Notes on Going Home Again
One thing I’ve learned over the past seven years of blogging is to not post when you are sick, exhausted or pissed off. If you are sick or exhausted, it inevitably comes out in a strained, rather incoherent stream. If you are pissed off, the tone is all wrong and you’re likely to offend (even if writing about unicorns and bunny rabbits dusted with glitter and rhinestones, eating cotton candy in sun-kissed meadows).
Thus, my fortnight of silence here.
This post has had a dozen false starts. It has gone through several title changes. I’ve deleted the first paragraph about six times.
It started out as an unfocused mish-mash of lamentations on the rain (yup, still Plum Rains, still humid, still grey), then took on the added baggage of my 5-day mutating flu last week. My half-delirious enforced bedrest took place over last weekend’s TBEX travel bloggers’ conference in Vancouver and the subsequent hockey riots, so there were semi-coherent rambling paragraphs about feeling totally out of the loop in the travel bloggy universe and baffled and annoyed by the idiocy of the rioters. On top of all this was the undercurrent of unexpressed sadness I’d been feeling over the end of term, end of my job, end of my intense two years with my students– my lovely, funny, sweet, bizarre students.
I’ve deleted all of those false-starts. Let’s start again. I want to talk about going home.
Next Saturday, I’m going home. I haven’t been home since January 2010, which is actually a relatively short absence compared to, say, those four years I spent away in Turkey when I was too broke and too busy to go home. Going from Istanbul to Vancouver takes about two days, ten time zones, and well over a thousand dollars. And I’m going to indulge myself in some entertainment while I’m there. Mayhap shoot some hoops there, or maybe book an escape room from amazeroomescapes.com
I missed two weddings and at least one birth. My parents retired. My eternally 4 year old cousin bought a loft apartment and qualified as a dentist. My childhood cat died of marvellously old age. Trees grew taller and then were spectacularly blown down in some of the biggest winter storms in decades.
Life back home (always called home, even though I’ve lived everywhere else since 1994) carried on without me. I got older. They got older. Stuff happened. I wasn’t there. I was in Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Egypt, UAE, Oman and India but I wasn’t in Canada– or, more specifically, Vancouver Island.
This is where I come from
I have made a slightly better effort at going home since that 4-year stint of absence and have spent several happy month-long visits there since 2007, when I broke the long fast.
I actually really like where I come from and would happily attempt to make a life there but I have no idea how. My restlessness always kicks in. My preference for being an outsider gets thwarted by familiarity. Jobs there lack the free-form anarchy that I’ve grown to appreciate in Turkey and China. I swear too much and people actually understand it and that isn’t a good thing. The rules and by-laws are clearly printed in words I can read.
Home is a wonderful, cozy, remarkably beautiful place but I don’t know how to live there properly without getting all shouty and frustrated.
For those of you who have only known me through my blogs, as an expat or as a traveller, as an urban-dweller in two of the hugest cities in the world (Istanbul, Shanghai), you may have no idea that I started life in the forest, in a house in a valley near a river at the dead-end of an unpaved road, half an hour from the nearest small town, on a sparsely populated island off the west coast of Canada.
As a child, I cleared trails through the thickly underbrushed forests, made forts in the clearings, read books up on thick branches in trees, balanced precariously on unevenly rounded river stones, rode my bike down long, skinny, gravelly logging roads. Our neighbours lived in log houses they’d built themselves. We had a well. We had a wood shed. We had working kitchen gardens and an orchard, ducks, chickens, dog, cats. Our house was heated by a cast iron wood stove in the living room, and in winter I had to hang my nightgown and bedding behind the stove to warm so that come bedtime there would be at least something warm in my unheated bedroom. Out my bedroom windows were trees, trees, trees. And passing neighbour dogs.
Before I was 19, I’d only ever travelled within North America (to Montreal to see family, to Disneyland once, to Seattle a few times). I was from Vancouver Island- born in Port Alberni, briefly raised near Sproat Lake on the way to Tofino, then in the woods of Sahtlam in the Cowichan Valley for all of my school years, then in Victoria, intermittently, for my never-ending degree. I had never lived anywhere else– and even now, I don’t think I’d live anywhere else if I moved back to Canada. It just resonates with me.
For a long time, I couldn’t even conceive of what the rest of the world looked like. It was like a big grey area that I tried to fill in with my aunt’s annual gift subscriptions to National Geographic World magazine and a lot of library books about countries and cultures and history. I knew I would eventually leave –I knew even when I was 5 or 6 but I couldn’t articulate how or why. By the time I was 10, I had accumulated a dozen or more penpals around the world and obsessively quizzed them on the outside world. I needed to know what was out there and how it all worked.
