The rap music that I associate with Stephanie and her boyfriend, Jason, shook the car as we drove down Highway 101 toward San Francisco. They were driving me to the airport after a spontaneous 48-hour trip at the end of this past January. I had decided to stay in New York for winter break, but when plane tickets went on sale for $240 roundtrip, I knew I had to fly home and surprise my best friend. I started to feel nostalgic as I gazed out the car window and saw the familiar bay surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a rare sunny January day, and the fog had held off for once. In moments like these, if only for a second, I consider moving back to California after college. Stephanie had a baby last year and my return to New York back in August had been hard after spending half the summer at her house bonding with the kid I consider a nephew. As I spaced out in the car on the way to the airport, I thought about how the past 48 hours had been filled with toothy grins, slobber and sporadic temper tantrums, and I loved every second of it.
New York is where I was meant to end up, and I often refer to it as home, but when I feel homesick, I long for the rolling hills of the Napa Valley and the fog of the Bay Area–somewhere I have not lived since I was eight. I was born in Santa Rosa and lived there until the summer after third grade, which is when my family moved to Sacramento. Whenever I think of that place I left behind thirteen years ago, I feel a little guilty for not missing the house my parents fed me in for the last 13 years. There is no obvious reason why I should feel more connected to Santa Rosa than Sacramento, but it still holds my heart. This personal ambiguity caused me to question the definition of home, where it is and if a person can have more than one. What is it that makes a place a home? If I occasionally feel homesick being only 3,000 miles away from Santa Rosa, how do international students who traveled even further than me for college feel? How do they define home? I spoke to four international students and asked them to tell me their stories in an attempt to answer my questions. They each had a different answer: one knows exactly where home is, one has grappled with the definition but finally settled on one, one said home is wherever she is and one said home is not a physical place.
Karen Lee, 21, responded to my Facebook query about willing interviewees, and she is the only person I spoke with whose definition of home has been static.
“Hong Kong is my one and only home,” Lee said.
Hong Kong (8,039 miles from New York) is the only place Lee has ever lived. It is where she grew up and where all of her family lives, including both sets of grandparents.
“The only time I ever left the country to live somewhere else was to come here to school at NYU,” Lee said. “So coming to New York was very new, very exciting for me.”
Her parents moved to Vancouver and got dual citizenship in their mid-20s when the United Kingdom handed Hong Kong back over to China in 1997. They moved back to Hong Kong before Lee was born.
“So I am a Canadian citizen that lives in Hong Kong, studying in New York, and Shanghainese by blood.”
Even though Lee’s definition of home is straightforward, I cannot help but wonder how her multiple identities could have very easily complicated it.
Lee, now a computer science major and business minor, attended an international high school under American curriculum, making her transition to New York easier than for some other people. She is unbothered by being so far away from home.
“I consider myself to be quite independent. I don’t really need to be near my parents, and my parents are pretty confident that I can handle things on my own, too.”
Her plan is to stay in New York and work for a few years and then move back to be close to her mother, as her parents are divorced and both of her younger siblings will be in college.
“I know in the end I will go back to Hong Kong.”
Lee’s story was enlightening, and it was reassuring to find out that someone can have such a definitive understanding of a complicated word, but I was still befuddled about my connection to Santa Rosa, so I decided to speak to someone who has also had trouble navigating this subject. The perfect person to speak to was Aditi Ramesh.
I met Ramesh, a 21-year-old fellow journalism student, last year at NYU Florence and one of the first things I remember her saying is that she disliked living in New York. She seems to have changed her tune a year later.
“I’ve learnt to accept and take in the city for what it is–the energy drives you, it frustrates you, it inspires you, but that’s the personality of this city,” Ramesh said.
Ramesh is a third culture kid–someone raised in a culture different from that of their parents’ homeland–born in Bangalore and raised in Bahrain until she was 13. She then moved to Abu Dhabi (6,843 miles from New York), where she lived until coming to New York for college. She has always struggled to find the right definition of home.
“The concept of ‘home’ is a tough but beautiful gift that any third culture kid like me has the beauty of exploring,” Ramesh said. “I have spent my whole life living in a culture that was different to my own, but now, without a doubt, if someone asks me where home is for me, I say Abu Dhabi immediately.”
I found it interesting that Ramesh lived in Bahrain for the majority of her life but considers Abu Dhabi home, since I spent the majority of my life in Sacramento but consider Santa Rosa home. After speaking with her, I realized that the length of time spent in a place is not always what makes a home.
Ramesh also gets homesick and deals with the distance by talking to her family frequently and flying to Abu Dhabi during school breaks.
“A 14 hour flight is not a hop, skip and jump away and time difference really does make it tough, especially since I am extremely close to my parents,” Ramesh said.
Even though Abu Dhabi holds her heart, she has always been resolved to stay in the United States after graduation.
“Ever since the beginning, my plan was to get my degree here in the United States and then to continue working here as well,” Ramesh said. “But I never closed off the option to go back to Abu Dhabi and work there, because it is a beautiful city with an extremely rich culture and many opportunities for growth.”
Like Ramesh, I have always been committed to staying in New York for as long as possible to work; like Ramesh, I am experiencing the difficulty of closing off the option to return “home” and continue my life there.
