How I Became a Country -- A story of longing, belonging, and unlearning the map that they gave me
One of the most asked questions I received while traveling solo was:
“Where are you from?”
Always asked with that tone—
the one reserved for women of color.
A question that seems simple,
but carries a thousand shadows.
I was asked it even in the places I’ve lived.
It made me question my own identity.
So I asked ChatGPT if I could be called a triple expat—
Hong Kong, Canada, Berlin.
Technically, yes.
But apparently expatriate was a word originally coined for white people living abroad—
a term padded in soft colonial edges,
often used to distance certain travellers from the word immigrant.
Immigrant—now that’s a word I recognize.
At ten, I immigrated to Canada with my family.
Old enough to remember how Hong Kong felt,
too young to carry much of it with me.
I was wide-eyed, excited to move abroad,
with no real sense of what I was leaving behind.
In Berlin, I heard expat everywhere.
But I never identified with it.
I was never a patriate to begin with—
how could I be an ex of something I never truly belonged to?
If Canada were a man, it might be because of the word patriate.
A word never close enough to claim.
He was well-meaning—
the kind of partner who holds the door
but never asks what you’re dreaming of.
He was always there—but distant.
Polite on the surface, alienating underneath.
I wanted him to ask about the places I come from—
the ones I carried in silence,
the ones I’d begun to forget how to name.
But he never did.
I didn’t know how to tell him
that I had felt invisible in our relationship all these years.
But maybe he, too, was still searching for who he really was.
I couldn’t bring myself to call him home,
even when all my legal documents said otherwise.
But Berlin… Berlin was different.
A city of misfits and migrants,
the beautifully unrooted,
the lucid, the lost.
If Berlin had a body, it would be fluid—
elusive and sexy,
noncommittal and transient.
Never quite yours,
never asking to be.
They never needed me,
but I kept wanting to stay.
Because they embraced my queerness and my edges,
my shapeshifting nature—
and ultimately,
helped me grow comfortable in my own skin.
There, I found myself among fellow in-betweeners—
souls in exile who chose them
as a stopover,
a sanctuary,
a testing ground for the fluid self.
But even then, I knew:
they were never the kind to promise forever.
After that second migration, I drifted further—
across lands, languages, and expectations.
“But where are you really from?”
(You don’t belong here, do you?)
It made me realize
how long I’d let others define me.
As someone from the diaspora,
I was programmed to assimilate quietly.
To work hard.
To stay small.
To never answer back.
But in my travels, I was renamed again and again—
sometimes gently,
sometimes violently.
I was called things I didn’t recognize.
Words shouted, projected, guessed.
And thanks to them, I came to understand:
those were never me.
Just shadows,
bent through the mirror of their own projection.
So I stopped looking out there for mirrors,
and began looking in.
And I found that home wasn’t a place.
It was something I could grow inside myself.
I didn’t belong to any one country.
I had become my own.
And she—
she is a land who will embrace me,
any day.