Assignment 2:2
In Search of Home- Ramblings
When I first looked at the criteria for this blog, I thought it was going to be a breeze. A short story on the home and values, topics that had been discussed countless times in my English classes. But as I sat down to write, my mind remained blank, and as I kept staring at the ghostly white glow of my empty word document, a sense of panic slowly crept up behind me. I didn’t know what to write. What is my sense of home, and the values and stories that connect me to where I am?
Maybe I am overthinking this definition. Home is where I feel a sense of belonging, right? Where I feel the safest, the most comfortable, and the most content. I do have all that. I have my home to come back to after a long day and the people I love to share joyous moments with. Therefore, it confused me when I realized that I didn’t have a very strong sense of home when I thought about where I am. I think this might also be partly due to my lack of experiences away from home. I haven’t traveled much—the only times being two-day trips with friends and a five-day tripe to Korea. Maybe I will experience a stronger sense of what home means to me once I am away from it, once I’ve gone to unfamiliar places that didn’t provide the comfort that I am constantly blessed with.
I feel like I am always on the chase for that feeling of home, and it is a feeling that is not always there. My sense of belonging, I realized, is not constant. Is it supposed to be? I don’t know. During my road trip to Banff, I had the privilege of witnessing the beauty of the Rockies. I was able to stand and watch as rays of sunlight came through the clouds that surrounded the mountains, and it really looked like heaven had opened up. I remember during that moment, I wanted to stay there forever, fit myself into that scenery somehow and be a part of it. Is that the sense of home and belonging that I was looking for?
Vancouver is a beautiful city and I love it with all my heart. It has everything lined out for me in terms of comfort and familiarity. Here, I can find all the things that the “Chinese part of me” sometimes crave, from food to clothes to entertainment. There is nothing more I can ask for, and I am extremely thankful. But sometimes, I would look at a street in Richmond, and the way leaves fell next to the greyish, old buildings would remind me so much of the streets back in China. I would be struck with a sense of longing to go “home”, where I haven’t been for year now. That is a strange, strange feeling, and one that I don’t quite understand. I’ve grown up mostly in Vancouver, so why does a part of me still think of home as my family’s little apartment back in TianJin? I’ve made so many memories in Canada, and everyone I hold close to my heart is right beside me, so I don’t understand the longing I would have for a different place, somewhere that is no longer familiar to me.
To help with my confusion, I looked up a video where it asked people to define what home meant to them. After watching it, the large variety of answers gave me comfort. It seemed that while space is very important to some people’s sense of home, others also look to someone or something that brings them a sort of feeling. And, like me, it seemed like a few of the people hasn’t quite grasped it yet either.
Lastly, I would like to end my ramblings with my messy definition of home and what my values are. Adding to the definition of home as a sense of belonging, I think that home also encourages the feeling of love. We feel at home with the people and things that we love, and that can be found in the spaces we inhabit, the movies we watch, and the books that we read. I felt that when I read All that Matters in one of my second-year English classes. It was a book that told of an immigrant family in Canada during the early 1900s. I did not experience Canada at that time nor relate with the events of the story, yet with every page of the book somehow made me feel a connection. When I read it, I felt a sense of home and belonging that I could not explain. Perhaps it was his language, perhaps it was the theme that I identified with, but what I was certain about was getting close to that feeling I was always chasing.
Here is a brief article on the background of the author who made me feel at home with his writing.
Works Cited:
“Wayson Choy is Taking Reader’s Questions.” The Globe and Mail. 11 May 2009. Web. 1 January 2019.
“What does ‘Home’ Mean to you?” Youtube.com. Youtube, 27 April 2009. Web. 1 January 2019.
Thank-you for sharing. Your exploration of the concept of home is very complex and fluid and contradictory -which makes sense to me, because “home” itself is a fluid and contradictory and all-encompassing concept. If anything, I find these contradictory expressions to only reflect the deep thought which you put into this journal.
In example, you began by writing “Home is […] where I feel safest, the most comfortable”. But later in the journal, you wrote, “Maybe I will experience a stronger sense of what home means to me once I am away from it, once I’ve gone to unfamiliar places that didn’t provide the comfort that I am constantly blessed with.
I think this contradiction perfectly encapsulates how home is both the personal, and the political: and it manages to be both in polarizing ways. On a personal level, home is often an ideal of comfort for individuals. But on the socio-political level, since the immediate post-war suburban era in Canada: the concept of “home” is also a challenge to individuals. Before immediate post-war suburbia, it was normal for Canadians to live comfortably in transgenerational housing. But then this cultural idea of: a successful and happy and “normal” family will only live with two parents and their two kids and their pet in a nice, standard hope was sold to the public. In this way, “home” is also a challenge to be met: a challenge of cultural normalcy to be achieved by the privileged.
Your expressions that “home” is comfort for you, but you must also /find/ “home” by leaving comfort and exploring new places is therefore a brilliant expression of the contradictory nature between the personal and political.