Unlike Ramesh, who attributes “home” to the place she lived before college, Isabella Tan feels she has outgrown the country she grew up in and finds that wherever she is becomes “home” through the connections that she makes. Tan, a 22-year-old film and TV major, was born in Taiwan and raised in Malaysia (9,389 miles from New York). She returned to Taiwan to work for a year after high school.
“Even then it didn’t feel like home. At that point Malaysia felt like home. But now that I’m here, New York feels like home.”
Tan used the word “home” to refer to Malaysia during our dinner date, but with the nonchalance of someone saying they are going home over winter break to visit their parents–in that context, it only meant the place her family is rooted.
After speaking to her, I realized that there are two definitions of home: the hometown and the place one feels most connected with. These dual definitions are why I can call both Santa Rosa and New York home.
“There’s that saying, home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling, and that’s so true. You spend so much time away from home and you see people here every day. Sure, your family isn’t here, but you start to make a new family with the people you do meet. And that becomes your home,” Tan said. “I feel more like a New Yorker than a Malaysian honestly, and I’ve only been here for 4 years.”
Her love for New York is part of the reason Tan has no intention of returning to Malaysia to work after she receives her degree. She is currently in the process of figuring out how to start a production company. She hopes to get the company up and running in New York before eventually expanding to Southeast Asia.
“I left Malaysia because of all the oppression I faced back home. As a young female it was hard enough to thrive as a creative, and in a Muslim country it was hard to create content that would’ve been accepted.”
Tan is nervous about her future in the United States in light of President Trump’s election, and is nervous to fly because Malaysia is a Muslim country.
“Even though I’m not Malay, or Muslim, in any way, I still have the passport. Which is why I don’t want to leave. What if I leave and I can’t come back?”
While she doubts that Malaysia would ever be placed on a travel ban, she is still apprehensive due to the pending expiration of her visa. She explained that a visa for someone in a creative field is harder to obtain than for other fields.
Tan’s story and experiences demonstrate the malleability of “home” and further complicate its narrative by introducing threats to that newfound sense of home. What happens when you don’t have a legal right to the place you call home, or that legal right is threatened?
While Tan has imprinted on the city of New York and feels comfortable labeling it as her second home, fellow international student Rick Maeda has never experienced that same ease of claim one place as “home.”
I met Rick Maeda, 20, during committee interviews for NYU ACE, a student organization that produces a charity fashion show every spring. His quiet demeanor reminded me a lot of myself as a freshman, and when Karen Lee suggested I speak to him about this topic, I was unsure how willing he would be to open up about his background. We met for coffee and his fascinating life ended up being the story that made me reflect most on how I define the four letter word that led me on this journey.
While Tan said home is wherever she is, Maeda defined it as wherever his mom and dog are. He has a hard time assigning it to a physical place because he moved around so much.
“The longest time I lived in the same room is for three years. The longest time I lived in the same house is five years, and that was just because of boarding school. I don’t have a childhood home.”
Maeda, an only child, was born in Hong Kong where he lived for a year before moving to Singapore. He then moved between Japan and Hong Kong a few times before heading to Sydney for boarding school at the age of 12. After six years of living in Australia, he moved back with his family for 18 months before coming to New York for college. His family still lives in Tokyo (6,738 miles from New York).
“Few people in my family even went to university, and they went to local schools. So for me to go overseas in high school was just strange to everyone…It feels like we live in different worlds almost.”
Hearing from someone who left his family for school at such an early age was fascinating because in the suburban city I grew up in, most of my high school class remained in state for college. I am one of the few who traveled as far as New York, and Maeda’s story reminded me of the distance I felt when I traveled across the country for college–even though I remained in the United States and he traveled to a different continent.
Maeda said he was forced out of his comfort zone, without really realizing it, but the community of people he was surrounded by helped him acclimate to his new environment. His boarding school was comprised of only 10 percent boarders and 90 percent day students, and he was always invited to spend time at the day students’ houses to enjoy comforts like home-cooked meals.
“In terms of a physical place, I’d consider Sydney more home than Tokyo now.”
Maeda had no qualms about coming to college so far away from his family because he had already done that for six years. After graduation, Maeda wants to stay in New York until his 20s or early 30s. He has no intention of returning to or working in Japan.
“Then I probably want to move to Sydney, or somewhere more family-friendly.”
Maeda made a clear connection between his lack of a childhood home and his struggle to associate home with a physical place. This experience gave me an answer as to why I consider the Bay Area more home than Sacramento. I formed my earliest memories and friendships, some of which I still have to this day, in my childhood home in Santa Rosa. My sister, on the other hand, remembers nothing about Santa Rosa because she was only five when we moved. I was interested in her experience compared to mine and called her to ask where she considers home. She said, almost immediately, that she considers the Southern California cities of Lakewood and Long Beach home because of the friends she made during her summers spent there with our extended family and the strong bond she formed with our four-year-old cousin. Her answer to my question proved that every story I heard has one thing in common: home is associated with the place where one’s most important relationships are made. Stephanie is the only friend, who is more like a sister, I have had for 21 years. Santa Rosa is the place where I made the friend I have had since I was a baby, who now has a baby of her own.
