Living the Dream

We're going. After years of planning, dreaming, envying anyone else who went, we're finally on our way to Taiwan.

It's been a dream for so long. Eighteen years ago I served a mission in Taiwan. I fell instantly in love with the country. The food, the people, the culture all seemed to be so me. When I left, I promised I'd be back within a year. I kept that promise and returned with my mom. I wanted her to see how a whole country could be a part of me and experience it all for herself. She fell in love too. Now I had someone who understood, who could feel a piece of what I felt when I pined for Taiwan. I thought I'd need to marry someone who had been to Taiwan too.

That didn't happen. I married a man who served his mission 19 years ago in Korea. So we compared stories, he understood in pieces of how I wanted to go back. We talked about the kids we'd have and agreed they should learn Mandarin Chinese. After all, 1 in 4 people in the world speak Mandarin.

Before kids, we had a thirst for travel. We honeymooned in Mexico AND New York City. We traveled to Alaska with the ballet, and for my birthday, we went to Hawaii. As we approached a break in my work and a year of marriage, we decided it was time for a final, kid-free adventure before we upturned our lives entirely to become parents.

We hunted out all the travel options that seemed appealing to us. Since we'd both been to Asia, both of us multiple times (he'd traveled to Japan for work, I'd also been to China for work), at first, we didn't even consider it. Perhaps it was time to explore a new continent. But as we shopped options, nothing seemed within our price range.

And then I told him of where I always thought I'd go: back to Taiwan. I described for him what I'd seen - jungles, marble-white gorges split by blue rivers and draped in living green, the ocean, the cities, the food, and the gracious people. Suddenly he was convinced a trip back to Asia might be in order. THAT plan came together.

We were back to Taiwan for almost 3 weeks and he fell in love. We contemplated coming back to teach English. But our lives at home were calling - his career, my career, our future kids waiting to be born. So we left feeling like we needed to. And hoping we'd come back again.

That was 13 years ago. I almost feel like I've been waiting for THIS trip for 13 years.

In that time we've watched a brother of mine serve his mission in Taiwan, we've watched him travel to China to work, we've had friends who have worked in Taiwan. We've hosted students from Taiwan and China, hoping to bring that world closer to our family. Always, it seemed to me that there should be a way for us to go, and we never found it. When the public schools where we live began a Mandarin immersion program, I felt so tempted to throw aside all our lovely homeschooling experiences and give the kids this language experience because I knew it was something I couldn't do alone. But in deciding homeschooling was STILL the way to go, my desire to take my family to Taiwan for a truly immersive experience only increased.

Finally this year our baby turned 3. For years when I thought about my family in Taiwan, I'd thought about diapers, or nursing, or traveling pregnant. THIS year, my thoughts didn't have any of those obstacles. THIS year we had money in savings AND my husband had a flexible work arrangement. THIS year our oldest is only 12 - not yet in such a critical time for pursuing his dream of becoming a professional dancer. THIS year, I decided, was the year to make it happen.

And we are! I hope to include in this record my thoughts, resources we've found to help our study of Chinese, and our tips for booking cheap flights. I hope the kids will chime in with their hopes and dreams. And then we'll go, and record our adventures there - what we loved, what was challenging. As a family, we'll come to discover what experiencing a different country teaches us about ourselves and our culture. We'll learn more about what it means to be a human on planet earth. I hope we'll learn a lot of Chinese. And I hope that magic will happen again - that all the people I take to Taiwan fall in love like I did, and we can share forever this special part of ourselves that perhaps only we can understand.