We had the kind of encyclopedia that you ordered from a magazine, or perhaps our grandparents had bought it from a door-to-door salesperson. The whole collection was only sixteen volumes, maybe twenty, and comprised the entire potential reference capabilities in our household. I’m sure we had a dictionary somewhere, and various field guides, but if I wanted to know about culture or people or the world at large, it was to this shelf of magazine-quality information dressed up in fancy leather that I was resigned. Always when I went to investigate something in this promising reference library, I invariably felt some kind of injustice had been committed. Even before my age had reached double digits, I was well aware of adult deception. These purported reliable sources did not contain all of the facts. It was obvious that truths were being kept hidden, and even moreso that stories had been fabricated. Why, I would wonder abed after hunting for my Easter candy, would it matter that a bunny brought the eggs? To this day I wonder. I served the justice of telling my little brother the truth behind this strange secret. I don’t remember him caring, but I haven’t forgotten that my grandmother did. I like to think, though I do not quite remember doing so, that I had researched the Easter bunny in those lame encyclopedic tomes. It was my ongoing and quite fervent mission to reveal the truths that were being hidden from us children. If I said it wasn’t fair, adults would tell me that life’s not fair, and would leave me puzzled as I cried that they might be, if they so chose. How could I ever trust them or their books? I pledged to grow up honest. I even wrote myself a note, in high school, that as a parent (update: uncle) I would trust children with truths, and believe theirs in turn. I suppose it wasn’t only the lack of compelling information about the world outside my own that made me want to run away.

One of our fonder family stories involves my then-kindergartner brother taking off down the road from our home armed only with fresh undies and a toothbrush. He was my hero that day, despite my skepticism and the likelihood that it was I who gave him up before he got far. I read as many books as I could about adventurous kids; I still do. My Side of the Mountain remains glorious in my mind, as well as the entire Narnia series. (Pa que lo sepas, there was nothing in the latter to persuade even my childhood mind to believe that god was anybody significant.) In the waning glow of my trust in adults I tended a budding faith in all underestimated young adventurers. Wasn’t I as capable as Lucy and Peter? I knew myself equally pure of heart, and similarly in need of respite. Parents don’t believe their children know what’s good for them, I suppose. Nearing the end of a halfhearted slog through undergraduate tenure, I found myself applying to grad schools with a depressing, panic-inducing resignation. In those weeks, sleeplessness would leave me only temporarily, and then horribly, as in the midst of the rest I so dearly needed I would startle awake clutching at my chest and gasping for air. I was thus plunged into apathy, giving up on most of life and nearly failing the capstone project of my minor. I had started to expect that my entire existence was going to suck if I did it the way the lying adults wanted me to. In my final semester of university, I finally began my plan to run away.

My mom, nearly exclusively among the adults around whom I was raised, always did her best to see me when she looked at me, and hear me when I talked. When I admitted to the deep suffering of my final semester and asked if I could put off graduate school, she didn’t even take a breath before agreeing that I should. There was a pause though, I remember, before she let me know that I was my own person now. I should probably go to grad school, but it would be entirely my own choice, my sole responsibilty. She let go of her managerial duties as parent then, and let the evolution of her role as a trusted, supportive equal begin. It was my mother who taught me to question authority, and it was she alone I trusted among adults. It was also she who, upon hearing of my decision to teach English in Asia, bargained that she’d pay for my ticket if she could choose the country. In my fledgling state there was nothing to do but agree, and so my ticket to Taiwan was purchased.

Teaching in Asia was a natural choice for me, it felt wholly in line with the life of my dreams, and not at all scary as a concept. Susan, Peter, Edmund and Lucy didn’t take guidebooks to Narnia; they didn’t do research before stepping into a place wholly unknown. I arrived in Taipei at the tender age of twenty-one with a well-packed suitcase (gracias, Mama), a contract for employment, and no clue what I was getting into. It was my very own clean undies and toothbrush combo; I was running blindly toward anything new. Bravery asks that one choose to overcome an unfamiliar discomfort in order to accomplish something. Cultural discomfort wasn’t new to me, though. I was a bisexual, biracial, human who’d been assigned to the female gender and treated alarmingly thus. All of this confusion even as I struggled to reach eighteen in a village of fewer than two thousand all-but homogenous, very privileged people. A whole new continent seemed no more daunting to me than every single day of high school had been. I thought happily that abroad I would have the excuse of being foreign to shelter all of my insecurities. With trepidation made palatable by the immense hope offered by a new experience, I cried myself to sleep on the plane to Taipei.