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Being a Diplomat’s Daughter: Growing Up Between Worlds in China, Jordan, France, India, Brunei, and the US

I grew up knowing how to pack my life into a few suitcases.

By the time I was old enough to spell “address,” I’d already had more of them than I could count on one hand. I’m a diplomat’s daughter, and my childhood was a passport full of visas: China, Jordan, France, India, Brunei, and eventually, the United States. Each country left a stamp not only in my passport, but on who I am.

People often ask, “So… where are you from?” I usually pause, smile, and think: How much time do you have?

This is my attempt to answer that question.

China: My First Memory of Elsewhere

China is where my earliest, blurriest memories live. I remember the sound of a language that rolled and rose like music I couldn’t yet understand. I remember crowded streets, the bright colors of market stalls, the clatter of chopsticks, the steam rising from bowls of noodles on chilly evenings.

As a child, you don’t think in terms of “foreign” and “familiar.” China was just normal—the backdrop of my everyday life. Our apartment overlooked a city that seemed to grow and shift overnight: new buildings, new roads, new faces. I learned early that change is not an event, but a constant.

We had a driver who spoke no English and laughed kindly when I tried to repeat words in Mandarin. My victories were small: counting to ten, saying “hello” and “thank you,” and recognizing a few characters in bright red signs. I didn’t realize it yet, but this was my first lesson in humility: the world is vast, and my own language is just one tiny slice of it.

Jordan: Desert Light and Quiet Strength

Jordan felt like a different planet at first—sand-colored hills, the sharp, beautiful call to prayer echoing across the city, and a different rhythm of life entirely.

I remember driving through the desert, the sky so wide it made you feel smaller than a grain of sand. We’d visit places like Petra, where history isn’t behind glass but carved into rock. Living in Jordan, time felt thicker. You could sense the weight of centuries under your feet.

There, I began to understand culture not just as food and language, but as a kind of quiet strength. Families were large and close. Hospitality wasn’t a gesture; it was a way of life. You didn’t leave someone’s home without eating something. Being invited in—offered tea, dates, a meal—wasn’t optional; it was how people said, “You are welcome. You belong here, even if just for this moment.”

As a foreign kid, I also learned what it means to be visibly “other.” My clothes, my accent, my school, even the car with diplomatic plates marked us as different. Sometimes that came with curiosity. Sometimes with assumptions. Jordan taught me that you can feel both welcome and out of place at the same time—and that both can be true.

France: Where I Learned to Be In-Between

France was supposed to feel familiar—“Western,” European, more like the countries we saw in movies. But for me, it was just another place where I had catching up to do.

School was in French. My classmates had grown up together, sharing jokes and references I didn’t understand. I remember the frustration of knowing exactly what I wanted to say in English but having only half the words in French. My personality felt trapped behind grammar mistakes and a clumsy accent.

So I learned fast. I picked up slang on the playground. I mimicked the rhythm of French speech, the shrug of shoulders, the little “bah oui” and “mais non” that slip between sentences. I learned how identity can stretch: I could be one version of myself in French and another in English, and both were real.

France also gave me an appreciation for beauty in everyday details: long lunches, warm baguettes from the corner bakery, arguments about cheese as if it were a matter of state. It was my lesson in savoring life, not just racing through it.

But it was also the first time I realized that I might never feel fully “from” anywhere. When I visited relatives, I was “the one who lives abroad.” At school, I was “l’étrangère,” the foreign girl. France showed me what it means to live in between: not just between countries, but between versions of myself.

India: Noise, Color, and Complication

India does not whisper. It arrives in your senses all at once—color, sound, smell, and movement layered on top of each other in a way that feels overwhelming until, suddenly, it doesn’t. Then it just feels alive.

The streets outside our compound were crowded and chaotic: rickshaws weaving through traffic, street vendors calling out, cows wandering as if they owned the road (and honestly, they kind of did). Inside the embassy compound and our home, everything was more controlled, more familiar: English conversations, expat neighbors, school buses.

India sharpened my awareness of contrast. Inside and outside. Rich and poor. Modern and ancient. Air-conditioned malls a short drive away from neighborhoods with people living in makeshift shelters. It was impossible not to ask questions, even as a teenager: Why do some people get so much and others so little? What does it mean that I can leave, and they can’t?

