(Editor’s note: Irina Truong and her family lived in California for 15 years. Irina’s frustration with what she views as punitive policies regarding healthcare and maternity leave led her to look for a better life in Franee. This is the second part of a two-part post. You can jump to Pt. 1 here.)
Two thousand thirteen was the first time that not only I deeply disliked something unique to the United States but it affected me personally.
It was the maternity leave, or the lack of it. It was then that I started seriously thinking about moving to Europe. But I didn’t have a good plan. For a while, I was hoping I’d find a job in an international company as a software engineer and somehow persuade them to transfer me to an office abroad. That would make things so much easier – the work visa would provide a foot in the door. In 2016, Trump was elected president and started implementing his anti-immigrant and pro-billionaire policies. In September 2019, my son Evan was born. In March 2020, Covid hit, California started the lockdowns and travel stopped. In July 2020, I interviewed and got an offer from Elastic, an international software company. I thought: this is it. This is my chance.
Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. I was able to see Maryna in 2022 but next time I’d see my mom (who lives in Russia) would be in 2025. Also in 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. I was furious about it. In December 2022, Elastic had a layoff and I was cut. I found a job quickly in another startup, then lost it again in September 2023.
The war and the two layoffs put some things in perspective for me:
• Life is short and nobody knows how much time they have.
• A perfect opportunity may never come.
• Consequently, if you want something badly, you should do what you can, by any available means and as soon as you can.
Those things are not new but they don’t become obvious when you’re swept up in the routine: work, kids, chores. For me, I guess it took a global pandemic and a war in Ukraine. I told Brian that I think if we are ever to move to Europe, we can’t wait anymore. The kids are growing. Soon, they will be too old to assimilate easily. We are not getting any younger either and language learning becomes more difficult as we age.
Between Brian and me, our motivations were different. To him, things that were broken in the US didn’t make an argument to move. His reasoning was: “We live in California, it’s a liberal state with better policies and social programs than elsewhere. And being middle-class parents, we’ll already leave our children with a safety net. They won’t need any help from the government.” However, wishing to be closer to my sister was an argument that he could – and did – support.
Wikimedia Commons
The decision to move
From my side, I think I wouldn’t move without the secondary motivation – a desire for my children to grow up seeing what I considered a better society. A society more oriented towards social good and less obsessed with money and power. A society where schools are equally nice in any neighborhood, school shootings are not normalized, people don’t spend half of their workday commuting in cars, voting counts fairly, yearly vacations last longer than two weeks, maternity leaves are a thing, early childcare doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and food additives in the groceries are strictly controlled.
I wanted them to experience a different way of life. Even if eventually they’d decide they prefer the US and return, I’d accept it, since it would be an informed choice. Even though my primary motivation was the desire to be closer to my family, I could not act on it, I’d consider it too selfish. I needed to believe that the kids will also benefit from the move. Tell me all you want that I’m lying to myself, I’ll die on this hill.
“My goodness, woman, I asked why you moved to France and you told me your whole life story” — well, that’s sort of how life works, doesn’t it?
It’s not a single thing that leads you to make one decision or another. It’s a combination of life experiences, or just… life. This is how, in a span of a few months, we made a decision, got rid of almost all our possessions, left our house in Californi, and moved to France. But why France and why Bordeaux? That’s a different story.
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This is the first piece by Irina.
Read more here in Dispatches’ archives about Americans moving to Europe.
Irina is a software engineer who started her career in Ukraine, spent 15 years in sunny California, and recently moved with her family to Bordeaux. Her family includes her husband, also an engineer, two kids and two very fluffy cats. All of them are still learning the language and adjusting to their new life in France.
