Creative commons photo Shai Barzilay

On May 14th last summer, I was enjoying a casual layover at Istanbul Airport and my brief immersion into Turkish culture, when I suddenly started to wonder where exactly I was going. Technically speaking, I was going back home. But where counts as “home”?

I grew up in a traditional Chinese family in Hubei, with loving and bubbly parents and, more importantly, a cute younger sister, which makes a lot of my peers jealous. I love my family deeply, but I never felt compelled to stay in Hubei forever, even though it’s common in China to stay with your parents until your 20s or even 30s.

This is probably why I insisted on going to a university in Beijing after graduating from my high school, even though my parents kept asking, “Won’t you miss home?” “Not really,” was my response – I believed that there was going to be a new “home” in that new environment.

Unsurprisingly, my parents asked the question—“Won’t you miss home?”— again, after I decided to transfer to University of Virginia. Even though overcoming language barriers and making friends with native English speakers remain challenges for me, and I was very clear about the fact that adjusting to life abroad takes longer, that wasn’t going to prevent me from exploring a new life and education.

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When I left home for the first time it did not occur to me that I would never be able to return to it again. I don’t mean ‘return’ in the literal sense, but in the sense that something happens between the moment that you leave a place and go back to it that irrevocably changes how you perceive things, that renders the familiar objects of ‘home’ into something distant, unattainable –  something of the past.

Like so many others, I left home when I was 18, and while I had been told many things about leaving, I did not know anything about what, exactly, it would mean to return.

When I left home for the first time, I didn’t think about looking back. I was only worried then about where I was going, how to begin a new life. What I did not know then – and what I know now – is that the pain of departure is far easier to bear than the pain of return.

Trip one

The first time I went home was the summer I turned 20. I was studying abroad in Paris and had become increasingly, quietly, desperate. I had grown tired of cathedrals, café crèmes, and the decay of Europe. I had been away for nearly two years, and ‘home’ had become nothing more than a nebulous image in my head, an absence rather than a place I longed for. The summer lay before me, empty and unplanned, and in a moment of panic, I decided to return to Thailand.

Going home that first time was an experiment: I wasn’t sure what to expect, and whether I was going to experience Thailand as a tourist, or as a resident. I had been away for so long that when I stepped into the Thai citizen line at Suvarnnaphumi airport, I could barely speak. The language felt unfamiliar and foreign, and the words garbled in my mouth.

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We’ve been hearing a lot about how studying abroad changes your definition of home.  Olena found it difficult at first to settle back into life in Ukraine.  For Sebastian, transitioning between Kansas and Bolivia is easy, but he struggled to accept that Kansas now feels as much like home as his birthplace.  Qian too feels she has two homes now, but going back to China is not exactly how she imagined it would be.

Photo by Shai Barzilay

For American college students, time off such as Thanksgiving week, winter break, spring break and summer vacation usually is a time to go home.  But for Chinese students in the U.S., myself included, the cost and distance to get home, combined with the requirements of school work and internships, can sometimes keep us away from home for quite a while.

As a result, the home we go back to is not always the same one we left, or that we imagine in our heads.

For example, I have a 9-year-old cousin, once my sweetest little angel, who I watched grow up. This winter when I went back to Chengdu, I bought her several child-size-10 dresses as Christmas gifts. However, as soon as I met her at the airport, I realized those dresses were too small for her; she was already in 5th grade and in the year since I’d seen her had grown to almost five feet tall!
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While spending my winter break with my family in Bolivia, I received a message from a school friend in Kansas asking me, “When are you home?” It was a simple question, but it caught me off guard. She just wanted to know when I was planning on getting back to Kansas, but I was struck by how she was calling Kansas “home.” That was mind-blowing for me.

Is this home now?

I had never stopped to think about it before but, having adapted very well to my new environment, collecting more and more personal possessions there with time and having spent 11 out of 12 months there last year, it would be foolish not to consider it something of a home.

But does it replace the place that saw my birth and first steps (more like my first twenty years)? I wasn’t comfortable even thinking about that!
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Kyiv (left) and Ohio University (right) (Source: Google Maps – DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, USDA Farm Service Agency)

What is it like going back home after 15 months in the U.S.? I began looking forward to it the minute I booked my flight, which was three months in advance. I expected myself to be excited beyond all measure. I thought I would count down minutes for a car to get me to the airport, for my plane to take off, for me to see my dearest people in the world.

Immediately, I started thinking of all the possible gifts I could bring to different people back home. I even made a list to make sure that everyone would get a gift, at least a small thing (which I had to revise pretty significantly when I remembered the weight restriction on luggage – 50lb for a checked bag and 15lb for a carry-on).

But contrary to all my expectations, when the time came to travel home, I didn’t feel the overwhelming excitement I thought I would. I felt like an experienced business traveler who doesn’t easily get amazed at changing countries, but rather anticipates all inconveniences of a long distance flight. No strong emotions, just a fear of losing luggage (which has happened to me twice so far) and a wish to squeeze a 20 hour flight across 7 time zones into 2 short hours.

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After seven months of exploring, enjoying, adapting, torturing…. in the U.S., I finally went back to my home country, China! What was waiting for me there was the incredibly great city of Beijing, yummy Chinese food, old friends who I missed so much, my college, which is my favorite place in the world…and some CULTURE SHOCKS. Yes, I experienced the so-called reverse culture shock in the place where I lived for 20 years.

Renmin University in Beijing, by Flickr user chenyingphoto

Over-friendly

The first culture shock I got after landing in Beijing was about saying hi. In China, people seldom say hi to strangers like the airport clerk, waiters in restaurants or sale associates in shopping malls. That is very different from what it is like in the U.S.

I definitely forgot this tradition after I got out of the plane and said hello to the customs officer in the airport. What made things worse was that I said “hi” rather than “Ni Hao 你好” in Chinese. He stared at me weirdly for a few seconds until I suddenly knew what was going wrong. I just pretended nothing had happened and did not say anything later.

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