Socially, India was where the “diplomat kid” bubble really formed: friends from everywhere—Korea, Brazil, Kenya, Canada—accents mixing on the sports field and in the cafeteria. We bonded over the fact that none of us were really “from” where we lived, and most of us were going to move again, soon.

India taught me empathy in a new way. It’s one thing to read about inequality in a book; it’s another to see it every day outside your window. It also taught me that loving a place doesn’t mean ignoring what’s hard about it. You can hold beauty and discomfort in the same hand.

Brunei: Quiet Waters, Small World

After India’s intensity, Brunei felt almost surreal in its calm. A small, peaceful country on the island of Borneo, it was all lush green and slow-moving rivers, with a pace of life that made you exhale without realizing you’d been holding your breath.

Life there was quieter: smaller schools, fewer people, a diplomat community where everyone knew everyone. I remember school events that felt like big family gatherings, weekends spent exploring mangroves or watching sunsets over the water.

In Brunei, I experienced stillness for perhaps the first time. There wasn’t a constant rush to go somewhere or do something. With fewer distractions, I had time to think more about who I was becoming, not just where I was living next.

At the same time, the smallness could feel confining. You quickly ran out of new places to go. Gossip traveled fast. The knowledge that nearly everyone there was passing through, just like us, hung in the background. But that transience also made friendships intense. You didn’t have years; you might only have months. So you made them count.

Brunei taught me the value of slowing down and looking closely: at the details of a friendship, the texture of a place, the privilege of safety and calm.

The United States: The “Home” I Had to Learn

People assume that coming to the United States—our supposed “home country”—was easy. It was, in many ways, the hardest move of all.

By the time we arrived in the US, I had lived more years outside it than in it. I knew the language, watched the movies, and understood the cultural references—or so I thought. But living somewhere is very different from observing it from afar.

In the US, I looked like I belonged, but I didn’t feel it. My classmates had known each other since kindergarten. They had hometowns, childhood houses they never left, baby photos all taken in the same living room. Their idea of “normal” was staying in one place. Mine was leaving every few years.

I’d mention Beijing or Amman or Brunei, and sometimes people would say, “Wow, that’s so cool!” in a way that felt like I was a walking fun fact. Other times they’d ask, “So where do you like best?” as if you could rank pieces of your own life.

I struggled with the idea of home. Was it my passport country? The place I was born? The last place I lived? The place I currently slept?

Eventually, I realized that for me, home isn’t geography. It’s people, routines, smells, languages. It’s my family around a dinner table, wherever that table happens to be. It’s the ability to carry bits of every place with me and let them coexist.

The US challenged me in a different way: it asked me to root. To stop assuming that “leaving soon” was inevitable. To sit with the discomfort of staying.

The Hidden Curriculum of Being a Diplomat’s Kid

Moving so often, through such different cultures, came with its own unofficial education. Here are a few of the lessons that sank in over the years:

• Identity is layered. I am not “from” one place. I am a mix of languages, memories, and learned habits—bowing slightly in Asia, saying “bonjour” reflexively in France, waiting for the call to prayer in Jordan, slipping between cultural codes without thinking.
• Belonging is something you build. I rarely arrived somewhere already belonging. I learned to build it quickly—through small rituals: finding a favorite café, memorizing a few phrases in the local language, mapping the walk from home to school.
• Goodbyes are both a skill and a scar. You learn to say goodbye often: to friends, to teachers, to neighbors, to cities. You get better at it—but it never stops hurting. There’s a particular grief in knowing you might never go back, at least not in the same way.
• You can feel at home in many places—and slightly out of place everywhere. That’s the paradox of growing up between worlds. I can land almost anywhere and find something familiar. But I also carry a slight sense of being “other” wherever I go.

So, Where Am I From?

I’m from childhood weekends in Beijing markets and car rides through the Jordanian desert.
I’m from French bakeries on the way to school and monsoon rains in India that drenched everything in seconds.
I’m from quiet evenings in Brunei, watching the sky fade over still water.
I’m from countless arrivals at airports in the United States, each one supposed to feel like coming “home,” each one a little different.

I’m from suitcases that are always a bit too full, from friendships held together by messages across time zones, from photos that look like they belong to multiple lifetimes instead of just one.

Being a diplomat’s daughter did not give me one home. It gave me many—and the complicated, beautiful task of carrying them all.

And if you still ask me, “Where are you from?” I might just smile and say:

“It’s a long story. But it starts with a suitcase.”