Between Passports

For 28 years, Marina was the Chinese girl in Brazil.

Then she visited China for the first time.

Within ten minutes, she discovered that people there saw her as a foreigner, too.

Born and raised in São Paulo to Chinese parents, Marina had spent her entire life answering one question:

"Where are you REALLY from?"

She thought visiting China might finally help her understand where she belonged.

Instead, she discovered that being Brazilian in China could be just as complicated as being Chinese in Brazil.

In this episode of Between Passports, Marina's story explores the experience of being second-generation: inheriting a culture you've never lived in, navigating expectations you never chose and discovering that neither country has to define your entire identity.

What happens when you belong to two cultures but neither seems to recognize all of who you are?

Perhaps home isn't about choosing which country gets to claim you.

🇧🇷 Brazil → China → Brazil 🇨🇳

🎧 Between Passports. Real stories. Real people. Real adventures.

Have you ever been asked where you're REALLY from? Share your story at betweenpassports.com.

Do I hear an accent?

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Seven years.

A mortgage. A dog. A career. A favourite café. Neighbours who knew her by name.

Camila, from Mexico, had built an ordinary life in Sydney, Australia. And that was exactly the point.

Then, at a dinner party, someone she'd just met asked:

“So... when are you going back?”

Going back where?

To the apartment she sold years ago? To friends whose lives had moved on? To the version of herself who once thought Australia was temporary?

The question wasn't really about geography. It carried an assumption: that her real life was still somewhere else.

But one afternoon, walking through her neighbourhood, Camila noticed something.

The baker asked about work. A neighbour complained about the weather. The woman at the café already knew her coffee order.

None of them ever asked when she was leaving.

To them, she already belonged.

Episode 18 of Between Passports is a story about the quiet gap between building a life somewhere and being seen as someone who belongs there — and the moment you stop feeling like you need to justify why you're still here.

Because sometimes home isn't where you were born.

It's the place where your future has already started.

🎧 Between Passports — real stories about immigration, identity, culture and belonging.

Have an immigrant story that made you stop, laugh, or rethink what home really means? I'd be honoured to tell it.

Find out more at betweenpassports.com

Between Passports — Do I hear an accent?

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Sara studied Canadian history for six months.

She learned the Prime Ministers, the provinces, Confederation, the rights and responsibilities of Canadian citizens. She passed the test, took the oath, and eventually received her new Canadian passport.

Then her father called from Tehran.

He was proud. He asked about the ceremony, the people and her new life in Canada.

And then he asked:

“Are you still Iranian?”

Suddenly, the hardest question Sara faced had nothing to do with citizenship.

In this episode of Between Passports, a story about becoming Canadian without becoming less Iranian — and discovering that belonging to somewhere new doesn't necessarily mean belonging any less to where you came from.

Maybe identity isn't a room where something has to leave before something new can enter.

Maybe it's a house that keeps building new rooms.

Between Passports. Real stories about immigration, culture, identity and belonging.

Share your story at betweenpassports.com

#BetweenPassports, #TheCitizenshipTest, #ImmigrantStories, #CanadianCitizenship, #IranianCanadian, #Immigration, #Canada, #Iran, #Identity, #Belonging, #CulturalIdentity, #Diaspora, #ImmigrantExperience, #Podcast, #Storytelling

Linh grew up in Vietnam, where the first price wasn't always the final price. Bargaining wasn't rude. It was simply part of buying something.

Then she moved to Australia.

A supermarket cashier was confused. A pharmacy wouldn't negotiate. And at an Apple Store, one innocent question — “What’s your best price?” — left Linh and the employee wondering whether the other person was joking.

It’s a funny story about shopping, but also about something much deeper: the invisible rules we inherit from home and only discover when we move somewhere that plays by a completely different set of them.

Sometimes immigration doesn’t just teach you how another culture works.

It teaches you that your own culture was never the default.

It was simply home.

🎙️ Between Passports — real stories about immigration, identity, belonging and everything that gets lost in translation.

Share your story at betweenpassports.com

Daniel moved from Kenya to Canada believing that good work would speak for itself.

His performance reviews seemed to prove him right: excellent work, reliable, technically outstanding.

But when management positions opened, Daniel kept getting passed over.

The feedback changed slightly each time: be more visible, show more executive presence, speak up more.

Eventually, Daniel began to wonder whether the problem wasn't his competence at all — but how competence was being recognized.

In Episode 15 of Between Passports, we explore the subtle cultural rules of the workplace, what “executive presence” can mean across cultures, and what happens when an immigrant realizes that adapting doesn't necessarily mean becoming someone else.

Sometimes, it means learning how to translate confidence.

Aiko left Japan for Brazil because she fell in love.

Tokyo was organized, predictable and quiet. Rio was almost everything she had been raised not to expect: loud, spontaneous and constantly inviting itself into her life.

Years later, she still misses Japan every day.

But when someone asks whether she wants to move back, her answer surprises even her.

The Reverse Move is a story about loving the person immigration allowed you to become — while still grieving the person you might have been if you'd stayed.

This is Between Passports.

