In 1984, after graduate school, Veronica's parents moved to Los Angeles, California so that Veronica's father could accept a job with the city of LA. They found comfort in the large Chinese community there and became very involved in their church community. These communities made the city feel like home and much less lonely than the Midwest had felt. It is in LA, specifically the 626 area code, that Veronica was born and raised and in that same house that her parents still live.
Los Angeles not only has a bustling Chinese immigrant community (making it easy to find Chinese grocery stores and authentic restaurants) but also a booming Chinese-American community in addition to communities with other Asian backgrounds. This distinction is important because it encompasses the lived experiences of second-generation immigrants such as Veronica. There is a fusion subculture of people like her who grew up in the area to immigrant parents. In fact, the majority of students at Veronica's high school were Asian American and this was quite common at schools in the LA area. Growing up in this community helped Veronica's family feel connected to their culture. Chinese traditions were not a large part Veronica's childhood because her family maintained other cultural ties through their community.
"I didn't have to celebrate Chinese New Year to feel Chinese because there were so many Chinese people around that I didn't feel that different."
However, when Veronica went to college at Yale University, she was exposed to the diversity of the Chinese immigrant experience. Many people she met at school were not from areas of the country where there were strong cultural communities and so they held onto to traditions such as Chinese New Year as a way of acknowledging and celebrating their culture.
After college, Veronica spent two years (2007-2009) in a large village in rural China. She was in China at the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics which was a national milestone for the country because it was able to show the world that China had made it on the world stage. During her time there, she was one of four graduates from her college to teach high school English in this program but the only one of those four who was ethnically Chinese. She fondly remembers being able to slip in and out of feeling like a foreigner.
"I really was able to blend in which was really nice because I could be Chinese, and be taken seriously and was not seen as an outsider because I looked like people there and my accent was pretty good ... I could be taken as a non-foreigner if I wanted to but I could also turn on the foreigner if I got tired of ... being Chinese."
After college and her two years in China, Veronica moved to the Boston area to attend Boston University School of Law and be with her then-boyfriend, now-husband who was attending medical school in Boston at the time. She now works as a lawyer and lives with her husband and two young children in Boston. She sees this city as home and is glad to raise her children here but also misses the strong subculture of young second-generation Asian-Americans in Los Angeles. She notes that Asian Americans in her generation feel more scattered across the Boston and the Greater Boston area with less of a centralized community with a couple of enclaves of immigrants in Chinatown and Quincy. Veronica is excited about Michelle Wu becoming the first female mayor elected to serve Boston and sees this moment as an important step in the journey towards more representation of Asian-American voices. In many ways, Wu's immigrant story mirrors her own (their parents are both from Taiwan, they are the same age, and went to law school in the same city at the same time) and symbolizes a new chapter in Boston's history in which women, specifically Asian-American women, are at the forefront of the city's future.
"It's cool to see someone who has a similar story as mayor of Boston in the city that is now mine. This is where we live. This is where my two kids were born. We see this as home."