CLEVELAND, Ohio — During his last semester on the Ohio University campus, Terrance Reynolds was near the Office of Global Affairs and decided he should go inside.

Stopping at the front desk, he asked someone behind the counter: “What do you have for me?”

His was a question not often heard from the mouth of a Black male.

In some ways, it made Terrance, then 20, a unicorn or, perhaps, a black rhino —the rarest of the rare: a youthful Black man who wanted to trot the globe. Such a man is rarer still when his roots were planted here, because most males who look like him have more pedestrian aspirations.

But dream big he dared do, a dream he etched in bold lettering onto the bucket list in his mind, so it wouldn’t get lost amid the helter-skelter of trying to live a fulfilling life.

Inside Global Affairs, Terrance discovered he had two options: Hong Kong and Singapore. He picked Hong Kong, the cheapest of the two.

The months he spent there opened his eyes to the world. He reached out and tried to put his hands around global citizenship.

“I went to the Philippines. I went to Japan and Macau,” said Terrance, a self-taught developer. “After doing that, I wanted to continue traveling. So, after graduation, I moved to another country, and that was Japan.”

He stood out there the way a Black man does at a Hells Angels gathering.

“Being Black in Japan or being Black in Asia certainly comes with its hurdles,” he said. “But it also comes with its upside.”

The upside is what makes Terrance’s experiences there the most rewarding. He finds his Blackness serves him well.

Japan and Southeast Asia are acquainted with Black culture. From hip-hop to sneakers, Blackness, a cultural currency of sorts, brings instant cool, he said. It gives him “cultural cache.”

People in Japan approach Terrance with an expectation; they seem to follow a blueprint in judging him. He sees their prejudgments, however, as benign compared to how malignant his Blackness tends to be among white folk in his homeland.

He’s found the former liberating, as if he had been freed from the dungeons that limited or caged him for his 20-plus years on earth. He has been freed – freed to dream about more than his Americanness.

“My options aren’t limited to America,” he said.

The world is what confines a true global citizen, which is how Terrance sees himself these days. He can work and play and love and marry and cry and hurt and build wealth in whatever place he decides to make his home.

Terrance isn’t necessarily saying he won’t return to the United States to live and work. He has time to figure his future out, and he sees no reason to make a final decision on it today. Frankly, he’s too at peace with the life he has created as a Yankee abroad to fret about what his next destination might be.

Yet to call his possibilities endless would be accurate.

“I don’t think I’m gonna be here for the rest of my life,” Terrance said. “Part of me considered moving to Europe after this — or another country in Asia, because, I don’t know, we can.

“It feels pretty awesome to do that.”

Justice B. Hill grew up on the East Side of Cleveland and still lives there. He practiced journalism for more than 20 years and later taught journalism at Ohio University. Since his retirement in May 2019, he’s been devoting his time to travel and freelance writing.