Internation, taking traditional dance lessons as a child is as common s playing in Little League or you soccer.

So just like every other kid started dancing dances from the island of Java I'm Japanese and Bali since I was five.

It is so common they even get graded on it in elementary school.

And here's me playing the role of an angel at our Christmas pageant, complete with Japanese dance choreography.

Somehow Indonesians are able to combine the traditional with the modern, the old and the new on our culture into our daily lives.

Then, when I was 12 years old, my parents moved us from bustling town of Jakarta to middle of Nowhere.

State College, Pennsylvania.

I didn't speak a word of English, so they put me in E S, L or English as a second language.

I was a complete certified fob fresh off the boat.

Someone who is an American.

Enough!

It's a 12 year old.

I was devastated.

I was going through a crisis.

I acted different.

I looked there, friend, I saw no different.

I just wanted to fit in.

And now the worst.

My parents made us perform at Penn State's International Night.

Don't let the smiles fool you if I want to fit in.

I was failing miserably.

So that was it.

I quit dancing.

From then it was English only to get rid of the accent, watched a lot of college football and hung out with fair skin.

Boys immerse myself in pop culture.

I even rocked the nineties bangs.

I was becoming look really American teenager, complete with a slight obsession of boys to men.

Then life continued.

I went to college, got a job at corporate America, married a boar with pronounceable last name.

Then these two happened.

These are my happy girls.

Look, there's nothing Indonesian about them.

They don't look Indonesian that I'll speak Indonesian.

They don't even eat Indonesian food.

I know on.

If I wanted them to know the other half that I spent years that gave shutting off, I needed to get back to my roots to my heritage.

So what's the easiest thing to dio dancing?

So me and the girls we join an Indonesian traditional dance troupe, and you've got more inter dancing.

I realized I wasn't doing it for them.

I was doing it for me I was the one missing that half.

I was the one that ignored that have shamelessly, you know, all these years, choosing to become an American and disregarding my Indonesian heritage.

That wasn't the complete me.

What if I embrace both?

So here I am dressed like a bird of paradise because I realized that mixing the modern and the traditional American in the Indonesian, that's me.

And for many immigrants, we are both.

So what better way to embrace myself and continue this journey than performing one of the more unique dances and more elaborate costume?

We're performing a dance from the island of Bali called General WASI, or Bird of Paradise.

The dense represents our meeting rituals of these birds of paradise, and some of the movements are not traditional.

It mimics the movement of these birds, like skipping, showing off the tail, shaking off the feathers mix and our traditional technique.

Typically about these dancers cannot show our teeth.

So are expressing their done through our eyes, and the constant finger movement is also very traditional.

This is also an example of a dance that's Ah combination of modern and traditional.

The dance isn't classical or sacred It was choreographed to protect and preserve the bird of paradise from extinction in an R verse.

And we have two male birds that will be joined by a female bird.

Wait, wait, wait.