Originally written in May 2019.
I am always in awe when someone shows me the home they grew up in, because I had 15 different places to call home by the time I was 23 years old. Home was nothing more than a temporary space I slept in. Where is home? For the longest time, I struggled to answer the question, but I am getting close. Very close.
I am a third culture kid, someone who spends the majority of his or her transformative years in a culture that is neither one’s own nor one’s parents’, but in a third culture. My father worked for a Korean corporation in import-export business and I grew up in Indonesia, Korea, Poland, and Vietnam, before moving to New York City for college in 2005. Looking back now, moving frequently had a big impact on me. It changed how I related to places and formed relationships. I never really settled anywhere and was always ready to leave.
My college roommates and friends found it very odd that I would never hang anything on the walls or decorate my dorm room or apartment. For me, it didn’t make sense to put time and effort into making a place feel like home, because constantly moving was the only thing I knew how to do.
I still remember the day when I couldn’t stop crying in the arms of a teacher in fifth grade, because I had to change schools by the end of that school year. It felt like the end. I was devastated by the thought of never seeing my friends again and losing a sense of belonging I had only begun to develop. It was one of my saddest moments and it wasn’t the last time.
With every move, I wasn’t worried about fitting in or making new friends. I was more afraid of saying goodbye. At a time before social media and cell phones, goodbyes were the end. You were never going to see your friends again. Every time my father made an announcement out of the blue, I knew there weren’t any other options but to leave for a different country, city, and school.
You’d think that things would get easier with practice, but that wasn’t the case for moving. Every time, it felt as if the ground I was standing on was crumbling, only to be replaced by a big void I did not know how to mourn. It is not the worst of tragedies like fire, earthquakes, and war, but for the little kid I was back then, it felt like a tornado had wiped clean all I had ever known. As this pattern continued, I became numb and reluctantly accepting of goodbyes, because there was nothing else I could do.
During the last decade, I was on a mission to find my home. I travelled everywhere in the hopes of finding a city or a country that felt like home, but I couldn’t find it. It didn’t exist. I also looked for men who could make me feel at home, but that would make me a hermit crab invading their homes, which is not what I strive to be. I couldn’t find home because I had believed that homes had to be found.
On a hot summer day in 2018, I was in Rockaway waiting to catch a shuttle bus to the beach and saw an osprey’s nest built atop a decrepit house. The bird had built its home, twig by twig, on top of a house that was disintegrating into thin air. Despite its broken foundations, it was a real home. It hit me then that I could build a home. If the bird could do it, I could do it, too.
That weekend, I thought long and hard about why I was still telling my friends about leaving New York. Did I really want to leave? After spending half of my life here, there was nowhere else that felt more like home, yet I still couldn’t get myself to call it home. Why?
I came to a realization that there is a part of me terrified of losing my home all over again, and the stakes were so much higher this time. I love New York. I love New York for all the reasons it is loved, but also for taking me for who I am and letting me make my own decisions about staying, leaving, and just being, for the very first time.
In a convoluted way, I believed that if I never called this place home, if I told everyone that I might not be here next year, if I pretended that I didn’t care, I couldn’t get hurt. I didn’t want to lose it again like that time in fifth grade.
I am so scared, but I also want to see past my fears. Birds build new nests every year and we rebuild after natural and men-made disasters. I hold on with unwavering hope and belief that homes can be built over and over again, no matter what.