Two years ago, in the waiting room of my doctor’s office in New York City, I froze. In my hands was a patient intake form asking for my personal information, with a blank I didn’t know how to fill: “emergency contact.”

I thought about the guy I had just started going out with—we’d been hanging out every week for the last three months and things seemed to be going well. But we hadn’t had the talk about what we were doing or who we were to each other. Was it too soon? Emergency contact seemed like a huge step.

When I moved to the U.S. by myself at the age of 18, I didn’t expect my emergency contact to be one of the hardest questions I would face. I grew up in Shanghai as an only child under China’s one-child policy. My parents, who grew up in small villages in Jiangsu province, worked hard to put down roots in a big city where they had no family or connections. Grandparents and relatives would visit, but we were mostly on our own. Chinese healthcare forms generally didn’t ask for an emergency contact.

“ Somehow I wasn’t scared by the thought of going to a foreign country where I had no family or friends. ”

Going to college in the U.S. was my idea. Somehow I wasn’t scared by the thought of going to a foreign country where I had no family or friends and which I had only visited once before, for two weeks. Even in high school, I dreamed of becoming a reporter and going to Columbia University’s journalism school. My parents weren’t affluent, but they did everything they could to help me realize my dreams.

I had to put down an emergency contact for the first time when I enrolled in college in Boston. I simply put down my mother’s name and contact information in China without thinking much about it. There were far more important problems to solve: how to speak English all the time, how to survive the beautiful but often brutal New England winters, how to make new friends, how to find a part-time job on a student visa, even what to eat at the dining hall.

Five years later, when I moved to New York City for graduate school at Columbia, I started to realize how little my mother could do from Shanghai in case of a real emergency. Some of my American friends offered to let me list their mothers as my emergency contact instead. In the doctor’s office, I decided to name a good friend who had been my emergency contact for the past year, even though she had recently left New York for Miami. “Just to be safe,” I thought to myself.

Two months later, the guy I was seeing—an American training to be a doctor—did become my emergency contact after all. It happened without much fanfare: “I’m going to put you down as my emergency contact,” I told him one day. He looked at me, seemingly understood where I was coming from, and just said “OK.”

He seemed like the perfect answer. We met on a dating app, and though we were six years apart in age we bonded over our interests in the news and the arts. He taught me some of the inner workings of the American medical system; I showed him the best noodle soups in the city. Neither of us had family nearby, so we looked out for each other. He took time off to accompany me to a medical procedure; I walked him to the ER when a bad stomach ache kept him up all night.

But naming him as my emergency contact always felt like a hefty responsibility to put on someone who wasn’t family—especially since I was never his emergency contact. Then, six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, we broke up. I didn’t see it coming. Suddenly, the question “Who would be there in a pinch if I get sick?” became very real.

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The thought that after eight years in the U.S. I once again needed to find someone who cared enough about me to be my emergency contact was agonizing. For the first time, I seriously considered moving back home. The rise of anti-Asian rhetoric and hate crimes fueled by the pandemic also added to my anxiety.

I’m not the only one wrestling with the emergency contact problem. A 2019 post on a forum for Chinese nationals in the U.S. asked the single members of the site who they put down as their emergency contacts. Answers ranged from friends and roommates to school administrators, company HR representatives and even the Chinese embassy. Some said they felt so conflicted about the question that they just left it blank.

Going through these answers left me feeling less alone. An emergency contact is more than just a name on a piece of paper. That person holds the key to my life. They need to know my medical history, the passcode to unlock my phone and how to contact my family. They have to be willing to drop everything at a moment’s notice to be there for me.

An emergency contact is about putting down roots in a city I never imagined myself living in. Sometimes, I feel shame that despite living here for so many years, I still don’t have a stable one. But I know I made the choice to be here, to uproot my life for a new one. My emergency contact may change from time to time, and that’s OK. And I still hold out hope that someday, someone will happily sign on to be my emergency contact for a long, long time.

For now, my friend’s mom seems just fine.

—Ms. Sun is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal’s Risk and Compliance Journal.

Write to Mengqi Sun at mengqi.sun@wsj.com