"Not again," I thought.
My family moved five times in elementary school, and now I was in middle school and we were moving again. I'd finally found a stable base of friends with whom I played soccer or video games almost every day. Whole days were spent outside on a field or gathered around someone's Xbox. But now that sense of stability for myself was shattered, yet again.
I wanted my parents to promise that we'd move back in a month or two. We lived on a residential campus that guaranteed housing to doctors doing their residencies, as my dad did at the time. This made the move especially hard since the majority of us lived feet from each other, making everyone's apartments within walking distance. In addition, my dad was entering the third of his four-year residency, so I knew we could have stayed if he wanted to.
"We found a deal," he said.
There was an insanely cheap foreclosed house in an upscale, high-performing school district. It looked like a trainwreck at the time: the driveway was the picturesque setting for off-road vehicle commercials, the floorboards needed to be entirely replaced, and the basement was moldy, damp, and uninhabitable. Now, those deficiencies have been repaired and the value of the home has more than doubled from the initial price. In retrospect, I could see why my dad made that decision.
At the time, though, I was angry. I loved my family but my parents worked so hard that they were rarely home. The age gap between me and my brother just meant we had different obligations. I clung to friends, and when I couldn't do that, I clung to video games in my spare time. What I figured then was, "What's the point of making good friends if we're just going to keep moving?"
I would ask many of my classmates and friends how often they moved whenever I arrived to a new school district. 95% of the time, the answers were, "never" or "once, when I was really young." I envied those kids, as if everything else in their lives was completely fine and perfect. Numerous times, I was the "new kid," and I always felt like an outsider, of course. I hated it.
The time we moved in middle school was the last time, but I'd adjusted by then. From a loud and annoying kid, I quickly became introverted and detached. I spent a lot of time playing MMORPGs, as I've written about before, because those games had a social aspect and friends that would never go away. While I played soccer and Xbox with my friends before, I now did quests and hunted monsters with my online ones.
It took a few years to realize that I was being melodramatic and unappreciative. I was born two years after my parents immigrated to the United States, and as such, our financial situation was heavily unstable. Being a researcher, my dad's positions were especially precarious, as most in academic professions. According to Dr. Nancy Darling of PsychologyToday, "Required moves is one of the many stresses in the lives of academics and many other professions." My brother and parents had moved about twice as much as I did before I was born, and here I was acting like I was the only one in the family who had it hard.
I began to see that my mom, dad, and brother all lost a lot of friends each time they moved, but they handled it more maturely and with more poise than each time I did. That may be just because they were older, but it stands to reason that I had it much better than anyone else in my family. I had a dad who always tried to do better for his family. He eventually turned to becoming a doctor to better support us. I had a mom who worked multiple jobs while still doing housework, a model of resilience and perseverance that I follow today.
Even now, we're the only members of our family to live in the United States. Whenever we visit China, we return to the village that my dad came from, and it's only then that I can fully appreciate how much my family sacrificed and toiled to be where we are now.
My family's village center didn't have much, but it had multiple picture frames of my dad when he came to visit, greeting kids and hugging elders in the family. It took me a bit to fathom the notion that "wow, my dad is a celebrity here." He made it out of the poor village and brought his family to the best country in the world. They saw him the same way we see LeBron or Kobe. It's his legacy and influence that reminds me that I could always do more and do better.
Moving allowed me to meet so many people and live in completely different demographics. In all, we loved doing the same things: playing sports (whether in video games or in real life), riding a BMX with three people on the bike, and climbing and sitting at the top of the monkey bars. It taught me how to get along with different people, that you have something in common with everyone. Instead of saying "we're just different people," I try to find that thing and use it to build better friendships.
The best of my friends that I made before settling down are still great friends, even "brothers" on Facebook. Although not often, we meet up to hang out like we used to when there's time. And since I haven't moved in the past six years, I have to admit that not moving is sometimes really boring.
