ATX to TPE

Hi!

My name is Graham Oliver, and just over three weeks ago my wife, Carolina, and I moved to Taipei, Taiwan from Austin, Texas. Once a month I send out a newsletter via TinyLetter and post a copy here as well, but I found that I have more to say than what I want to cram into that newsletter. So in this blog I’ll get more into the nitty gritty, the logistics, the surprises, the difficulties, and the victories of our new lives.

I’ll start with the basics.

Who: She’s a computer engineer who worked for Dell in the US and now works for Dell in Taiwan. I’m an English teacher who taught at a university in the US and will now be teaching at a high school in Taiwan. We’re in our mid-30s. I grew up in Kentucky, she grew up in Venezuela, and until moving out of the country we spent eleven years living in a suburb of Austin. Neither of us knew a word of Mandarin before moving to Taipei, and besides Carolina’s coworkers, we knew a grand total of one other person living in Taipei.

What: Carolina and I had been talking about living abroad for a long time. It was something vague, something we’d do eventually. Maybe to a Spanish-speaking country so I’d become fluent. Maybe through a Fulbright, maybe the EU through her Italian ancestry. None of the options ever went from theoretical to feasible until she started working with her Taiwanese counterparts at Dell. In the summer of 2017 she was sent to Taipei for a work trip and I tagged along. We loved the city, despite the miserable humidity, and when it became clear that moving could be possible we made a second trip in January of 2019 for more than two weeks to really consider what it would be like to live here. Obviously it seemed like a good idea.

Where: At this point it’s a little obvious, but to give you more context: Taipei is a 13 hour flight from San Francisco, or a much more expensive 15 hour flight from Houston. It’s on the 25th parallel, making it just a smidgen above the Tropic of Cancer and on the same latitude as Key Largo and the Bahamas. As a country on the global stage, Taiwan is complicated (and I’m still learning and trying to discover a good book/website to point people to). Besides the obvious cultural connection to mainland China, there’s also groups of indigenous Taiwanese and a significant Japanese influence. It’s hot, it’s humid, it rains a lot. Oh, and there are earthquakes.

When: It took a year of considering it before we began to be serious about the move. I started informally job hunting in the fall of 2018, then going about it more seriously at the beginning of 2019. We didn’t know for sure until March, and at that time we thought mid-March to early June was plenty of time to get everything ready for the relocation. Oh, how wrong we were.

Why: A host of reasons, big and small. For both of us, the biggest thing was probably the experience (or to use the word everyone wants to use, adventure) in general. We had a very comfortable life in Austin, but we wanted to learn a new place, a new culture, get outside of our safety zone. For Carolina, I think there was a big element of trying out a new challenge in her career. For me, there’s also a big political element: I wanted to live somewhere that cared a little more about the environment, that invested in public transportation, that held education in higher esteem, that had a socialized healthcare system. To be frank, I wasn’t sure that Austin, Texas was the place I wanted to keep growing roots. Which is not to say that I think Taiwan is perfect nor for sure the place to grow roots, but more to say that I knew the longer we stayed put in Austin the more difficult it would be to want to relocate later. Our timeframe for this move is a minimum of two years, but beyond that, who knows?

How: Well, that’s the point of this blog!

More to come. If you want some photos to tide you over, check out the hashtag #atxtotpe on Instagram.

-g