Our Adventurers Abroad feature this month is a chapter from my new book “Adventurers Abroad: The New American Expat Generation.”

“I immigrated to France in the early nineteen-nineties. If you think about it, in America we would not think twice about somebody who immigrated from Cambodia or Korea or France to set up a business or work as a scientist for the National Institutes of Health. It is a very normal experience. But an American doing that, in the other direction, it is a little strange.”

For Heather Etchevers, 44, her journey to Marseilles, France began in the Boston area, Newton to be specific. Dad was an electrical engineer and mom, a former English teacher, stayed at home to raise Heather and her younger brother.

As a child Heather was drawn to languages, French in particular. Her mother arranged private lessons for her in the fifth grade and she continued studying the language through high school.

“By the time I got to junior high school I was really gung-ho for taking French. In the Boston area we have a lot of ties to the people in New England who are of French-Canadian extraction. I made some good friends who also were really drawn to the language. I found it easy and fun.”

After high school, Heather remained close to home and attended Wellesley College, a private women’s liberal-arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She majored in biology, minored in music and played the clarinet. While there, she spent her junior year at Oxford University to get a taste of living abroad. Back home, her senior year proved to be life changing for her.

“I was the resident advisor for my dorm that year and invited a young woman on my floor to a party a friend of mine was having in another dorm to cheer her up. I met a young man from France at the party who was studying in a master’s program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His name was Olivier and a few years later, he would become my husband.”

After graduation, Heather spent the summer in Germany attending a music program, the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, and then headed west to enroll in the doctoral program at the University of California – Berkeley.

Olivier had graduated from MIT and returned to his home in Paris. But Heather was on his mind, so he came to visit her in Berkeley that fall. The romance began to bloom and after a year and a half, Heather knew that Olivier really mattered to her.

“After a while at Berkeley I was able to arrange a lab internship in Paris for a semester so Olivier and I could get to know each other better. We lived together in an apartment in the fifteenth arrondissement.”