PART I
The concept of traveling and living abroad was never really an issue for me in the way it is for many Americans. I was already abroad — born and bred in France.
My mother is French from Savoy and has always been fascinated by foreign countries, especially Japan. My Japanese father arrived in France in 1958 to introduce Aikido to Europe and North Africa. He has lived in France ever since.
So I have always approached travel more like something I just do and then worry about the details as I go along. But there was one trip many years ago that had a big impact on me. So big that it shaped the following 25 years of my life.
It began when at the age of 16 I spent a summer at Sunapee Lake in New Hampshire. It was the first time I was totally immersed in a new culture and not just a tourist. I enjoyed the whole experience because I was taking care of three fantastic kids, loved the lobster BBQs and the ice cream, and the boating and the big cars. Life was easy and fun.
College and Culture
I enjoyed New Hampshire so much that at the age of 18, after graduating from high school in Paris, I decided to return to the United States and study at Babson College just outside Boston. I stayed there five years. It was not the American college life that attracted me the most, it was the international community I discovered on campus, I met students from every continents. It was fascinating meeting people from so many different cultures, hearing about their countries as we learned to work together. It opened my mind to adventure!
After my studies I went back to Paris where I took a job working for Ernst & Young. Going from a delicious college life in the United States to a cubicle in a big city corporation was not for me. After a year I resigned and decided to try my luck in Hong Kong. Why not? At college I had written a paper on the Tiger economies of Asia and found Honk Kong very attractive. I arrived in the international metropolis in 1997, the year the British handed over the city to China. I was living history. Hong Kong bubbled with hard work and lots of parties. I held various small jobs and, for the most part, had a huge amount of fun.
And once again, I met a completely different breed of people — most of them entrepreneurs with brilliant business ideas, all eager to make it big in a place where exciting things were always on the verge of happening.
Even marriage …
~ by Masami Noro Bell
~ by Masami Noro Bell