My first overseas attempts at solo travel when I was 19 were built around meeting two of those penpals: a month in Germany with one, followed by two months on a sofa in Galway, Ireland with the other. I had a 5-day Eurail pass to take me safely from Berlin to Cork, via Amsterdam (where I slept on the floor of my German friend’s former classmate’s room in a vegan organic commune on Singel Gracht) and Paris (where I shared a room in a girl’s dormitory with a fussy woman from Edmonton, Alberta, who was 10 years older than me and who said that if I didn’t climb the Eiffel Tower during this visit I would probably never get a chance to do it again. I didn’t climb it that time. But I did return to Paris a dozen more times in the 1990s). I wasn’t a particularly brave adventurer. I was stunningly naive. I was shy. I was tentative. I was very introverted. I wrote a lot in my journal and lived in my sketchbook.
One of the stranger side effects of an adult life spent mostly in transit is that no one ever has a complete picture of who you are.
Friends I made in Turkey only know the version of me that I was in Turkey: bright red hair (usually quite short), striped knee socks, the wardrobe of a strange colour-blind 5 year old, the English teacher who changed jobs and flats every year like clockwork, the perpetually single one, the one with the fantastic cat, the one who regularly danced until 4am in African bars in Istanbul, the one who somehow survived two years in Kayseri in deeply conservative Central Anatolia. I wasn’t a blogger then. I wrote, but relatively secretly and anonymously in my LiveJournal. I took pictures, but not many. My memory card was 128mb until I upgraded to 4gig in 2008.
Before Turkey, I was a broke backpacker, a perpetual student, a serious and responsible nursing home care-worker, an unreliable flake who broke a lot of promises, a barefoot hippie, a music obsessive who worked her way into the 1994-1995 Irish music scene in a way that seems quite impressive in retrospect, a Doc Marten’d bleached blond buzz-cut angry Londoner who said Fuck a lot, a quiet artist in Connemara steeped in tea and soy milk and floaty long skirts.
I have layers and layers of friends who will never know of each other and who each knew a different incarnation of me.
I’ve gone by many names, given to me by friends and family and colleagues and only recognized in specific contexts and eras: Mao, Shirl, Emine, Mali, Miriam, Mariam, Marry, Yaramaz.
Sometimes I don’t feel like one whole person with a linear life but rather a series of very different people inhabiting a series of unrelated, unconnected vignettes.
Next Saturday I’ll be flying into YVR, three hours before I leave Shanghai (thanks to the International Date Line). One of my best friends from Turkey will be meeting me at the airport. She and her partner moved there about two years after I left Istanbul. She knew five years’ worth of Turkish me. The one with the striped knee socks and the cat, the one that left Central Anatolia to come live in Istanbul. We will drink west coast microbrews, eat cupcakes and probably talk about our long-standing obsession with finding bacon and cheddar whilst living in a Muslim country.
I’ve tentatively lined up coffees with friends from a half dozen different incarnations- my childhood best friend and I will meet up at the Folk Festival at Jericho Beach before I fly back to Shanghai; my German penpal from my teen years will be passing through with her young son on holiday and we will try to intercept somewhere on her Vancouver Island itinerary; an artist friend I haven’t seen since 2002 has already pencilled me in for tea next Tuesday at a specific cafe in Victoria. I have tentative arrangements to meet people who only know me through blogging. I have firm arrangements to drink peppermint espressos with my cousin and her babies. Family dinners are certain.
For three weeks, almost everyone will call me Mao again. For three weeks, no one except my parents will really know my current Shanghai incarnation, except for what I decide to write in this blog. I’ll have a lot of ‘splaining to do.
Have a great time at home! I am envious — even though I was just home in January I miss summers at home & wish I was spending this summer there. You will be missed here in China! (Oh, and don’t forget to come back!)
This will be my first summer back home since 2004. Since then, I’ve been there once in autumn and twice in deepest winter. Grim. I promise to come back.
Ahh, it’s such an anxious and confusing thing to have so many different facets in your life, and visiting home always seems to bring out so many emotions. I hope you have a good time though!
I’m sure it will be lovely to be home (it always is, though with mixed emotions). I’m looking forward to baking with ease again- even though we now have a marvellous hand me down oven here in Shanghai, I miss being able to get affordable flour, butter, non-dark-brown sugar and baking spices. Funny the things you miss.
