I wanted to address two aspects of home in my story: the first is where I call my home and the second is my definition of home.
When I first moved to Port Coquitlam when I was five, I really did not consider Canada my home. My mom, brother and I had moved in with my Aunt’s family, which also included her sister-in-law’s family as well. Needless to say, the house was always bustling with noise and crowded most of the time. I remember my elementary school years filled with unfamiliarity and frustration; I wasn’t fluent at speaking English and it was very difficult making friends. Each time I had a spelling test, I wouldn’t know half the words. Because it was a struggle to adapt to school, I didn’t enjoy much of my time there. I always looked forward to going home where I would be greeted by familiar faces. Further, I remember counting down the days I could return to Hong Kong to visit my dad. To me, Hong Kong was my true home even though I had migrated to Canada. My fondest memories of Hong Kong at the tender age of 5 were spending time with my grandparents in my old apartment, eating delicious street food like curry balls and skewers, and drinking Vita lemon tea (which is equivalent to juice boxes here) on a hot, humid day. What I cherished most about life in Hong Kong was the sense of familiarity – I understood the language, most of my family members were there, and the buildings and markets always gave me a sense of belonging.
However, my sense and outlook of a home has changed as my stay in Vancouver extended. When my dad moved to Vancouver in 2004, my family and I decided that it was finally time for us to move out into a house of our own. We found a neat Japanese-inspired home up the mountains in Coquitlam. As the years have passed, more and more memories were made in that house with the people I love and respect. My sense of home has shifted from Hong Kong to Canada ever since my immigration because I no longer visited Hong Kong as often. Because my immediate family members were all in Canada, I finally felt like my family was settled in Canada. I guess you could say that there was a sense of relief because I knew I wasn’t going to move elsewhere. For that reason, I consider my family a huge part of my home and regard the two as synonymous with one another. I connect Canada to my home because that is where my family is. The sense of welcoming and belonging given to me by my family is incomparable to any other feeling. It brings me joy just to think of that particular feeling because I think of warmth and acceptance. I want to end this response with a quote that fits perfectly with my definition of a home and has resonated with me since I read it: It takes hands to build a house, but only hearts can build a home.
Thank you for sharing your poignant feelings of home and belonging. I read a lot of the ways in which home for you, is tied to both a feeling and a physicality. The neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer wrote in his book ((http://www.amazon.ca/Proust-Was-Neuroscientist-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/B002CMLR5Q)(and blog) about how Proust, in his novel In Search of Lost Time making a very scientific claim when he described how the taste of a madeline cookie could take him back in his memory to times as a child. It turns out Proust had connected the fact that our brain so closely associates taste and smell with home and memory much before modern science had.
The way Proust describes it though, is much more like how you describe hands building houses vs. hearts building homes (a beautiful line). While science may well have later explained how or why food and scent so triggers feelings of memory, Proust lived it. There is something to be said about affective ways of being and projecting, especially onto ideas of home.
Work Cited
Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.