This article is part of the ESC Club’s “Crossing Borders, Building Futures” oral history project, documenting the experiences of Chinese families living in and around the San Diego-Baja California border region. The ESC Club is a student-driven organization operating under the nonprofit Amazing Grace Institute, dedicated to multicultural communication and STEM education.
Based on an oral-history interview conducted by ESC Club students Junpeng and Alex
A Journey Across China, Mexico, and the USA
For the Li family, home has never been just one place. Li Zhou Hong left China for Tijuana in 2003, joining relatives who ran a noodle restaurant and needed extra hands. It was in Tijuana that he met his wife, Amy, who had also come from China.
Their two children, Lance, now 11, and Li Ye Li, who goes by “Leia,” were born just across the border in San Diego, but Tijuana is where they actually grew up.
“We live in Tijuana, but they were born in San Diego,”
Li explained. For years, the family’s life followed that border rhythm: an American birthplace, a Mexican childhood, and a Chinese heritage tying them back to relatives at home. That changed in 2024, when the family decided to move back to China, at least for a while, so Lance and Leia could learn the language their parents grew up speaking.
“We wanted them to learn Chinese, and the best way to learn is to come back to China for one year for them to learn Chinese, since they don’t speak Chinese before,” was how Li described the reasoning behind the move.
Growing Up Between Three Countries
Not many families can say their children hold ties to three countries before the age of twelve, but the Li family does. Lance and Leia were born in the United States, raised in Mexico, and are now attending school in China. This unique path has reshaped how they see themselves and the world around them.
Even as the family adjusts to life in China, Tijuana remains close. Li’s younger brother still lives there, and the two continue to run their businesses together and stay in touch. Li has no other siblings, and today, neither he nor his children feel they are missing out by not having a larger family.
However, the move to China has come with real trade-offs. Leia, who used to speak Spanish fluently, has been losing it the longer the family stays away.
“She was speaking quite well in Spanish, but now she’s not. Now she’s more Chinese than Mexican,”
Li stated, stressing how important it is to the family not to lose their connection to Tijuana.
Learning Language the Hard Way
Long before their children faced the challenge of learning Chinese, Li and his wife faced a similar struggle when they first arrived in Mexico. Neither of them spoke Spanish. They picked it up slowly, through daily life, schooling, and Mexican television. By their own account, it was the biggest challenge they faced in those early years.
The interview had a lighter moment on the subject though, as at one point, Li turned the question back around cleverly, asking, “Hablas español también tú?”
Now the roles have reversed. Instead of the parents learning Spanish in Mexico, it is the children learning Chinese in China. Now, Lance and Leia are navigating a language and a school system that feels just as different to them as Spanish once felt to their parents.
A Blend of Foods, Traditions, and Cultures
At home, the Li family’s kitchen was heavily Chinese. Li and Amy cooked Chinese food most days, in part because it was what they knew best, and in part because, as Li put it, taste is difficult to change. But Mexican food was never too far away in Tijuana, as the family made a habit of going out for it once or twice a week, treating it as something special outside the home.
Posole soup was a family favorite, and Lance developed a taste for burritos. Leia, when asked about her favorite food, didn’t hesitate:
“Favorite food is tacos!”
Interestingly, Leia grew up preferring Western food over Chinese food, but her year in China has started to shift that, and she has slowly been adapting to eating more Chinese dishes.
Mexican culture shaped the family’s calendar as much as its dinner table. Christmas and Halloween became family favorites, and over time the family also embraced Día de los Muertos, a holiday with deep roots in the Mexican communities where they lived.
Lance and Leia
Lance, 11, is preparing to enter the fifth grade. His favorite color is green, his favorite animal is the crocodile, and he loves to draw, especially animals and landscapes. He’s currently reading a book he describes as “foreign” called Wings of Fire, and he used to play Minecraft on the Switch; though, he’s quick to point out that phase is behind him now: “Are you kidding me, that was 7 years old!” When he grows up, Lance hopes to become an artist.
Leia, now 7, is in the first grade. Her favorite animal is the dog, and her favorite colors are blue, white, and pink, and she loves to run and jump rope, and beyond tacos, she dreams of one day opening her own bakery.
“Open a bake shop,” her father joked, to which her mother added, “because she likes to eat bread.”
Two Different School Systems
Moving to China meant more than just a new language for Lance and Leia, it meant an entirely different school schedule. In Tijuana, school ran from 7:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. In China, the school day stretches from 7:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., and for some students, it doesn’t end there.
