Old, I return to the homeland I left while young,
Thinner has grown my hair, though I speak the same tongue.
My children, whom I meet, do not know who am I,
“Where are you from, dear sir?” they ask with beaming eyes.
–Homecoming, He Zhizhang. (Translated by Yuanchong Xu)
The time is AD 695. A young man, in his prime, was standing before the royal palace of the Tang Empire and staring, with excitement and pride, at his own name displayed on the top of the “Golden List” – a feat coveted by many, yet achieved by few. The List was a proclamation of his talent, affirmed by the imperial court of Chang’an, capital of the Empire. To have a shot at the list, a student had to compete with talents from all over the Empire to pass harsh tests on economic policies, defence strategies, and most importantly, poetry. Many were knocked out in the county and provincial tests, and less than 2% of those who advanced to the final exam, held at the imperial palace, were selected to be on the “Golden List”. Their names were cast in gold and proclaimed by the emperor himself (or empress, during Wu Zetian’s reign in 690-705 AD). Royal banquets were held, and government jobs granted to ensure a flourishing life for those on the Golden List and for their families.
Suffice it to say, the young man, He Zhizhang, was at the pinnacle of his life. A zhuang yuan (first place finisher) in the exam, he was a famous poet of the Tang dynasty and later became advisor for the crown prince. However, like the others who passed the tests, known as the Ju Ren, he was assigned to government posts away from his birthplace, for the government implemented a Regional Avoidance Policy, which meant that the Ju Ren could take jobs in their hometown, to avoid nepotism. He left home at 35. And it was five decades later, in his late eighties, that he wrote Homecoming on the way back to his hometown of Yongxing, some 750 miles away from Chang’an. “Oh, I return to the homeland I left while young,” he exclaimed in the poem, “Thinner has grown my hair, though I speak the same tongue.” His contemporary, Wang Wei, another zhuang yuan, resonated a similar longing in Missing My Brothers in Shandong on The Double Ninth: “All alone in a strange land, How I long for my folks on this festive day!”
Homesickness has always been part of the human experience. Some are forced to move, whilst many more others, like He Zhizhang and Wangwei, leave to pursue better opportunities and fulfil personal goals. This parallel between the story of migration and that of individual pursuits is foundational not only in ancient China, but also in America, founded by Puritans and Catholics from Europe in pursuit of religious freedom. To cope with homesickness, these immigrants named streets and places derived from their European places of origin: New York, Harlem, New Orleans. Later, during the California Gold Rush, many more rushed from all over the world, hoping to chance upon even a sprinkle of gold dust that could fulfil their dreams or provide for their families. In one popular folk song of the era, a Chinese wife expressed her husband’s emotional turmoil as he journeyed to San Francisco, which was referred to as “Gold Mountain”:
Sailing a boat with bamboo poles across the seas,
Leaving behind wife and sisters in search of money,
No longer lingering with the woman in the bedroom,
No longer paying respect to parents at home.
The folk song perfectly mimics the homesickness experienced by He in homecoming, both centering the sacrifice one has to make in pursuing wealth and opportunity in their migration. The places we move to aren’t just places. They are the carvings of names on the Golden List and the vein of gold we hope to discover underground. Or, in the words of 21st century bard Taylor Swift, the “kaleidoscope heartbeats under coats,” and “concrete jungles where dreams are made of”, as Jay Z raps. With the advancement in transportation infrastructure, such a narrative has only gained traction in modern society. Getting across the Pacific from, say, China to America, is now a mere 10-hour plane ride. According to the 2022 International Organization for Migration Slovakia report, there are approximately 1 billion migrants in the world today, or one in every eight, consisting of 763 million migrating internally within a country, and 283 million international migrants. Americans are nowadays the world’s most insistently mobile people. Each year around 12 percent of the population move internally–a national game of musical chairs with 36 million players, writes Melody Warnick, author of This is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are. Moving, as Warnick points out, is largely driven by “bank-account-enhancing life changes like a new job or a lower cost of living elsewhere.” Geography accounts less for where we are or where we attach to. Instead, it is our opportunity, our fortunes and our destiny.
