Last Updated on December 5, 2025 by Black Sunshine Media
As a long-term expat, I’m keenly aware of stuff, and by stuff, I mean shit you own and take for granted at home. Books, records, lamps, furniture, appliances, etc. For many aspiring and current expatriates, the main source of anxiety about leaving is: What Am I Gonna Do With All My Stuff? It’s one of the practical realities of the lifestyle and doesn’t get enough press.
It seems like certain objects survive every move. They outlast the storage units, shipping delays, and impulsive decluttering sprees. They become quiet witnesses to the life of an expat—not for their material value, but because of the stories they carry.
“Discovery of the Week” is a new series that reflects on the survivors: 40 well-traveled CDs that have followed me across continents, from Chicago to San Francisco to Taipei to Manila. Each record has its own story—a little piece of history that ties music to memory, and memory to movement.
Through these discs, I’ll trace not only the soundtrack of my own expat life but also the wider experience of distance, nostalgia, and adaptation; how the things we keep can illuminate where we’ve been and who we’ve become.
The Weight of Stuff
This is not a humble brag about my travels, but for the last 17 years, I have lived 7,000 flight miles from my place of birth (Chicago), and 6,000 miles from my last residence in the U.S. (San Francisco). Distance is subjective until you consider the logistics of moving to a foreign country and setting up shop. It’s not like moving to a neighboring state.
I’ve moved so many times over such great distances that I’ve learned that you shouldn’t take your stuff with you. Or most of it, anyway. Ever since I left San Francisco in 2008, my stuff has been a tremendous source of heartache and a depressing sinkhole of energy and money.
I wrote about the heavy obligation of “stuff” in my latest book, Year of the Dragon & Everything After. For reference, the main character, Charlie Birch, is leaving Taiwan after 10 years, and his biggest problem is what to do with all his stuff.
Excerpt from Year of the Dragon & Everything After (Chapter 18, “I’m Already Gone”)
“Sometime in mid-December, I sobered up and realized how much fucking stuff I’d accumulated: clothes, books, dishes, cutlery, musical instruments, recording equipment, guitar stands, microphone stands, various hand tools, photographs, obsolete computer peripherals, maps, memorabilia, toiletries and towels, documents, a Boss BR-1180 digital 8-track recorder that didn’t work anymore and hundreds of CD-ROMs with data files, a dead 2007 Macbook that got cooked by an exploding battery…
The furniture and fixtures weren’t mine, but everything else belonged to me, and most of it wasn’t going to make the trip. Shipping the stuff I wanted to keep vs. the other crap became a huge problem. At one point, I enquired about a cargo shipping container, but the guy flat-out told me I’d get fleeced at Philippine customs, and I’d be “better off giving that shit away.” The mundane domestic chores piled up, too. I made a list, and day by day, I took care of one detail, be it a Google search, or making some phone calls, or canceling my mobile hotspot.
During the last week of December, I went to the post office and shipped four big boxes of clothes, books, documents, and non-essential items on the slowest boat out of town. Four more boxes were queued for later shipment. The unwanted clothing was dumped in several local donation boxes, but that still left me with a ton of shit like the space heater, standing lamp, ink jet printer, etc. I couldn’t just dump that shit on the corner of Lane 74 and Anhe Road and expect it to be gone by sunrise. The garbage trucks wouldn’t take it, either. Margo’s father, Sun Da, a genial old fellow, gave me the number of a junk man who’d haul away the debris, but I kept putting it off.
My guitars had flight-ready hardshell cases, and they’d already traveled thousands of miles without damage, so I was mainly concerned about my new iMac. It wasn’t cheap, but I found a flight case for the computer. And I realized that two round-trips were necessary to move all the gear, which worked out perfectly. I’d fly home for 10 days, celebrate David’s birthday, and jet back on the 14th to grab my guitars and do the final cleanup. Like I was never there.”
