I was 10 years old when I flew over in a plane with my family from Singapore to Canada. The initial plan was for us to stay in Vancouver for a maximum of 3 years as my father studied for his Master’s degree, before returning to Singapore – the place where my family called home, at that time.

 

Time flew quickly, and before we knew it, it had been 3 years. During the course of those 3 years, I had made several friends in the elementary school I’d attended, and had graduated from elementary school. I was prepared – well, as prepared as a 7th grader can possibly be – to begin the scary world of high school alongside the close friends I’d made. Because of this, I was reluctant to move back to Singapore, where I had lost touch with many of my friends there, as well as the extremely different culture. I had become so used to the Canadian culture, especially in school, where teachers took very different approaches to teaching me material, encouraging me to “have fun” and have a more balanced lifestyle, instead of studying all the time. This was quite different to the culture in Singapore, where good grades and studying are valued so highly that it would not be surprising to find students as young as I was, studying for hours after school ended, in addition to attending tuition classes on Saturdays.

 

I say all this not to raise one culture’s teaching techniques over the other, but rather to highlight the massive differences between the two cultures and how it would have been extremely hard for me to integrate back into Singapore after having gotten used to the culture here. In addition to these, leaving my friends that I’d made here was something I was quite opposed to, as I wanted very much to experience high school with them.

 

Eventually, after many days of contemplation, arguments and discussion between myself, my siblings, and my parents, we made the ultimate decision to stay in Canada and let me and my siblings finish our education here. My siblings and I were overjoyed!

 

Throughout the next 5 years, I grew and matured a lot, made new friends, lost touch with some old friends. However, through all these, one things remained constant: at the end of each day, I would return home to share about my day with my family. It felt nice; it felt comfortable. Some things, I must admit, I did take for granted – such as the fact that my mom would cook me dinner every night.

 

This would soon change when I started university. I moved out of my house for the first time and moved into first year residence at Totem Park in UBC. Admittedly, at least for the first month of living there, I was excited and barely missed home. I started feeling more comfortable living away from home and slowly got to know my roommate and others living in my house. At a certain point, I realised that I now, in fact, had two places that I called home: the house where my parents and siblings lived, and the new first year residences that I was now living in.

 

After the first month, I started missing several aspects of home – such as having homecooked meals, and the comfort that only living with one’s parents can bring. I started visiting home at least once every month, which was a refreshing and welcome change from living on campus.

All of these experiences have taught me the very valuable lesson that my idea of home is not necessarily based on location – but rather, the people that I am around. Should my family move out of our house and return to Singapore, I would not find our house as welcoming anymore. I would probably even be unable to call it a “home.” After moving out of Totem Park in first year, it no longer felt like home to me – despite me having spent a whole 8 months there. This, I realised, was because the friends that I’d made in my first year had also moved out. To me, home is somewhere that I can return to where the people that I love are. It is somewhere that I can feel like I belong, where I can be around the people that I’m closest to, where we can share our lives with; where I can return to and share about how my day was – and, in turn, listen to how their day went as well.

 

I feel blessed to have lived in places that I can call home. Despite having moved around so much, and having to get used to a completely new culture, I am convinced that the difference between a “house” and a “home” is that a house is simply a place to live in, while a home is not about a specific physical location, but rather, the people that I surround myself with.

 

Works Cited

 

Brent Larkin, Northeast Ohio Media Group. “Education Dominates Singapore’s ‘different’ Culture: Brent Larkin.” Cleveland.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 June 2016.

 

“Singapore – Lonely Planet.” Lonely Planet. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 June 2016.