This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dom Jones, 39, a teacher and entrepreneur who moved from the US to Taipei, Taiwan, in the fall of 2025. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Asia has always drawn me in. I grew up in the Los Angeles area, and one of the cities that I lived in was Long Beach, California.
Long Beach has probably one of the largest Cambodian populations in the world outside of Cambodia itself. I went to school with a lot of Asian classmates in a very diverse community. So it was my life.
I will never forget, my neighbors were a Cambodian family and they had a daughter, and I was about seven to nine years old.
They would always cook food, and the food that they would cook would smell very different to the American palate. Everyone walked by like, “Oh God, it’s so crazy.” But as a kid, it intrigued me.
I remember the little girl would play with me outside and one day she said she’s going to eat and her mom told me to come in and eat with them. I went and I sat at their table and laid out right in front of me was a whole fish with an eyeball.
Inside the little me was like, “Oh, what is this?” The mother cut off the piece from the belly and put it on my plate and said, “Eat.”
I said, “I think I like this.” And after a minute, I just started really eating a lot.
As time goes on, I’m literally knocking on this family’s door every day asking for some funky food. And that was the beginning of a love affair with the Asian diaspora — and it wasn’t just Cambodia.
I was a Christian missionary for many years and I was called into the work of the Vietnamese community. In college, I went to Vietnam on a J-term and it changed my life. I learned Vietnamese and Tagalog as well. Later on in life, in my late 20s, I had the privilege to travel for the first time to Japan. And Japan, of course, many Americans fall in love with Japan.
Every kind of Asian community has always been a part of my journey.
After I went out of the country for the first time in college, I knew I was destined to live outside of the United States.
I fell in love with Taiwan during a layover
Asia has been my primary place in the world that I love the most — and I’ve been everywhere.
I thought that my final migration would be to Vietnam as a part of my purpose in my life, but as life shifted things, Taiwan was presented to me in a way that I didn’t expect.
I first came to Taiwan as a layover during Christmas time 2019 — it was a long layover, basically 24 hours.
I came out of the airport into the city and tried to do as much as I could, and I really just felt a connection to the energy of Taiwan in a way that I didn’t feel in other places.
I went back home. Then I immediately came back and I said, “I’m going to stay there for like a month and really try to enjoy it.”
I began to explore the community and realized that this is kind of an untouched pearl and maybe an under-appreciated pearl of an island in Asia that has a lot of culture and a lot of beauty and a lot of peace.
The focus wasn’t, is it a digital nomad hotbed? The focus wasn’t, can I speak English there?
There was the immeasurable level of peace that my soul felt. That was the draw.
I’ve been traveling back and forth to Taiwan for the last six years. I just did my final migration here this past September.
The peace I feel in Taiwan is unmatched
I did consider living in Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. But Taiwan offered me that combination that I felt was unique to here, which is safety, infrastructure, affordability, and that cultural depth that really aligned with my life and where I want to build.
Safety is, for me, one of the first things that I noticed when I came to Asia. For me, it’s not just about crime, it’s about the felt experience of safety.
I can move through the city here in Taiwan at all hours of the day and night — I’m talking from 10 p.m. all the way to when the sun rises. I can use public transportation very easily.
And when we talk about convenience and the way the infrastructure is built for the citizen, it is absolutely incredible. I can live my life here every day without the constant vigilance of, “Is this area OK, where’s my bag, where’s my purse?”
And listen, no government is perfect. However, the safety, the convenience, the manner in which one can live one’s life that is carved out by the institutions that are laid out here, it feels like the way we all want to feel about our government — which is we feel cared for and supported.
Also, healthcare is so accessible. When I say it’s accessible, it’s not like they’re giving you healthcare that’s just basic. No, you get premium healthcare here.
It kind of shocked me moving here, getting my visa, and them telling me that my visa comes with the same national free healthcare that all the other Taiwanese residents get. I was in shock. I didn’t expect that.
Taipei, Taiwan, specifically, is like the New York of Asia. It’s extremely expensive — it’s certainly expensive by Taiwanese income standards.
The average Taiwanese person is paying less than NT$ 25,000 in rent. That’s equivalent to paying less than about $800 a month. They’re not paying anywhere near what we pay for a nice, comfortable apartment.
I did want to live in a very convenient, walkable area, so then the price drives up dramatically.
However, the drive up is still doable for us with American pockets because our dollar stretches here. So for me, I was able to get what’s considered to be a very desirable Taiwan apartment right in the middle of Taipei, Taiwan, and I pay less than $2,000 for a three-bedroom, two-bath unit.
I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I have a very nuanced and insider’s perspective on why one would leave the United States. But for me, this was always going to happen one way or another. So I wasn’t running from something, I was moving toward a different way of living.
Leaving the US, for me, was a matter of logistics, honestly, but the motivation was very intentional expansion, not rejection of the US. I still feel connected to the US professionally and culturally.
Maybe I was raised to believe — perhaps in America, we’re all raised to believe — that opportunity only exists in one place, which is America.
But relocating helped me to realize that you can love where you’re from and still choose something different. For me, Taiwan wasn’t this exit, it was more of an arrival.
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