This piece began writing itself near the rows of leather seats in Pudong airport, next to floor-to-ceiling windows that bear witness to planes—those dove-tailed little things—sprint across the concrete runways and lift into the sky. Word after word appears on this document as I face all of my packed bags on the sofa, and as I frantically repack everything the night before I leave. It ends at eight o’clock in the airport as I board, knowing that this time, just like two years ago when I set off for the Netherlands, I have to say goodbye again.
Senior summer felt like taking a window seat on a high-speed rail: I get on the train and watch as the endless lazy landscapes of rice fields and poultry pass me by. I know how the minute-hand ticks, but when I lean my forehead against the cool glass, part of me concludes in disinterest that there will always be cows to see. I believe this until the broadcast flares up and announces the next station, and, as I frantically take my bags off the shelf, I look out the window: in the brief moment I lost focus, I’m back to the marvelous emerald city of cement. I know I’ve missed the business and fascinations of urban life, but it’s just that I thought the cows would always be there, and now there aren’t any cows in sight, and, as I hustle along, I don’t know when I’ll see cows again.
In my mind, I’ve just finished taking Polaroids with my friends, all of them decked out fancy at graduation—and the next day as I turned around at the end of the flag tunnel I found myself on the Eurostar, travelling across Europe and going everywhere I’ve dreamt of—Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, Sarajevo—and suddently I’m back where I grew up, and I’m whooping and hollering with my friends as we play round after round of Chinese poker on grad trip—and then there are slow days of lounging on the couch and summer work and travelling and catching up—and now, after I’ve bid farewell to mostly everyone that mattered to me, it’s time to go and start over again.
In two days, I’ll strap on my enormous backpack and carry me and my camera to the land of the free; in four days, I’ll be on a flight with strangers to a foreign land whose language I don’t speak. I know that these nine months in Indonesia are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I’m determined to make the best of it. I’m not writing because I’m getting cold feet: I am aware that it won’t be an easy journey, and there’ll be times when I get things wrong and make mistakes and question what I’m even doing here, but it’s worth it. I’m willing to believe that I’m made of stronger stuff, and that, whatever happens, I’m not alone, I’ll figure it out, and I’ll do it scared.
This essay is not about how I feel regarding the coming months. This essay writes itself because whenever I find myself standing alone in front of the boarding gates I am flooded with an overwhelming longing for the past and what has been, because I find bits and pieces of myself scattered across the world and I am terrified that I will never be whole again, because I am terrified of the existential fact that I will forever miss people for longer than I’ve known them, because I know that I will never find home again, even when a small voice in the back of my head keeps telling me that please, sir, I want to go home, and I cradle the apple cheeks of a broken child and kiss them on their forehead and whisper how I don’t know where that is.
It is nighttime, and I am sitting by the windowstill of our hotel room, three metro transits away from the airport, twenty-seven hours from my flight to America. On the other side of the curtain, my father sits at his desk, squinting at journal reviews on his laptop. My mother is packing for me. Above my music, I hear her shifts the heavy items from my bag to my suitcase, zipping pockets tight and sorting all my clothes because, for some reason, I’ve done it all wrong.
I hear David Foster Wallace whispering in my ear: This is water. This is water. This is what the world is. This is how a world ends.
The truth is that there is no home. I no longer saw home fully in Guangzhou, where I was born and raised, when I chose to build a life of three years in Shenzhen, where I created the happiest memories of my younger adolescence; yet in Shenzhen I have no physical dwelling to return to after a late night, and so I cannot say that I have a home there. I no longer saw home fully in China when, two years ago, I left for a small town in southeast tip of the Netherlands and, for lack of a better term, found myself again—and yet I also cannot call Maastricht home, because I know very well that I am not much more than a footnote in the memory of my teachers and classmates and friends, who do call the Netherlands home. I no longer spoke home fully when I can’t remember the last time I picked up a book in my mother tongue; I no longer saw home fully in my parents when, throughout the years, I found friends whose company brought out versions of myself that could never exist in their vicinity.
There is no home. My parents are here with me right now but I miss them, I miss them desperately, and I believe that I am not only missing who I once believed they were but also who I once was, someone who didn’t feel the need for the emerald city because they were golden-hazed in their mother’s arms.
Yet my world has long ended. Macleish writes in Hypocrite Auteur: a world ends when its metaphor has died. There is now something I need more than comfort, beyond the fairytale of family, and I have found it in Shenzhen and Maastricht, and I will continue to find it where the sun shines. I will read and write new metaphors, I will enter into the lifelong cycle of greetings and farewells, and I will try to find home in other people, and I will grow.
For now, however, I will sit and watch my parents and smile and mourn, because I love them, and I grieve when a world has died. I remind myself: This is water. This is water. This is water.
To wave goodbye over and over again, to look through photographs with a deep sense of longing, to desperately miss the physical presence of a friend—it is a necessary sort of melancholy. I grieve my past lives because there existed warmth and joy and tears and laughter. I grieve my past because there is a past worth grieving. I tell myself: how fortunate am I that I have found something to miss.
There is something else—a line by Miriam Adeney—that I repeat to myself to cope with my rootlessness: this loneliness, this uncertainty, this grief—this is the price you pay for the richness of knowing and loving people in more than one place. I love my city, but I lost my familiarity with it in exchange for the richness of my friendships in another city; I love my culture, but I gave up parts of my connection to it in exchange for the richness of my friendships in a foreign country. There is always a price, and my rootlessness is the price I pay for letting my roots take place wherever I find home.
It’s all very simple, actually: I meet people—friends, teachers, everyone—and I get to know them well enough to fall in love with them, and then because of the tides of time I leave, or they leave or, we leave each other, and I miss them. I miss them dearly. And then I remind myself: this is the price I pay for this richness.
As I’m writing this, three steps away from the airport gate, there’s twelve minutes until we start boarding, one after the other, on a passage New York bound. I miss home already. I listen to Hamilton again, and I remind myself: this is the price I pay for this richness, and this rootlessness is worth it because I’ve grown from it, steady as old pine.
This is the price I pay for the richness of knowing and loving people in more than one place.
I’ll gladly pay it every time.
Written in the HK International Airport, minutes before boarding.