Not Chinese. Not American. Not Dominican. Just Real.

A reflection on a return to where I grew up

In three days, I’ll return to a place I haven’t seen in 52 years. It’s where my first memories were formed. I remember nothing of the United States before the age of eight. After my family fled the Dominican Republic, we landed in Puerto Rico.

The Dominican Republic is a place I’ve heard arrogant, imperialist stories about my entire life—stories told with absolute conviction but no grounding in truth. As I look now into what actually happened in the 1970s, I realize those stories were fabrications.

I was told that all major American airlines stopped flying there because the locals didn’t know how to maintain airplanes and were causing crashes. That was never true. Not once. It was just a way to frame the people there as primitive and incompetent.

I was told—by the same person—that in 1972, Dominicans didn’t know how to use toilets. As if toilets are some mysterious technology. Of course they knew. Toilets have been around since the 1800s. Everyone knows how to use a toilet. That wasn’t a memory—it was a performance of superiority.

I was told someone from that culture said a table “broke itself,” and that this proved their ignorance. But now I know it was just the reflexive voice in Spanish—a normal, elegant part of the language. The only ignorance in that moment belonged to the American who didn’t understand what they were hearing.

When the Dominican Revolution of 1965 was mentioned, it wasn’t the thousands who died that drew concern—it was that the French doors had been left open, so the glass wasn’t broken. Glass was hard to get then. That’s what mattered. There was no discussion that the revolution began because the U.S. disliked Juan Bosch and immediately recognized the military government that deposed the democratically elected president. I learned that today, doing my own research. It was never talked about by the American missionaries—people who were there to erase indigenous and local culture while mocking its difference, fretting more over panes of glass than human lives.

As I’ve tried to trace the reasons we left, I’ve heard so many versions—each mutually incompatible—that I no longer believe any of them. I think the truth is simpler: Americans failed. And couldn’t face it. So they turned it into a story that made them heroes or victims, but never accountable.

For nearly 40 years, I’ve watched this same person clash with my Chinese family—rejecting Chinese and Taiwanese traditions, dismissing what they didn’t understand. I’ve walked beside them as they rolled their eyes at temples, muttering “superstition” under their breath, too proud to ask what anything meant.

And now I return. Not to reclaim a myth. But to touch the truth that was always there.

And in doing so, I see myself more clearly: not American. Not Dominican. Not Puerto Rican. Not Chinese. But shaped by all of them. A third culture person. Raised in one world, raised again in another.

And for most of my adult life, I’ve lived immersed in yet another culture—Chinese—surrounded by Americans who refused to learn, refused to listen, and who didn’t even know what questions needed asking.

I return with humility and respect, knowing that I know nothing. I only know what a child might have known: happy games, laughter, merengue music, and the joy of sitting under waves as they crashed over me.

I return, too, with a memory from ten years ago—of the two Dominican men who helped move us into our home. When I said, “That is where I am from,” they looked at my white skin and blue eyes, skeptical. Until I said, “I moved here when I was eight—no memories before that.” And then they understood. I stepped in to help carry, ignoring their polite protests. And we worked slowly, easily, enjoying each other’s company.

That’s the feeling I carry now—not certainty. Not explanation. Just the chance to return in the spirit of recognition, and to begin again.

And knowing—finally and fully—that everything I was taught and told before I moved to Taiwan at 22 was an imperialist fantasy. A script that never fit. A story I was expected to repeat. But somehow, I knew it wasn’t real. Even at six years old, tugging at a parent’s hand and saying: “Let me translate. You don’t speak Spanish.”