Homeish
Confuddled.
A word I picked up from my best friend sometime in elementary school, and one that I began using with gusto, applying it to everything I could, regardless of whether or not it was appropriate for the situation. What was I to write for my next assignment regarding the environment? Oh, I don’t know, it’s so confuddling. Why is the sea blue? What a confuddling question, and wouldn’t I like to know. One word to describe me best? Confuddled, of course.
To be completely honest, that hasn’t changed much.
In the years that have passed since my voracious book-devouring phase from the ages of seven to eleven, many of the words I gathered retreated to the darker depths of my brain, and I adopted a much more teenage-friendly vocabulary that inevitably contained more slang and profanity than anything else. The word “confuddled” retreated too, but it came scampering back this summer when an uncle asked me about hometowns as we drove back to my mother’s hometown. We had been chatting about music, about world news, and about religions, and as we gradually worked our way to more personal topics, he asked me where I considered my hometown to be.
I wish I could have inserted “confuddled” into my answer somehow, but alas, my ever-dwindling vocabulary in Chinese failed me, and I mumbled something along the lines of, “I don’t know, maybe Canada?” and received a disappointed tsk. If I had a competent Chinese vocabulary and adequate practise with using it, though, I probably would have told him something like this:
Ideally, it would be Montreal: a Europe-esque city with winding streets in which echoes of music and chatter in Quebec-accented French, a city surrounded by the glimmering waters of the Saint Lawrence River, and one that is blanketed by dazzling white come winter. It was where I was born, after all, and I think often, isn’t that what a hometown usually refers to? However, as my parents packed six-month-old me into a carseat and drove off to find better horizons before I could develop any memories whatsoever of the place, I have hardly any hometown-y attachment to it.
Three-year-old me found myself in Hangzhou, which is the first city I have any recollection of. It, too, would be a wonderful place to call home: I remember evening strolls by the West Lake, admiring the lotus flowers in the waters and the majestic mountains in the distance, and taking tourist buses around the city and throwing my arms up into the air as we drove over bumps that us - very momentarily - flying. It would be my hometown, I think, if we hadn’t moved back to Canada barely two years later. As it was, my memories were interrupted, and if I were to compile my coherent memories of the city into a video, I doubt it would surpass thirty minutes.
Five-year-old me was likely falling off her bicycle on a hiking path in the suburbs of Mississauga, while my distraught grandparents chased after me. My memories of Mississauga are similarly fragmented, for though I was seven by the time I left, I suspect my maturity remained stagnant throughout the three years there. I remember telling my grade one English teacher that her handwriting was ugly, crying on the hardtop during recess because I was scared of getting cancer (and infecting my friends, until there were three six-year-old girls sobbing inconsolably by the hopscotch squares), and spending an afternoon trying to scrape the rust off of my bicycle. Perhaps because I am so clearly aware that I was an unpleasant child, or because I spent only three years there, Mississauga doesn’t feel much like home, either.
Following Mississauga was a rural town in Canada, where cornfields and tractors were more common than people - or at least, that’s how I remember it. We lived on the outskirts of the city, and our neighbours seemed even more socially awkward than we did, because in the nearly four years we lived there, I met the residents of a grand total of two homes in our neighbourhood. I remember most of my time there, I think, whether I was hopping around our hopelessly flat backyard on a snowboard I’d found in our shed, knocking my brother’s head on the metal bedframe of the bunk bed in our basement and screaming more than he did when he got a bloody nose, or reciting every bad word I knew in class to try and seem cool. It’s because of the abundance of memories, I think, that I call this my hometown the most, but as I write this, aboard a plane headed to Canada, I don’t feel the sense of homecoming I expected to feel at all. After nearly seven years away, and not very much rooting me to the country in which I was born, there seems to be precious little connecting me to my homeland apart from my passport.
That leaves, well, my current place of residence, an extremely rural town in Northern California whose name I shall not disclose for fear of being discovered by people I actually know, and my parents’ hometowns. I was ten years old when I arrived in California, a little too late for me to be developing very hometown-y feelings, and it doesn’t help that it’s a wonderful place that floods come winter, burns come summer, and is rocked by earthquakes all year round. As for my parents’ hometowns, it’s where my Chinese relatives would tell me my hometown was, because apparently such things are hereditary, but there is no natural tug-in-the-gut feeling that tells me I’m home when I get there. Instead, I count the mosquitoes in every room with my brother, and count down the days until we can leave in my head, because to me, it isn’t home.
Of course, I wouldn’t have given this monologue in its entirety to my uncle even if my Chinese skills had allowed for it, because such an explosion of words would likely have left an awkward silence in its wake that I don’t ever want to deal with.
But as I prepare to bid farewell to this home-ish place, setting off for university halfway across the world, I think that I have failed to keep it out of my heart entirely. Will I miss the incessant heat in the summer, the cracked-open roads that seem to worsen each time they get fixed, or the skies that turn orange in fire seasons? No, but somewhere along the way, the unpleasant child who raised her hand to inform her teachers that she thought her handwriting was better than theirs grew up here, made friends, made memories, and grew roots, and now when people ask me where I’m from, my immediate answer is “California”. Of course, I’ll try to explain that I’m not actually Californian right after that, because I’m kind of Canadian and kind of Chinese too, because I am still stubborn, but this has become home…ish.
