Happier Abroad Forum Community

I have lived by the saying: "Blood is thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood. Family is not always about blood, it is the people who love you and accept you for who you are, who will stand by your side, to dream, to fight, and to live with you."

I am not comfortable revealing what has made me abide by this belief, and I still hope to have a wonderful relationship with my own children (I know I will try my best to be a loving, understanding father).

I just want to know whether you guys believe the same as I do, and what would a foreign woman's perspective (Chinese, Filipina, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Russian etc.) be? To give more detail, I am referring to blood "family" treating you / them like crap and you / they just leave, find people whom they trust, and accept them as family or even adopted parents.

IMO blood has no value, it is respect, love, and loyalty and devotion that really counts. I have someone I see as my adoptive father and he is great. One of my motivations for HA apart from leaving the West and finding martial happiness is joining him and changing my surname to his. He is a British expat who shares the same views as HA.

It's complex. I was very distant from my family growing up (aunts, uncles, cousins) on both sides. I used to be very loyal to my father and took after him until he betrayed me. He's White and my mom's Chinese. But after finding this site and then actually going to China my perspective changed. I'm still not very close to anyone in my family. Yet I lived with a family in China and became like one of them. One of my tutors said she thought I could learn Chinese because it's in my blood. I felt more at home than in America despite not knowing the language. My other tutor was same ethnic group as me, Hakka, and we got along really well. So I realize now that I feel a strong bond between myself and Chinese people, my blood, even if not my close family.

It's kind of like living with culture shock since birth. I may have been raised in America, but I never assimilated. There must be something deeper for why I fit in better in China. Just how my brain patterns are, I understand Chinese people better and can't mold myself to American ways of thinking. So that's blood, it's in my genes. I don't believe in biological determinism, but biology is still very influential in how people act. I fit in well in China and not in America because it's in my blood. Trying to raise me in a different culture was a failed experiment and just led to suffering. That's also a large part of why I was never close to my extended family growing up despite seeing them all the time.