Changing countries left her torn between Los Angeles

moving from – For nearly a decade, the family behind this story lived abroad—China, then Cambodia—before returning to Los Angeles five years ago. Now, with the daughter almost 10 and her friendships deepening, the prospect of another move to Europe collides with a child’s g

When my daughter was three and we lived in China, she gnawed on a chicken claw—then looked at me like I was the one being weird.

“Eww,” she said, annoyed that I was asking her to look away from Roblox. I tried to pull the memory back out of her later, showed her the video again, and watched her shake her head.

Another memory gone.

She doesn’t remember much about the years we lived abroad. And that, more than anything, has started to change how my husband and I think about leaving Los Angeles again—because our daughter, now almost 10, is happy here, and she doesn’t seem eager to go back into the churn of new places.

We left Los Angeles first for work—then kept going because the next offer arrived.

My husband is a music teacher. We left because his first job offer came in after he sent résumés to schools around the world. We didn’t care where we landed so long as it was far away. The plan was rooted in restlessness and possibility, not a detailed map of what childhood should look like.

For a while, moving felt like a shortcut through life.

We’d met at a jungly yoga class in Bali. then spent our early years together living out of cheap hotel rooms across Asia. Living this way felt like “cheat code” energy: while people back home wrestled with mortgages and credit card debt. we zipped around on motorbikes. got cheap massages. and—most importantly for us—outran boredom.

But when I got pregnant, the story turned.

We moved back to Los Angeles and bought a house. Things felt pleasant for a stretch: holidays with relatives, nice neighbors, and a life that made sense on paper.

Still, the idea of leaving didn’t disappear. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch YouTube videos of families living abroad. When our daughter was asleep, my husband and I would open a bottle of wine and talk ourselves back into that older life—this time, with a kid.

Once that talk turned into applications, the first school extended an offer, and we said yes.

The teaching job was in Xiamen, a coastal city in southeast China. Xiamen wasn’t as touristy as cities like Shanghai and Beijing, which meant fewer English speakers. We enrolled our daughter in a local pre-school where she was the only foreign kid in her class.

She did learn—she practiced Mandarin and learned to use chopsticks. But even then, I started to notice something I hadn’t expected: she seemed more frustrated than excited about the adventure. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d formed sentences in English and used a fork.

Eventually, we moved again—from China to Cambodia.

The pandemic was part of the reason we left China. In Cambodia, my husband secured another teaching job. This time, our daughter went to school with other expat kids. She swapped Mandarin for Khmer lessons, but the rest of her day stayed in English.

Life became easier. Still, we never intended to stay in Cambodia.

We treated it like a pit-stop until something better came along. and while the days were manageable. I started to worry after meeting older expat kids who had already been through their fourth or fifth new country. I kept coming back to the same questions: what if our daughter never felt settled anywhere?. How many new languages would she be expected to learn?. How many friends would she have to leave behind before she was old enough to hold any of it steady?.

When the pandemic finally hit Cambodia, we decided to leave and return to Los Angeles to wait it out.

By then, our daughter missed small pieces of the old life—she loved the idea of tuk-tuks. I still remember her glee when she saw everyone at the local park speak English.

We enrolled her in school and moved to an area we liked, telling ourselves we were done with the moving life. We’d still travel, we said. Spring break, summer, Christmas—like other families.

For five years, Los Angeles became the longest place we’ve ever lived.

And now that stretch is exactly what makes the future feel heavier.

My husband and I have grown restless again. We’ve tried to settle: signing leases, browsing homes, investing in expensive furniture that we know we can’t take with us. It doesn’t feel like us.

Lately, we’ve been talking about moving to Europe and floating the idea to our daughter. The conversations don’t travel far. She quickly changes the subject.

While my husband and I keep looking backward and forward—talking about the past. dreaming about some far-away somewhere—our daughter is anchored in the here and now. She’s happy. As she gets older, her friendships grow stronger. For us, imagining pulling her away has started to feel scarier than exciting.

There’s a mismatch that’s hard to explain from the outside, but easy to feel inside a family.

For me, Los Angeles feels boring because I know it so well. When I was a kid, I watched foreign movies with my mom, dreaming about all the places I’d see one day. Anywhere felt more exciting than home.

Maybe it’s the opposite for our daughter. Maybe for her, adventure isn’t jumping to the next place—it’s knowing a place intimately, belonging somewhere.

I don’t know whether we’ll ever get there. I don’t know whether my husband and I will ever look out the window and feel the simple certainty: this is it, we belong here.

Los Angeles China Cambodia international schools expat life pandemic travel family relocation child memory parenting music teacher Xiamen Khmer Mandarin tuk-tuk