Where is Home?

For this week’s post, I decided to invite my dear friend to write about her experience of ‘patriating’-re/ex/self. Today I find myself officially homeless and yet I feel wonderfully liberated and at ‘home.’ Over to you, Elyse…

Recently I edited a PhD thesis dealing with expat and repatriation issues and the discussion revolves around the concept of ‘home’. For anyone with a penchant or a compulsion for wandering the globe – the concept of home is a really interesting one.

I left home almost 15 years ago and headed off to London as a starry-eyed young university graduate with my four year (thanks grandpa) working visa in hand. ‘Home’ at that time was Sydney, and in my naïvety, I guess I thought that was where it would always be. My friends were there, my family, my boyfriend, and I was really only planning on staying for six months. Tops.

Cut to a year and a half later, and I remember this moment very clearly, I was walking down the road to the station on the way out to somewhere or another one night, and I suddenly realised how settled I felt in London. I had a job, friends, a decent social life, and I knew my way around the city – not only physically through transport links and roads, but also figuratively – I knew how to ‘handle’ London...innit? Yet through one way or another (mainly because of a boy), the desire to move on grabbed me, and I had Hong Kong in my sights, which incidentally didn't happen (also to do with the boy), so I self-patted myself again – this time to Shanghai. Believe you me, I wept as bitterly at the airport in London as I did when I left Sydney. It may have had something to do with the huge fee I was charged for my overweight bags, but also I wept because I was leaving a place I knew and felt comfortable in.

France followed Shanghai, and then a return to Shanghai followed on from that. Finally, I find myself where I am now – married to a Japanese man and living in Tokyo with a baby daughter. Strangely, even though this is the most traditional concept of home – a hearth, a partner and a kid – I am finding this the least homely place of all. Perhaps it is because I haven't ‘cracked’ it yet like I managed to with London and Shanghai and to some extent France. There was a brief glimmer of hope the other day at my drumming group when I was chatting with one of the other members – in Japanese. I felt like I was part of something – that I belonged.

Although I was born in Sydney, there are now parts of it that feel alien to me. To some extent, I think it's because I have forgotten how to deal with Sydney. Or has Sydney changed? It has certainly become shinier, flashier... a lot of the slightly grungier, more down at heel parts have been polished up, mainly due to the 2000 Olympics. In fact, some of it has changed so much that I just don't recognise it. I recall walking from the city centre out to Newtown, which is a suburb right next door to my first university – a walk I used to take a few days each week - and suddenly finding myself in a spot where I had to stop and really think about where to go next because none of it was familiar. That is very alienating.

Culturally, I have missed a lot too – my friends talk about all sorts of things – restaurants, celebrities, TV shows, bands – things I have never heard of. Because I have been away for so long, friends have ‘new’ friends – actually long-term relationships - with people I have never met before. Perhaps because I once knew it so well and now I don't makes the whole issue more fraught. When I return to other places I have lived, it's like revisiting an old friend – cosy and familiar; we seem to be able to start off where we left. Regardless, I still refer to it as ‘home’ a term which is no longer an exclusive nomenclature.

So then – what is ‘home’ for a serial expat? Yes – in some respect, it is where my passport says it is and yes, yes – we all know it is where the heart is – but where is my heart? There is a little bit of it dotted in several dodgy bars in Camden in London and despite our differences, definitely a large chunk of it that remains perfectly content looking out over the beauty that is Sydney Harbour. Another tiny part of it is browsing the aisles of a French supermarket marvelling at the cheeses and wines. Some of it is inextricably entwined in the roads and buildings of the French Concession in Shanghai, lingering over the steaming baskets of baozi. These are all places that I have to a greater or larger extent fallen in love with; places I have got to know over the years, whose languages I have learnt, where I have made friends and had fun in, and therefore consider all of them a little bit of home. It's the places where, when I arrive, I think...ahhhhh....here I am.

I guess that's it. When the wandering and travels are over, when the to-ing and fro-ing have finished, home is the place where you find yourself.

Elyse Singleton is a Tokyo-based freelance writer, editor and proofreader who lived in Shanghai for many years and blogs about craft, thrifty fashion, eco-consciousness, op-shopping, food and other gorgeousness mixed with a little Japanese flavour at www.elseseven.blogspot.com Elyse also edits my blogs. Huge thanks, Dude!

For more about Leah’s journey back to the UK, click here.