“Some kids stay after class, have their dinner in school, and go back into the classroom to do their homework, and their parents go get their kids at 8 p.m.,” Li explained. “Some kids stay at school for the whole week and only come home for the weekend. We don’t do that because we think it is too long.”
For Lance, the length of the school day was the biggest adjustment; “the time,” as he put it. But it wasn’t only about hours. Leaving behind the friends he grew up with in Tijuana has made settling into China harder than the schedule alone would suggest.
Sports carried over more easily than friendships did. Lance played basketball and badminton in PE class back in Tijuana, along with running and jump rope. In China, he’s found most PE activities are, in his words, “basically the same sports,” though he admits he still gravitates toward “the ones he played in Tijuana and not in China.”
Li’s Reflection on His Journey
For Li, the decision to send his children back to China was about more than language. It was shaped by watching how much the country itself has changed over the decades, and by a much older story that runs through his hometown of Taishan.
“Thirty years or 20 years ago, China was not that good economically, not good enough, people were experiencing poorness here. I lived in a town called Taishan, and the Taishanese had a culture of looking for better lives overseas. Not the generation of my father, but like 100, 200 years ago, the Taishanese were going to foreign countries, when China was bad for living. For my generation and my wife, China was getting better and better, but we were just like the last ones to go out of the country. Now the younger generation, they prefer to stay in China, or maybe they go out to have a trip and come back. But we see a big change in China, and that is why we send our kids back to school here; we would like them to learn Chinese, to adapt again to Chinese culture, and I think they would have better lives in the future in China than in Mexico.”
“That’s what I see here, for my father, my mother, if they had the opportunity to go out, they went out. But now the younger generation prefer to stay,” Li said, reflecting on how the pattern has reversed within his town.
He also acknowledged that Mexico had once given his family real advantages. “At that time we do have better income than in China. I think for Mexico it is easier to do business than in China at that time,” he said, pointing to how hard it can be to protect a business idea from competitors in China. In Tijuana, he said, “you can keep the result for a longer period.”
Li added that life is about facing challenges and gaining hard-won experiences, part of why he believes it’s important for the family to keep moving and seeing new places.
The Divide Between Two Homes
Not everyone in the family has embraced the move to China the same way. Lance has been open about missing Tijuana, saying plainly that he wishes he could “stay in Mexico.”
“Tijuana is too comfortable, it is too easy,”
Li said, reflecting on why the transition to China has been difficult for a family that grew up loving life on the border.
Even so, the children have started noticing what China offers that Tijuana doesn’t. Lance has pointed out that China has far more infrastructure and technology than Mexico, including electric vehicles and self-driving cars, while Mexico, in his view, has more nature. Li and Amy have noticed the same gap, and both agree that experiencing such different ways of life is a rare and valuable thing for their children.
Despite the challenges, the family has no plans to let go of Tijuana. Li and Amy still run their businesses there, sometimes remotely, and travel back once or twice a year to check in and see family. Lance and Leia return during school breaks and vacations, keeping the border crossing very much a part of their lives.
The Future
Li is honest that he doesn’t know whether the family will eventually move back to Mexico. For now, his focus is on giving his children a foundation in Chinese language and culture while they’re young, with the understanding that they’ll be free to choose their own path once they’re older, which includes the decision of whether they want to move abroad again, a conversation he says will come later.
Both children have already found things to love about their time in China. Leia’s favorite trip has been Beijing, where she enjoyed the roast duck and a visit to the Great Wall. Lance’s favorite has been Changzhou, home to the adorable panda, and he also remembers a museum visit and trying Chengdu food, though the spice was a bit much for both him and his sister.
When asked what advice he’d give his younger self, back when he first moved from China to Mexico, Li reflected on how difficult those early years were, learning a new language and adjusting to an unfamiliar school system after already finishing high school in China. Looking back, he feels he spent five years in college in Mexico without gaining as much as he’d hoped, and if he could go back, he says he’d tell himself to work harder and make better use of that time. Still, he wouldn’t change the outcome he got, as staying in Tijuana is what allowed him to meet his wife and build the family he has today.
For the Li family, crossing borders has never meant choosing one identity over another. Between a Mexican childhood, an American birthplace, and a Chinese homeland now shaping their future, Lance and Leia are growing up with a wider map of the world than most children their age, and they look forward to continuing their journeys, starting off with a vacation to Mexico this summer.
Source: Oral-history interview with the Li family (Li Zhou Hong, Amy, Lance, and Li Ye Li), conducted by ESC Club students Junpeng and Alex.
