.

There’s a gap between where I come from
and what’s happening around me now.
And suddenly, the confidence I admired asks something of me.
Not admiration, but participation.

My chest tightens.

I realize how much of my life
I’ve spent watching freedom from the sidelines.

And now, under this sun,
even the edges are exposed.