There is an unspoken story that follows people like me when they leave.
That story says: you ran.
You rejected your culture.
You turned your back on your people.
I’ve heard versions of it for years—sometimes softly, sometimes with resentment disguised as concern. Leaving is easy to misunderstand when staying is framed as virtue. But the truth is simpler, and harder to accept:
I did not leave to escape responsibility.
I left to finally take it.
Before I left Canada, I was not well. I carried anger I couldn’t regulate and habits I used to dull it. I wasn’t a catastrophe, but I could see the direction clearly enough because I’d already watched others arrive there. I was surviving politely. Explaining myself well. Coping just enough.
Staying would have allowed that to continue.
Leaving made it impossible.
China was not an escape. It was friction. It removed the social padding I had relied on. Here, there were consequences. Expectations. Limits. I couldn’t talk my way out of myself. Restraint and accountability stopped being theories and became survival skills.
I married a woman who did not confuse love with indulgence. She did not rescue me. She demanded that I grow up. Geography mattered, but structure mattered more.
I used cognitive behavioral therapy not to become enlightened, but to stay functional—to interrupt patterns in real time, to stop myself before anger or impulse completed their arc. None of this was easy. It required repetition, humility, and distance from the environment that had taught me my worst habits.
This is the part people misname.
What looks like abandonment from the outside was, from the inside, an intervention.
I didn’t leave because I hated where I came from.
I left because I understood what staying would cost me.
There was a cost I didn’t anticipate, though.
When my first novel was released in Canada, my mother did not speak to me for months. She read the book, felt wounded by it, and withdrew. Years later, when the Chinese edition of that same book was launched here, my father—who had been excited to talk about it—was suddenly unavailable. The celebration passed without him.
In both cases, there was no argument. No confrontation. Just absence.
I don’t believe this was deliberate. But the pattern is hard to ignore. At moments when I needed my roots not to evaluate me, not to protect themselves, but simply to be present, they turned away.
Endurance is not the same as healing.
Survival is not the same as presence.
If my leaving unsettles the people I came from, it may be because it suggests—quietly, unintentionally—that another way was possible. That is not an accusation. It is simply a difference in choices, and in timing.
I did not leave to be superior.
I left to become stable.
From that stability, I built what I could not have built otherwise: a home, a family, a way of loving that does not bleed onto the people closest to me. I gave my stepson what I did not always receive—consistency, containment, and the certainty that love does not disappear when things get hard.
I do not regret where I come from.
But I refuse to apologize for refusing to repeat it.
Leaving was not a rejection of my culture or my people. It was a decision to interrupt a pattern that had already taken enough. If that choice is misunderstood, I can live with that.
What I could not live with was staying the same.
Coda: It Ends With Me
I have a granddaughter now. Naomi.
When I think about her future, I don’t feel threatened by the idea that she might surpass me. I hope she does. I hope she exceeds my limits and never has to untangle the knots I spent years working through.
I don’t need her to stay small so I can feel whole.
I don’t need her to manage my emotions.
I don’t need her success to confirm anything about my worth.
That’s how I know something ended.
Whatever moved through my family—anger, avoidance, addiction, self-protection disguised as love—it stops here. Not because I am better than anyone who came before me, but because I chose to do the work they could not, or did not.
I left so I could return differently.
I changed so the people who come after me won’t have to.
When Naomi reaches her own moments of joy, I will be there.
Not evaluating.
Not withdrawing.
Not collapsing.
Just present.
And that is the inheritance I intend to pass on.
