A story that took me more than a month to finish…. not because of the length but because of the weight behind it all…. It might be more than just being a Taiwanese abroad, but it definitely highlights how strong a Taiwanese, a foreigner, or a life can be.
The strangest thing about losing my job was not losing the job itself.
It was realizing that people who had never met me suddenly believed they knew exactly who I was.
I am a foreigner. I am a young woman. During these three years, I had needed to pick up Dutch language within few months, had worked for a government institution, and the next thing I knew, my name had become entangled in a political scandal. In the public version of the story, those facts were enough to create a character for me, even almost a main one in the narrative — a woman who had supposedly received professional opportunities through sexual favors and later received benefits that she had not deserved on paper.
The person in that story was not me. But I still had to live with the consequences of her existence.
I had moved to Belgium to work. Over three years, I thought the hardest part of living abroad would be learning how to navigate a different culture, language, and professional environment.
It was not that simple in my experience.
What people couldn't see was what happened after the headlines disappeared.
I found another job. I continued going to work. I learned how to answer questions without telling the whole story and without knowing who to trust anymore. I smiled when I needed to smile. From the outside, I was moving forward.
Internally, however, the experience had left a much deeper mark than I wanted to admit.
In Taiwan, we sometimes say “After the storm comes clear sky 雨過天晴 ” as a way to encourage and motivate through hardship, so I also learned to understand strength differently.
Strength was not pretending that nothing had happened, but instead, it was allowing myself to recover, to feel, to be confronted, and to hide when needed.
I used to think that building a life abroad meant becoming independent enough that I would never need anyone. Now I think it means learning who you are when the familiar versions of you disappear.
It means discovering that your nationality is only one part of your identity, your job title is only tiny part of your worth, and other people's assumptions do not have to become your biography. We can all be above and beyond.
Belgium did not give me the three years I imagined when I first arrived.
It gave me something harder but valuable.
It gave me the experience of losing control over my own story, and then slowly learning that I could pick up the pen again.
I came to Belgium thinking I was building a career.
Somewhere along the way, I ended up building myself.
The author requested to remain anonymous.