Your writing always captivates and sucks me in. I hope you have a wonderful time meeting up with your friends and going to your beautiful home in Canada. 🙂 I would really love to be able to go home this summer. Enjoy yourself, pretty lady!!
Aaw, thanks! Hopefully I’ll be able to blog from home and not get stuck with writer’s block again…
Really, really lovely post. Have a great trip!
Are you still in Burma? How was/is it? I’ll do my best to have a good trip. It’ll be a busy one…
Nice post, Yaramaz 🙂
I relate to your traveller multiple personality thingo. Multiple languages, multiple customs, multiple geographies etc. equals multiple realities. But home is always home somehow, no matter how many other homes I collect. (And I don’t ‘own’ a home anywhere.)
I’m now Mama to two babies, and when I relocate I have so much extra packing to do. I spent all day today packing – and throwing the frisby at the park.
How long are you home for this time? What happened about that job offer?
Happy travels x
You have two babies now? Oh, I’m so far behind in the news concerning people from that incarnation of my life, it seems!
Am going home just for three weeks- the only spare time before Doug’s summer holidays start and we head off to Sri Lanka for a month. Work is still up in the air. This term is totally done on Friday (one exam to invigilate and mark) then I have to wait to see how enrolment is at the other uni our program works with. This year they only needed two teachers but they’re hoping to get enough students for three so I can be moved there. I’m not really sure what I want. I was kind of looking forward to unemployment.
Beautifully written, thank you. You captured something I think about often as I get older — life is short, but it’s also actually incredibly long. Sometimes I think about how many memories I’ve made, how many incarnations I’ve experienced, and I think I can’t possibly fit many more in. The memories will overwhelm me …
Have a great summer at home. I look forward to reading more of your posts!
Thank you for your comment! You’re right about the memories beginning to overwhelm you- this is something I’m starting to feel as I’ve gotten older. The layers are building upon layers, and each layer is separate and distinct… I always wonder if it would be more manageable if I had stayed in on place all my life, with a linear stream of memories and a consistent group of friends, less job hopping. It seems so much more manageable!
It’s so strange to think of all of us Shanghai gals scatterd around the globe over the summer, meeting old friends, rediscovering our ‘home’. I for one, feel a kind of anxiety about going back, I’m worried it will be way less than the sum of its parts…and yet two months ago I was so homesick. It *will* be nice to buy something without miming, and try on clothes and shoes that fit….
For some reason, I am not anxious about this trip home… maybe because I have concrete needs that I know will be met there, no matter how the reverse culture shock hits me: trees, ocean, family, quiet, camping, jalepeno-cheddar chips…Oh, and shoes and clothes that fit.
Are you up for a coffee/gin & tonic this week? Am free any day but Friday.
“One of the stranger side effects of an adult life spent mostly in transit is that no one ever has a complete picture of who you are.”
Hi MaryAnne–this is just my second visit to your blog, so just wanted to say hello. The sentence above caught me especially, as I was just talking with someone about the faces (or masks) I wear. In my case, I was talking more about my numerous versions while in one place (at work, with friends, with family, online as a blogger, etc.), but I do like your thoughts on the versions of ourselves we create in different cultures and experiences abroad.
“Sometimes I don’t feel like one whole person with a linear life but rather a series of very different people inhabiting a series of unrelated, unconnected vignettes.”
Yes, yes, yes. Love this.
Lovely post.
Cheers,
Cheri
Thank you! I do wonder sometimes if it’s the nomadic/ephemeral lifestyle that causes this or just, well, life in general. You’re right about the hats we wear- even here in Shanghai, I have Home Hat, Work Hat, Friend Hat, Public Chinese Hat… Maybe it isn’t just about having multiple locations– maybe everyone shifts their persona anyway. It’s an interesting thought to consider.
After 4 years back in the States, I have had a series of revelations. I consider myself lucky for all of the good and bad that brought me here. And “here” is prepping for a return to my life abroad. I have my visa, my contract and my tickets.
You struck a chord withinme – “I actually really like where I come from and would happily attempt to make a life there but I have no idea how. My restlessness always kicks in.”
I had to sit back and digest that statement. When you wrote of being “thwarted by familiarity.” I sat up straight in my chair. Yes! Exactly!
I find myself complacent at home. It is so hard to explain. I thrive being an outsider. How do you make someone get that? It is, or it isn’t.
So, instead of explaining my place in the world at the moment, I just want to thank you for stating what I sincerely have felt since I was a child as well. Amazing.
Enjoy your return for all that it gives you. Embrace it, then embrace your choice.
