“Where were you born? Oh Tokyo, okay. Why did you move from Japan to the US?”

I don’t know.

My biological family is too dysfunctional to agree on the truth of how we came to the US. There have been many times where my sister and I have built up the courage to ask about this seemingly really touchy subject in our family. Each time, they tell a story that makes sense but contradicts the other family members’ stories. As a biological family, we don’t take pictures often or organize documents in a single household (due to violent divorce), and knowing what happened is difficult.

Below are different responses we have received to the question, “Why did we move to America?” from different family members:

My biological father: “I brought you to the US because the education system is better, and we wanted the kids [Ryu and his sister] to be successful.”

My biological grandmother: “When [Ryu and his sister] were children in Japan, I allowed them to move to America because your mother wanted to move to the US with her husband.”

My biological mother: “Your father’s passport was about to be taken away due to child support issues involving a previous child he had. This passport issue conflicted with employment and pushed him to go back to the US alone. I then took my children [Ryu and his sister] to the United States, we were already married at that point.”

As of November 2025, my sister is soon to be a pharmacist, and I am a software engineer. We have somehow become grown adults without knowing how the ground under us really got there.

This question is really common for normal interactions and conversations in society, but I seriously do not know the true answer nor do I want to.