Expat Dilemma: What to Do With All Your Stuff
If you’re leaving for an open-ended period, smart expats will get rid of everything.
Smart expats will sell it, give it away, or ditch it on the corner for the nighttime scavengers. Don’t leave anything behind. You’ll never have to worry about storage spaces or the inconvenience of a generous friend who offers a corner of their basement.
Not-so-smart expats will wrangle a storage unit or impose on family members with empty spaces in a garage or attic. A lot depends on how much stuff we’re talking about. In these cases, you have a finite amount of space, so you’ll have to make some sacrifices.
The dumb expats will keep everything come hell or high water.
Expert Recommendations for Your Stuff
| Item(s) | Best Practice |
| Personal documents | Safe deposit box, storage space, or close family member |
| Furniture | Get rid of it |
| Record collections (vinyl or CD) | Find a way to keep them, but be prepared to get rid of them |
| Books | See Record collections |
| Appliances | Get rid of them |
| Musical equipment | Keep the good stuff, sell the rest |
| Clothing | Get rid of most of it |
| Bed linen, bath towels, etc. | Get rid of it |
| Kitchenware | Get rid of it |
| Various electronics | Depends on the stuff, but usually get rid of it |
| Personal memorabilia | Find a way to keep it safe |
| Art collections | See Personal memorabilia |
Likewise, I’ve been through all three stages of the Expat Stuff Dilemma. I’ve been smart, not-so-smart, and dumb about it. Three major moves of more than 1,000 miles:
- Chicago to San Francisco: I brought everything with me in a U-haul.
- San Francisco to Taipei: I put 99 percent of my stuff in storage, taking only the essentials to Taiwan. Over the years, I sold or gave away 90 percent of my stuff in San Francisco, including decently modest vinyl and book collections. A fraction of the archived material survived and was relocated to Phoenix, AZ.
- Taipei to Metro Manila: I currently have storage space in two locations: here in Metro Manila and a small corner of my friend’s garage in Phoenix, AZ.
Discovery of the Week: A Lonely Box in the Office
Recently, my wife and I embarked on a decluttering spree, which involved going through everything in storage, mostly cardboard boxes and large plastic storage bins. We love this kind of thing. My wife is really good at organization and efficient use of space. I’m really good at saying, “Get rid of it. We don’t need it anymore.”
Against logic and precedent, one box with a selection of CDs has survived the tumult, chaos, and travel of expat life. The box remained (mostly) untouched since I moved from Taipei to Metro Manila in 2019, as it was moved around my office in Makati for six years, and I never had the motivation to open it. I knew the box contained CDs, but I couldn’t name one.
We don’t even own a CD player, and most of the music had already been ripped to my iTunes, so the discs were heavy artifacts that I’ve been carrying around for nearly two decades, and not a good reason for it.
On this particular Sunday morning, I opened the box with slight curiosity and a vague idea of its contents.
When Memory Fails
I don’t remember many things unless I write them down. It’s a side effect of long-term expat life and one reason why I started keeping journals.
According to my journals and scattershot memory, I knew that I shipped four boxes of personal items from Taiwan to the Philippines in late December 2018. I simply remember packing the boxes with stuff I wanted to keep and shipping it from the post office across the street. When the boxes arrived in Metro Manila three months later, my wife and I pulled out the stuff of value, and kept the rest—like CDs and vintage T-shirts—tucked away in the boxes.
As I sorted through the CDs, I often wondered how these records had remained in my possession. Other times, the root providence came back to me immediately. Every record has a story related to my expat experience, and many were extremely influential during the Lunar New Years series. And it was interesting because every record has a little story to tell.
Every week, I’ll pull one CD from that box and see what I have to say about the music, the place, and the long, strange persistence of stuff.
Some discoveries will be about sound. Others will be about loss, recovery, and the absurdity of keeping a dead format alive halfway around the world. But all of them, in one way or another, are stories of continuity—the hidden threads that tie an expat’s life together when everything else has changed.
