Why No Asian Country Will Ever Be Our "Forever Home"
It's a nice place to visit, but we don't want to live there.
As digital nomads for nine years, we’ve lived in or visited countries all over Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan — and we even recently took a ten-day tour through mainland China.
And we’ve mostly loved it.
After nine years of travel, it’s an open question whether we’ll ever return to the United States, but we know we eventually want to settle down somewhere.
So as we travel, we always ask ourselves: Is this a place where we could ever see ourselves settling down?
“Asia” is obviously a vast and very diverse place. Even so, as much as we love this area of the world, the answer here is pretty clearly: No, we don’t want to settle down in this part of the world.
Here’s why:
It’s too hot.
Climate change is rapidly making the world a hotter place, but it’s getting hotter faster in South Asia and East Asia.
Almost everywhere we’ve lived in Asia, we’ve experienced record-breaking temperatures: an all-time high of 41.0°C (105.8°F) in Bangkok in May 2023. This year in Hong Kong, the city recorded its hottest October ever — for the second year in a row.
And we were absolutely miserable.
It’s the height of Western privilege to have the choice to live almost anywhere in the world and to still say, “I don’t want to live there because it’s too damn hot!”
Especially since Western countries are more responsible than most for these rising temperatures!
But, well, our comfort matters a lot to us. And our not living there is not going to make a place any less hot.
Either the infrastructure is bad or the apartments are tiny.
For Westerners, it’s very easy to find “cheap,” comfortable housing in Asian countries — in places like Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia.
Problem is, most of those countries often have subpar infrastructure: dodgy plumbing, lousy sidewalks, subpar mass transit, and you can’t drink the tap water or always flush toilet paper.
