I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of home lately. Not the physical place, but the feeling of it: how it shifts, fades, resurfaces, and sometimes surprises us. After more than a decade and a half of living abroad, the question of what “home” really means has become harder to answer cleanly. The longer I live away from the place I grew up, the more I realise home isn’t fixed. It moves as we move.
After 15 years of living overseas, sometimes I feel like I’m on a permanent trip, and there’s no home to return to. The home I remember is gone, and when I go back, both of us have changed too much for me to belong. I wonder if everyone feels this way. As time passes and we evolve, even if we stay in the same place, are we coming back to the same home?
Nostalgia is a strong seducer, leading us to remember things as better than they really were. We can’t go back to the home we remember, but I’m not sure if we should anyway. The home that shapes our early memories is made up of feelings, tastes, and smells. Sometimes that place is fuzzy in our memory, and other times a single note comes back to us like it was yesterday. On the other hand, the place we call home now is easy to describe and clear in our minds, but we don’t get to decide if the feeling of home comes along with the title.
We all know the phrase, “Home is where the heart is”. On the surface, it’s a nice sentiment, and I agree. I do feel at home when I get back from a trip and hug my daughter, and lie down on my own bed, surrounded by the things I’ve chosen to live in my house with me. And if we had to pack up and move somewhere else, it’s true that as long as I had my family with me, that would be enough. But beyond the embroidered wall art, sometimes it feels like I don’t belong anywhere, and that makes me a bit sad. I’m realizing you can call somewhere home for all the right reasons and still not fully feel it.
On the other hand, there are many times I feel at home wherever I am, living out of a suitcase or in Singapore with friends and family: from riding the local train in Mumbai with my hair blowing in the wind, to downing highballs in an izakaya in Golden Gai with strangers, or sitting on a plastic stool eating at my favorite char kway teow stall in Kuala Lumpur. I feel comfortable, I blend in, I am content. I get spoken to in Mandarin in Singapore and China, Bahasa in Malaysia and Indonesia, Tagalog in the Philippines, and Cantonese in Hong Kong. It may just be because of my pan-Asian face. But it still makes me feel good.
If home isn’t just where the heart is or the house we sleep in, if home is a feeling that we know when we have it but not something we can manufacture, then those stretches of not feeling at home are just proof that we aren’t standing still.
Maybe the feeling of home isn’t supposed to be static. If it were, we might stop moving and searching for places where we feel we belong. Maybe we can’t feel at home for very long because the world keeps spinning, and we can’t just get off at the next stop. Maybe we can learn to feel at home wherever we are. But for now, the desire to feel at home keeps me going, or maybe it’s the other way around.