Every morning, Kartik wakes up to more than 200 WhatsApp messages from fourteen different group chats.

He knows what's happening in everyone's life.

He just doesn't have anyone to have dinner with.

A story about technology, distance, and why sometimes the opposite of loneliness isn't communication—it's company.

The first thing she paid every month wasn't her rent. It was home.

Forty percent of her paycheck crossed the Pacific to the Philippines before Canada took its share. Before the landlord. Before life.

She worked as a teacher in Vancouver. Every month, the transfer was almost automatic. Not because anyone demanded it. Not because her family kept score. Because they slept a little better knowing she had made it safe.

Or at least, that's what they believed.

Every few weeks, she sent photos. Cherry blossoms. The seawall. Mountains after snowfall. The pictures weren't fake. She had really been there. She just never mentioned that the coffee was the only thing she bought that afternoon. Or that she walked the seawall because it was free. Or that after taking the photo, she had instant noodles for dinner.

Again.

When her mother asked "Are you eating well?" she looked at the noodles on the counter and smiled. "Yes."

It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the whole story.

This is a story about love that hides itself. About the strange mathematics of living abroad. About how being an immigrant sometimes means sending more than money home—you send reassurance. You send hope. You send a carefully edited version of your life.

Not because you're ashamed of the truth. But because the people who love you most are also the people you'd do almost anything to protect from it.

It's about the quiet choices we make over and over again. The messages we don't send. The worries we absorb so others don't have to. The version of ourselves we keep sending home because it's kinder than the real one.

This is what love sometimes looks like from ten thousand kilometers away.

Between Passports tells the stories that live between countries. New episodes every week.

Find us at betweenpassports.com | Instagram, TikTok, Facebook: @between.passports

Her grandmother died in Peru.

María was standing in a small apartment kitchen in Germany, still wearing the clothes she'd worn to work.

The funeral was starting thousands of kilometers away. She wasn't late. She was impossible to reach.

She opened airline websites. The cheapest ticket cost more than two months of rent. There was also work—she'd only recently started the job and hadn't accumulated enough vacation. Calling in sick for several days wasn't really an option.

Immigration asks impossible questions. Not "What do you want?" But "Which loss can you survive?"

The day of the funeral, she made coffee she didn't drink and put on a black sweater her grandmother had once said made her look elegant. Not because anyone would see. Just because it felt wrong not to.

At 11 in the morning, Germany time, the WhatsApp call began. Someone in Peru carried the phone into the church. The phone shook with every step. Faces froze, became pixels, turned back into people. The picture cut in and out.

María kept moving closer to the screen. As if standing ten centimeters away instead of fifty would somehow shorten six thousand miles.

When her mother cried, the audio disappeared. When it came back, the crying had stopped. She never heard it. Only saw the tears afterward.

This is a story about the invisible cost of immigration. About the moment you realize that building a better life means accepting losses that can never be recovered. About watching your grandmother's funeral through a screen and realizing that witnessing goodbye through a window you can't open is not the same as being there.

Months later, María realized something that frightened her: when she remembered the funeral, she didn't remember the church or the flowers or how the room smelled. She remembered pixels. A frozen screen. A voice cutting in and out.

The last goodbye she would ever have had been compressed by an internet connection.

People often think the hardest part of immigration is leaving. Sometimes the hardest part is not being able to return.

Between Passports tells the stories that don't have easy answers but matter anyway. New episodes every week.

Find us at betweenpassports.com | Instagram, TikTok, Facebook: @betweenpassports

A seven-year-old boy comes home from his first week of school and asks his mother: "Mum, why do the other kids say I talk funny?"

She freezes.

Not because she doesn't know what to say. Because she's been asking herself the same question for years.

Sofía is from Guatemala. She moved to Mexico. She thought she understood what it meant to adapt—replace your vocabulary, replace your identity, leave the old version behind. But her son was teaching her something completely different.

He didn't see his Guatemalan accent and his Mexican accent as competing identities fighting for dominance. He was carrying both. At school, he sounded Mexican. At home, he sounded Guatemalan. Three weeks into first grade, he had figured out something that took Sofía thirty-one years and a move across borders to begin to understand.

Adaptation doesn't mean replacing. It means expanding.

This full episode goes deeper into what happened after that first conversation. How Sofía watched her son code-switch without even knowing he was doing it. How she realized that linguists call this dialect accommodation—the way we unconsciously adjust our speech to fit the people around us. How children do it faster and more naturally than adults ever could.

And then there's the dinner table moment, six months later, when her son corrects her Spanish. He's right. She laughs. And then she realizes something that changes everything: Guatemala isn't something she's leaving behind. It's something that continues through him.

This is a story about the moment a mother stops thinking about immigration as loss and starts seeing it as expansion. About learning that you don't have to choose between where you came from and where you're going. Sometimes the answer is both.

It's also a quiet reminder that sometimes the people teaching us the most important lessons about identity and belonging are the smallest people in the room.

Between Passports explores the quiet moments when cultures collide and identities shift. New episodes every week.

Find us at betweenpassports.com