Chapter 2 — Leaving Home to Find Home

1) I Left Because I Had Lost My Direction

I stepped away from school because I had lost my direction.

I was studying advertising, and somewhere along the way, I stopped believing I would ever truly belong in that world. Not because it was “bad,” but because it didn’t feel like mine. I didn’t know what the next chapter would be—only that I had to go see something larger than the life I was living.

So I left. With one simple backpack.

My first journey took me to the Himalayas.

I still remember that morning, with a kind of quiet clarity. I woke up at base camp, and the weather felt almost impossible: in front of me, bright sunlight poured down like a blessing; behind me, snow was falling hard, as if another season had opened in the same sky. I stood there looking at the distant peaks, and my mind went completely blank.

No thoughts. No words.
Just the mountains—vast, ancient, and indifferent in the most beautiful way.

In that silence, the world suddenly felt enormous. And I felt small—not in a painful way, but in a freeing way. Like something inside me could finally loosen its grip.

That “gap year” quietly became years.

I moved through Asia first—Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan… and more places than I can count now. Later I went to the United States, and eventually to New Zealand. And somewhere along the road, I started noticing something I couldn’t not notice:

When you’ve grown up inside a particular world, you recognize it everywhere.

For me, that world was pearls.

I saw pearls in different countries like little signals—appearing in shop windows, on necks and ears, in markets and museums, in quiet daily outfits and formal evening looks. I saw Japanese pearls. I saw Indonesian South Sea whites. I saw Tahitian pearls with their deep, ocean-dark glow. On different skin tones, in different cities, across different languages—pearls kept showing up, calm and luminous, as if they belonged everywhere.

And I realized: pearls are not “a local taste.”
They’re part of the world’s sense of beauty.

They’re also the only organic gemstone—born from a living creature, shaped by water and time, grown layer by layer in silence. Maybe that’s why they travel so well. They don’t feel like something invented. They feel like something discovered.

I also noticed something else that stayed with me.

In Asia, pearls were often associated with older generations—elegant, yes, but sometimes trapped inside tradition. But as I traveled, I saw more and more young people wearing pearls as if they were simply part of their own style. Not for “special occasions.” Not for “when I’m older.” Just… because they loved how pearls looked and felt in everyday life.

That small observation planted a question in me:
If pearls can belong to everyone, everywhere… why was I still thinking of them in such a narrow way?

I didn’t have an answer yet.
But the question followed me.

And it eventually led me to the far side of the world.

---

2) New Zealand — A Different Rhythm

After years of traveling, I went to New Zealand to begin a new chapter. I arrived because people told me the landscapes were breathtaking. But I stayed because I fell in love with the people.

New Zealand moves at a different rhythm. Especially in the South Island, where the land is wide and the population is small. It’s hard to find high-rise buildings there. It’s hard to find anyone rushing. People don’t wear panic in their steps. They don’t carry the same heavy urgency I was used to in big cities—Beijing, Tokyo, Los Angeles.

For someone like me—a city kid at heart—it felt like walking into another version of life. Like crossing not only hemispheres, but realities.

I worked many jobs there: orchards, farms, beekeeping, fisheries. I learned how different kinds of work shape different kinds of strength. I even joined a deep-sea fishing trip aboard the Thomas Harrison—an experience that still feels like a movie scene when I replay it in my mind.

Later, I lived in Kaiteriteri, my favorite beach and one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever known. At the time, I worked on a hop farm. What I remember most isn’t romance—it’s the mornings.

The grass soaked with dew.
The air sharp and clean.
And my lower back aching so badly it felt like a lesson I couldn’t ignore.

After work, my routine was simple: a book, headphones, and the sea. I’d sit near the shore and let the water quiet my thoughts, the way it always seems to do.

Sometimes we’d go to Little Kaiteriteri to collect wild mussels. And that’s where I started seeing them—the dolphins.

They would appear in the afternoons near a rocky edge, circling and playing like they owned the ocean. And there was one dolphin who always came closest. He was slim, almost delicate, with a clean, streamlined body—and somehow he always jumped higher than the rest. Full of energy, full of joy. He would leap out of the water and slap his tail down with force, as if he needed the whole bay to notice him.

One afternoon, half-asleep on the sand, I heard a sound in my mind. Or maybe it wasn’t in my mind—maybe it was the dolphin’s own whistle, a small call carried on salt air.

Alya.

The name arrived softly, but it felt certain. So I gave it to him.

Later, I searched the word and learned that in Hebrew it carries the meaning of “ascent,” of rising. And that meaning stayed with me—not because I wanted it to be poetic, but because it felt strangely true. Pearls rise too. They begin in low places, hidden places, quiet places. They are formed slowly, held patiently, lifted by time… and then one day they emerge, calm and luminous.

---

3) The Dream That Led Me Back

Around that time, the world changed. COVID-19 arrived, New Zealand went into lockdown, borders closed, and travel stopped. For the first time in years, I couldn’t move forward. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t distract myself with the next place.

So I paused.

And in that pause, I began to think differently—not about where to go next, but about what I could build. About what it means to give back. About whether a small life can still create something meaningful.

Then one night, I had a dream that felt like a message.

I saw myself in Chile—in a narrow little alley in Santiago, beside a wall painted bright blue. An elderly woman and a little girl—four or five years old—sat together on the doorstep. And both of them were wearing pearl stud earrings. The child’s pair was small. The grandmother’s was larger.

It was such a simple scene. But it stayed with me like a photograph.

Later, I learned something that made the image feel even warmer: in many Spanish-speaking families, it’s common to pierce a child’s ears when she’s very young—often as a gentle tradition, a kind of blessing, a way of welcoming her into life with beauty and care.

That dream brought me back to an older truth:

Jewelry isn’t complete when it’s made.
It’s complete when it meets a person.

Pearls mean nothing alone.
They mean everything when they live on someone—when they become part of a day, a memory, a family, a story.

And in that quiet moment, I understood what I had been circling around for years: maybe I should go home. Not to return to the old way of doing things, but to return with new eyes. To bring what I’d learned back to the water that raised me—and let pearls speak in a new voice.

I left home trying to find the world,
but the world ended up leading me back to pearls.

Looking back, I think the road taught me three things—gently, over time:

That the most beautiful thing I ever saw wasn’t a gemstone, but the light in people.
That relationships matter more than transactions, and sincerity can shorten distances.
And that the more of the world I saw, the more I loved my hometown—and wanted to build something that could bring dignity, jobs, and care back to the place that shaped my life.

This isn’t a marketing story.
It’s simply how my eyes were changed.

And if you’re reading this now, maybe it’s because—somehow—our paths have started to overlap.