I’ve been alive for 44 years. I took a moment recently to trace where those years went. Geographically, I mean. And the result genuinely confuses me even now.

Born in Indonesia. Adopted at six weeks old. Raised in Brussels, in a French-Belgian household. University in Antwerp. Then the United States, during the Obama years, followed by years of just… moving.

Traveling. Living out of bags and laptops. China for a bit. London eventually. And then Taiwan, where I mostly live now, despite speaking Mandarin at a level that would embarrass a toddler.

Forty-nine countries. Three continents. Multiple versions of a life, running simultaneously.

And yet: I have no idea where home is.

The Question People Always Ask

It was always the same two, whether I was meeting someone at a hostel or on a Zoom call.

Where are you from?

Did you ever go back to Indonesia?

The second one is the interesting one. I never went back. Not once. Not even during the years between 2010 and 2018, when I had every opportunity.

Something always pulled me elsewhere, or maybe I pulled myself elsewhere on purpose. I’m still not entirely sure.

But here’s what I need people to understand: there’s no emotional thread connecting me to Indonesia. I was six weeks old when I left. I don’t speak the language. I don’t know the food, the customs, the textures of daily life there.

None of it. Being born somewhere doesn’t automatically wire you to it. Not when you leave before you’ve formed a single memory. My country of birth is, in every meaningful sense, a place I’ve never been to.

People sometimes find this strange, even unsettling. But the judgment doesn’t really land when you haven’t walked the same path. Attachment to a place isn’t inherited through geography.

It’s built through time, through language, through the smell of a kitchen and the particular light of an afternoon. I got all of that in Belgium, not Indonesia.

The Language Problem

The deeper confusion is linguistic, and it compounds everything else.

I grew up bilingual. French and Flemish-Dutch. Learned English at 12. By 22, English had quietly become my primary language, and it’s stayed there for over two decades now.

My thinking happens in English. My writing, obviously. My internal monologue, the voice I argue with myself in: all English.

So what does that make me, exactly? European? Asian? A walking identity crisis with good food instincts?

Now add Mandarin to the pile. I’m living in Taiwan, making repeated and mostly humbling attempts to learn Traditional Chinese, and somehow this is making the whole picture even blurrier.

There are days when I can’t locate myself culturally on any map I know how to read.

It really does feel like a perfect storm. Someone built for nowhere specific, and therefore for everywhere.

Am I Still an Expat?

I think so. Or an immigrant. Honestly, I’ve never been sure what the practical difference is.

What I know is this: I live about 90% of my time in Taiwan and 10% in London. Belgium, where I was raised, I haven’t returned to since I left.

That’s not a decision I consciously made, or maybe it is, and I just haven’t admitted it yet.

If I walked back into Belgium tomorrow, I’d be uncomfortable. Speaking Flemish again after all these years, trying to recognize a culture I grew up in but have slowly become a stranger to.

The mentality there, especially compared to the United States or Taiwan, feels like a different world to me now. Not worse. Just genuinely foreign.

My working conclusion: I’m an Indonesian-born, Belgian-raised expat, living in Asia, thinking entirely in English, with a stomach that still craves Belgian food above everything else.

The expat label probably stays until my Mandarin can hold a real conversation, if that day ever comes.

I Don’t Want to Forget Either

Belgium still feels like my real country, if I had to point to one. But I don’t want to write off Indonesia entirely just because there’s no emotional foundation there. That’s not the same as saying it doesn’t matter.

At some point, I’d like to go. Not to reconnect with something I never had. I’m past romanticizing that, but just to see it. To close a loop, or at least to look at it directly instead of around it.

I could start smaller: dig into it online first, read about it properly, and understand what I was actually born into.

Belgium, I think about more than I let on. I’m far too attached to Belgian beer, waffles, fries, chocolate, and pastry to fully let go. And Taiwan, to its credit, makes most of that available. Not all of it. But enough.

And maybe this whole thing, this whole confused, multi-continent, multi-language, no-clear-home situation is worth documenting properly.

Not as a tidy narrative where it all makes sense at the end, but as an ongoing thing. The kind of thing I’d actually want to listen back to in five years and see if the answer has changed.

That might be worth a few episodes in my podcast journal.