Crawling, like spiders, from one node on the global web to another, further and further away from home, we seem to have evolved beyond the Homo Sapien instinct of homesickness. As Mark Leary, a psychology professor at Duke University, suggests, homesickness developed as an emotion to prevent us from venturing into the unfamiliar and away from bounds of safety, especially during an age where we are uncertain about what’s out there. In other words, when we push against homesickness, we are pushing against our natural instincts that allow us to survive and thrive. It’s different now, one may say. Unlike Wang Wei and He Zhi Zhang, we now have a new coping tool–the internet and social media. From across the Pacific, I can Facetime my family whenever I want. If I am hungry for a snack from back home, I can tap a button on an app and get it shipped.
However, despite being a coping mechanism, technology not only isn’t the cure for, but may exacerbate homesickness. A study by Miranda van Tilburg, an associate professor of clinical research at Campbell University, focused on cell phone use at summer camps. She found that homesickness rates were significantly higher at camps that allowed cell phones when compared to camps that banned them. It’s like scrolling through photos of your hometown food at 3am–you only miss home more. The development of steamboats and telegraphs in the mid-nineteenth century led many to predict that homesickness would vanish once and for all. But that turned out to be false: even as we move with more efficiency, speed, even passion, homesickness is a condition that stays with us. We need a familiar environment for a sense of control, as well as supportive groups when we are in need, and a Facetime call across time zones simply can’t replace such a natural impulse.
Indeed, humans are instinctively driven to form connections with places. “To be rooted,” the philosopher Simone Weil wrote, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” This connection is termed in humanistic geography “place attachment”. It’s like interpersonal attachment: we stick to a place that we fall in love with. When we are limited physically by how much we can move—as in the days before cars and airplaines—the place that we fall in love with and call “home” is usually where we are born and grew up in. This gave rise to “sedentarism,” which champions being “rooted” to one place and one origin, while framing moving as a disruption.
However, a new “flow” or “multi-centered” view, whereby we can choose to attach to multiple places as we move, as suggested by the very title of the Warner’s book–Make It Your Home Wherever You Go–emerged as travelling and migration became a much more common experience. In this sense, as we become “prodigal sons” of one place, we are “adopted” by other cities or places. Whether this comes in complement to or at the expense of our connection to our previous origin is another question debated among the humanist geographers. In either case, nevertheless, the “flow” model doesn’t necessarily encourage constant moving. Instead, it simply suggests the possibility for us to grow attached with new place(s) other than our “home”. To become rooted, we still need to develop an almost intimate bond with the place we live in, which takes time and emotional investment just like any relationship (three to five years is apparently peak season for place attachment).
However, the harsh reality is that many people struggle to form such bonds with the big cities to which they travel. One such group, most prominent during the 2000s but still seen today, are the beipiao, literally Beijing drifters, who migrate to Beijing from other parts of the country, seeking opportunity in Beijing’s wide variety of industries. As in the name, the beipiao drift from one job to another, one apartment to the next. According to a East China University of Political Science and Law research, young people in Beijing move every 11 months and 38.5% have moved at least five times. Many worked over 5 different jobs in a span of a few years. Unsurprisingly, such instability of jobs and high cost of living lead to high levels of stress, loneliness and burnouts in not just Beijing, but metropolitans around the world.
Perhaps a counterbalance to the stress of life in the big cities, lately, there has arisen a narrative to “escape from BeiShangGuang” (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou); to free oneself from the toxic work culture and endless rat race. Many have moved back to hometowns or to smaller cities that provide cheap housing. Ironically, however, many who “escaped” eventually return, parodied as “huilong piao” (back-to-cage drifters). Perhaps we just can’t resist the aura of the big cities. Like Gatsby, yearning for the elusive green light across the bay, we attach to something about the city–perhaps the narrative of the “endless possibility” it offers–that we try so hard to reach but never quite does. Therefore, when we find that life in one city does not match our expectations, we begin to contemplate whether we are in the right spot. We get hit by FOMO as we realize which wonderful city everyone else is in and what amazing lives they are leading. And then, with a signature youthful impulse, we pack our bags and move on to the next city to find, to no avail of course, a “sense of belonging”.
