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This is the first time I've returned to a foreign country. I've visited/lived in. And it's for a purpose. And part of that purpose is being that I left the place I'm originally from, for a reason, and that reason is what I'm going to attempt to explain to a land I ought to have stayed in, so here goes. 

Dear California,

You are in many ways a bread basket, providing everything someone needs. Good education, good infrastructure, & stable employment. I ask most people in the 3rd world and they’d kill to be with you… Yet I left. And while many people write letters to you talking on how they miss you, I cannot say the same. I left for a reason, I left since I started college.

Well California with, all you have to offer, it’s too constraining. Too many rules and too much competition. I could eek out a little place for myself. But that’s not enough for me. I want my own stake in the world, and I’m not going to find it doing what everyone else is doing.

What I long for is not the tech and entertainment capital we know now, but the old you, back a few hundred years when things were different. Back when people began coming to count you from all over the world, but few different reasons. Not for jobs or government handouts, but as an opportunity to make not only a fortune for themselves, but also carve a piece of the world for themselves. My ancestors in China called you the Golden Mountain for a reason.

I long for these times where I got a shot at making it big. And in search of that wide open prairie of opportunity. I must leave you.

You are, I’m afraid, a product of your time. So many competent people have come and gone, building you up to the point that you are no longer recognizable from the times when the Donner Party arrived at your doorsteps, beaten and battered. You have become old Europe. And just like now those in Europe set sail for you in the centuries succeeding the Mayflower and those in Asia set sail for you in search of the Golden Mountain, I must leave as well.

Kingston S. Lim

March 23, 2022

Lagos, Nigeria