This was originally posted on blogger.

Whenever I went to the US growing up, the border control officer would take my passport, look at my pre-pubescent face, and solemnly say, “welcome home, sir.” I’d struggle to hold back a smirk.

Home? The US was the place I was born, but the UK was the place where I grew up. I had no memory of the US, a land foreign to me. Big roads, big brands, big people. Cars on the wrong side of the road. Entrance to the country was followed by a painful hour at a car rental place. That was America – a place for summer trips and family friends I didn’t know. A vestige of my family’s life before I knew how to speak.

Yet my documents recognized my place of birth – Livingstone, New Jersey – and so I was welcomed home. They call border control “the first line of defense”. They play a video narrated by the American president: George W. Bush, then Barack Obama, then Donald Trump when I moved for college. In London, I observed America from a distance – through British news coverage, long-distance phone calls and five to eight hours of time difference. The country I was born in was changing all without me.

This July may be the first time I really feel what it’s like to “go back to the states.” My identity of Americanness has developed, calloused as I’ve lived here. When people have asked me where I’m from, I defer to where I lived last, which was Berkeley, California. In Chinese, the “beautiful country”. The process of saying this again and again makes me think, “hey, maybe I am American.” Being American – and of an Indian-background – is what uniquely identifies me in Taiwan. It’s what makes me an English-speaker, and lets me have my job.

The young, pre-pubescent Rohan might wonder why I enjoy a visit “home”. To me now, I reluctantly accept that with my cultural backgronud, America is the place to go back to. I suppose I’ll be homeward bound.