Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog with some commentary about what you discovered. —Erika Paterson
Hannah Vaartnou: “Home is in your heart”
I found Hannah’s idea of home as “a never ending, twisting, turning, a constantly evolving journey” quite refreshing. We are brought up to believe that we grow up and live in a fixed place, and that might exist in fiction, but in reality our young lives go through so much change in their formative years. And I think this change is a fundamental part of what we call “home.” I love how Hannah describes the events and forces that shaped her childhood and how she connects all that with the idea of home, whether those forces were good or bad.
This leads me to reflect on the forces that shaped my own formative years. Like Hannah, I was raised in a Christian family and attended a Catholic school in my early elementary years. Sometimes I forget how much this experience has affected me, but it has. Growing up in an environment like that instills in you certain values and outlooks that are a core part of you and not easily changed.
Mattias Marten:”The Sense of Placelessness”
Like Saarah, I love Mattias’ ending idea that “home is a habit that builds up around you” and that he “find[s] home wherever [he] happen[s] to be, in welcoming country, earnest minds, and the smiles of strangers and strange familiars.” Not only was this ending paragraph poetic, it offers some hope and comfort to what I think are lots of individuals in this generation who are transient. The environment is becoming one of impermanence with more blurry lines of ownership, for example. Life is fast in the twenty-first century: one moment you may be doing this, another moment something else across the country. The idea of “settling down” is something that happens much later in life, yet, young people are often pressured to do this.
However, I don’t think a life of moving around automatically makes your conception of home impermanent. I think at the end of the day, home is associated with permanence—home is something you can “go back to.” I’m not saying home has to be a permanent space, more that home is the familiar. I once talked to a Go Global student advisor who said that, if she felt homesick while abroad, she and her Canadian friend would go to a sushi restaurant and talk about Vancouver (since sushi is bountiful in Vancouver.
Debra Gooei: So This is Where I Know is Home
In her post, Debra describes the changes her hometown of Singapore has gone through since she’s come to Vancouver, and the also the stereotypes and assumptions held by people outside the city. This is a highly relatable post to me because I also grew up in an area that has since been heavily developed.
Not speaking about my neighbourhood per se, but I can also see stereotypes and assumptions outsiders may have towards Vancouver. Debra notes that many people assume she is Chinese rather than Singaporean due to what she looks like. I can say the same. In my travels abroad, many people still believe Canada to be a predominantly white country. Yet, there is a large Asian population in Vancouver, and as a visual representative of that population, I’ve occasionally been questioned about my Canadian-ness. Our communities are becoming more mixed, and so are our backgrounds. These things are difficult to express, but they exist—for example, in the heavily globalized city of Hong Kong (where my family is from), there is now a company that addresses this multi-background-ness through art and festivals.
This post leads me to believe that it is natural for homes to evolve, to change and grow as we change and grow. Sometimes we may not like it (no one likes their favourite park or wooded sanctuary bulldozed over), but these things happen do in the twenty-first century. Home is also a diverse place, a place where not everyone is uniform, even if we’ve been conditioned to believe that certain places hold certain people.
Works Cited
Bale, Sung. “Third Culture – Where Transient Millennials Can Explore Their Roots.” South China Morning Post. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd., 21 Mar. 2015. Web. 8 June 2015.
Gooei, Debra. “So This is Where I Know is Home.” Oh Canada! An Interpretation. The University of British Columbia student blogs, n.d. Web. 05 June 2015.
Marten, Mattias. “2:1—The Sense of Placelessness.” Centre of Mass. The University of British Columbia student blogs, 04 June 2015. Web. 05 June 2015.
Mincer, Jilian. “The Allure of ‘no Ownership’ for Millennials Is Moving beyond Housing and Cars.” Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc., 28 May 2015. Web. 08 June 2015.
Paterson, Erika. “Course Schedule.” ENGL 470 A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres may 2015. The University of British Columbia Department of English, n.d. Web. 5 June 2015.
Vaartnou, Hannah. “.home is in your heart.” Hannah and Canada. The University of British Columbia student blogs, 5 June 2015. Web. 5 June 2015.