homecoming.
Perhaps the strangest thing about being a child of two worlds and of many cultures is that home becomes a concept that moves beyond the physical. Home is not found in a physical space, but a point of belonging. During the pandemic I spontaneously dropped a quiet fortune on a sign that reads “home is where you belong” - but where do I truly belong? When belonging lives in the active decision to choose spaces that I am continually uncertain of. I am 48 hours back in a city I once called home and perhaps I still quietly do, but for the longest time I know it will never truly be home. Like its name, Kuala Lumpur is a confluence of two spaces. The person I was, the person I am and the person I choose to be. Kuala Lumpur reflects the dreams and wishes of those that came before me, and a memorial to the life I make outside of it.
Having moved out at a young age, and being the eldest in an Asian household, hyper independence was a skill learnt out of necessity, and while that skill has served me well, it comes with its strings and many weighted bags. I was sharing with my therapist before I left that the skills that make me adaptable, calm and dependable are also the skills that grew out of a resilience built from trauma and that trauma has come to permeate my life in North America. Toronto will be one of my favourite cities in the world because of the growth that has come from my wrestle, but because of that wrestle, I don’t think I am in a space to call it home now. As I find myself again whenever I go back to a city I have grown up in, I find myself reconciling the past lives that could have been. The stories that never were told and never happened because life decided to take a left turn. And now as I sit at a juncture of my life where for the first time I can choose again to go left or right, I am at a standstill. Are the relationships I have built in North America worth keeping me there, or have I built them strong enough to weather change and transition.
It would be easy to say that if I choose to leave Toronto I can just pack up and go but like with Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Assen, Miri and the many places I call home, it will be choosing to leave the space that has nurtured much comfort and safety. The decision to move cities becomes less about the desire to uproot and travel, but it is the decision to choose myself in a way that honours the lives that I have lived. Home will be wherever I choose, but do I have the courage to choose a space where I honestly want to belong? When you’ve never given permission to yourself to choose such things, the choice of freedom becomes a paralysis in indecision. I have come to realize that I will be fine wherever I go, but the choice is mine again to choose to belong, or find my way around it.