On top of the individualistic drive for migration to big cities, societal development and the larger modernization trend further diminish place attachment and enforce our “rootless” condition through a homogenization of places. Anthropologist Setha Low and psychologist Irwin Altman, pioneering researchers of place attachment, argue that place attachment is a process in which we imbue places with meaning and memory. This is rooted in the distinctiveness of the place that shapes a particular moment or memory, just like a relationship is based on the uniqueness of each person and the unique story they share. On the path to modernism, however, the distinctive features about a place are quickly transformed into uniform building sites and condo apartments. Rural areas are quickly urbanized in a standardized way.
For instance, in his recently published book, The Nameless Home of Wuhu (无名的芜湖), Keyang Tang, Doctor of Design at Harvard and now a professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Architecture, embarks on a journey to rediscover his hometown, Wuhu, only to find that the small town in his memory no longer matched the reality of the “concrete jungle” as it stands now. Like most towns and rurals regions in the 1980s, it was torn down and rebuilt “modernized” following the Opening Up. Doctor Tang expresses a feeling of solastalgia–“the homesickness you have when you are still at home” –as coined by Glenn Albrecht, an Australian environmental philosopher who studied the impact of large-scale mining in New South Wales.
Modernization is efficient and cruel. As booming excavators and explosives sweep down the old, fragile limbs of a town, followed by construction of brown or grey-painted condos that share the same cliché names (Majestic Mansion, Sunshine Garden, Bund Palace. You get it.), hometowns are homogenized as they are modernized. Therefore, as noted by human geographer Edward Relph, placelessness replaced places, losing their uniqueness and any significance that would allow for people-place interaction. Unsurprisingly, residents in the mined area in New South Wales experienced a feeling similar to homesickness despite still living in the same area: a loss of distinctiveness of place is equivalent to a removal of the special connections that they had previously formed with the place, either with its nature or people. Therefore, in a sense, they are uprooted from their homes while still remaining at home.
So, are we doomed to remain drifting prodigal sons, propelled by personal ambition and swept along by a society that marches forward, erasing all traces of “backwardness”? One option, of course, is to stay put, which is completely fine, though it demands that we come to terms with the solastalgia that lingers in familiar yet changing landscapes. More difficult, perhaps, is resisting the weight of societal expectations and managing our own FOMO. There is another easier path, in my opinion: forging deep, rooted connections to the places we journey through, and allowing them to become more than mere waypoints.
As an international student, I left home in China at 12, for New Zealand. For the first few years, I struggled to make new connections and find belonging in a land that spoke a different tongue, as I fought to maintain my old connections in China. Then I made new friends as I got better at the language and grew more familiar with the local culture, and found comfort in settling down. Soon, I left another time, continuing further west to traverse another 6000 miles in the Pacific, and landed in Southern California, where I study now, completing almost an equilateral triangle on the map.
There’s no denying that each move has placed me outside of my comfort zone to grow bolder and more independent, and granted me encounters (wanted or not) with more people. But then again, each move feels like an uprooting, a sudden detachment from all my previous relationships that I struggle to maintain, as I get thrown into new, disorienting realities. But it doesn’t mean that the attempt is futile. I still try my best, calling friends and family back ‘homes’. Sometimes it was a comment on a friend’s post, other times a happy birthday wish. Deep in my heart I know, despite the distance, I still belong to them. And they still belong to me. Whenever I want to go back, there will always be a group of people that will welcome me as soon as I land. And that is enough.
The Alchemist is one of the few books that I could pick up in the middle of the day and finish in one sit-through. (Well, it is short.) It’s about a young shepherd boy named Santiago who, in pursuit of an abundant treasure that he dreamt about, abandoned his sheeps and ventured from Spain to Egypt. At the end of the quest, lying before the pyramid, hopeless, he found out that the treasure was buried at the very place where the journey began, under a sycamore tree where he rested with his sheep. Perhaps the story is a reminder that the gold we are pursuing is not buried deep underground in some far away land–instead, it’s right where we are. It’s the sheep and an Egyptian girl for Santiago, and for us, it might be our family or friends, an exquisite local coffee shop, or an afternoon disappearance in nature.
“Where are you from, dear sir”? As an 86-year-old zhuang yuan, perhaps He was surprised to find a child’s naive question so difficult to answer. I get the same question asked again and again, in each of the places I’ve called home: Where are you from? I search relentlessly for an answer as I trace the same routes as the gold miners. I am bewildered by each strange scene in each new home, as I rejoice in each newfound sense of belonging.
