When Morgan Hatrick moved to China from the United States, he was looking for something new. He’s part of a new breed of people in the world who think globally – people who look for opportunities in other countries, who aren’t shy about crossing borders and starting a new life somewhere else.

“I’m a rambling man,” he tells me from a booth at the Lakewood Diner – a restaurant on Chautauqua Avenue in Lakewood that he opened in August.

I’m wondering how he went from living in China to owning a restaurant in Lakewood and he tells me a story about moving to China to start a new life. He taught English for a while, and then found a good position with a Norwegian shipping company where he developed a program to help improve the English language skills of Russian and Chinese sailors who float on international seas.

“I got on a working tanker ship,” he tells me, “and the living quarters for all these men were so tiny. They couldn’t escape one another. There are mutinies all of the time on these ships that go unreported.”

He says he liked living in China. “Challenging” was a word he used. And “growth experience.”

But here’s what happened when the novelty wore off: he got tired. Tired and worn out. And even though he had chosen to escape America for a while, he began to miss it.

“I got used to China,” he tells me, “but when I got better at living there, I stopped being excited about it.”

At one point, he took some time off of work and went to Bangkok on a whim. He hired a motorcycle and ended up in Cambodia where he hung out near a waterfall for a few days and enjoyed the experience of being alone.

Shanghai, where he lived, has a population of 14 million and although the city boasts a lovely mix of the old and the new, there’s a lot of humanity there to grapple with.

But like a lot of stories, Morgan’s story changes when he meets a girl.

Sara, who is now his wife, is from a big island in the most southern part of China. She was doing very well working in Shanghai as a manager for a furniture company – one of the biggest in the world, but at some point they decided they’d live their lives in the states.

They didn’t pick Lakewood for nostalgic reasons, although Morgan had clocked some time fishing on Lake Chautauqua as a kid. He’d spent part of his childhood in Arcade, New York and his family knew the people who owned the Gaslight Motor Inn.

He picked our region because buying property here and becoming a landlord made sense from a financial standpoint – there’s a high income to price ratio here.

And so they moved to Lakewood – Sara never having lived outside of China and Morgan having been gone for nine years. One of the properties Morgan and Sara bought includes the diner they now own where people are happily ordering scrambled eggs and home fries as we sit and talk.

These days he’s focused on improving the rental properties he’s bought and he’s planning some farm to table dinners at the diner with Big Horn Meats.

What I really want to know is how Sarah is faring, what it’s like to leave China for the first time and find herself living in a small village on the western edge of New York state.

What she loves about life here, she says, is how it stays light out for so long in the summer, and the changing of the fall leaves. “It’s beautiful here and the people are nice,” she tells me.

One day they hope to buy a small farm.

Morgan tells me a story of how he went for years not seeing a blue sky in China because of all the pollution, and how one day, the government in Shanghai suddenly “cleaned up the sky” before an event and there it was again, all that blue.

I like the idea of a government cleaning a sky so people can see the world as it was meant to be seen.

What’s clear is that old boundaries are being erased. The world has shrunk. That’s something that is easily demonstrated in big cities, but Lakewood, too, is a microcosm of the macrocosm and we have people like Morgan and Sara who have traversed many miles to find their place here.

I’m happy to share our skies with them. Especially when those skies are blue.