I also tried to come home and stay home back in 2000, after South Africa, before Turkey. I lasted two years (I was also completing my degree and trying to figure out what to do next so my time there was pre-defined) before I finally burst like a coiled spring and landed in the middle of Turkey in 2002. I liked being at home. It was comfy, it was easy. But the whole time I was plotting my escape. Turkey hadn’t even been in the cards (I was interviewing for teaching jobs in Japan, China and Hong Kong) but when I got an email from the director of the English department of a K-12 private school in Cappadocia, I knew I had no choice but to go. My vague plans to register for a post-degree provincial teaching license program (thinking I could, say, teach high school history somewhere in the interior of BC…or something) evaporated and I knew that I had to go to Turkey.
Living abroad has been so much more challenging than staying at home would have been (esp. the gender crap I had to deal with in central Turkey and the language struggles here) but I don’t regret it. Maybe I’m a masochist? Anyway, I’m glad it struck a chord with you and that maybe it could be printed out and quietly handed over to whoever questions your intentions to read. Maybe we were just born this way.
(On a side note, over the past decade my boyfriend Doug has done an informal study of the star charts of travelers vs. non-travelers and has discovered that everyone he has met who has had the same *need* to travel has had their ascendant in their house of travel at birth. Every single one of them. And it isn’t found in those who don’t have that need. Just a thought.)
I love going home, but why do I think of it as home when I don’t want to live there full-time? Uffa. That feeling of different personalities for different people. Yes, yes and thrice yes. Most of the time I potter along not noticing how I change with each situation, but every so often it hits me. Usually when I’m trying to organise parties and realising that I can’t invite all my friends at once, because the different groups will *hate* each other. Also, nowadays, because they’re all in different countries. Yeah, that one’s a kicker.
I think I call it home because it’s my only constant. It always has been there and I hope it always will be there. I am only semi nomadic, I guess. I like to have a stable core.
The friend thing is funny- I’ve definitely noticed it over the years, all those different circles of friends (or not even circles, just solitary people in many cases) who have never met, never will, and who each have a totally different relationship with me. On Facebook I have something like 400+ friends which seems absurd until you remember that by leaving every year (or every month, as I did in my 20s) I had to start from scratch, over and over and over again. Concentric onion rings of people. I kind of wish i had a bunch of friends from school who all lived in one place and who had known me my whole adult life so I could at least have a casual barbecue or something.
Have a great time MaryAnne. I am due to visit England this year after a eight year self imposed exile. Not sure if I am looking forward to it or dreading the thought! Sounds like you will have fun though
Thanks Natalie! Good luck with your visit home- I must admit that my 4-year exile was really weird to break and I felt quite discombobulated being home for a 2 week Christmas break after so many years in Turkey. Nothing to dread, for me at least, just a bit of a head trip!
Wow, you stayed in Romania! What did you do here and when was that? Romania is our home country and we are always curious to what expats think about this place.
Have a great time at home!
Yes, I was in Romania twice- once in the middle of winter in 1999 for two weeks and then again for two weeks in the summer of 2008. Two very different experiences! The first time, we took a train from Budapest to Sighisoara in mid-December, planning to travel around the country for a few weeks before meeting friends in Switzerland for the 2000 new year celebrations, but we were hit by train strikes in Romania AND some serious blizzards and we were stuck in Sighisoara the whole time! We stayed with a family in town, celebrated Christmas with them, and had a very interesting, solitary time (the town was so quiet, so empty, so COLD). The second time, I was living in Istanbul and so took the train to Bucharest, where we stayed a few days. Summer in Romania (a decade later) was so different from my first experience! After Bucharest, we went to Brasov, which we used as a base to travel around that region. It was so pretty! So green! Romania is one of my favourite places still.
(Facebook photo albums from the second trip- Bucharest: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.53320445132.130769.854135132&l=3c3252c66e and around Brasov: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.53332275132.130788.854135132&l=df726a72a9)
We’re glad you liked Sighisoara (maybe the oldest city in Romania), Brasov and, of course, Bucharest, our home city!
One very interesting thing we foud out browsing through your pictures from FB, was that you were in Brasov in June 2008, just one month after us – the same mosaic of Elvis that you photographed in June was exposed in the central square in Brasov in May. How cool is that? 🙂
We love Brasov and the Rucar-Bran area too; in fact, we posted a few articles and photos of these places on our blog (might want to check them out 🙂 ) as well as on bootsnall.com (http://bit.ly/ksQPDO).
Oh, and one other thing: you also have a picture of “Atheneul Român”, which translates into “Romanian Athenaeum” (no connection with Rome, the Romans or the Roman Empire) – a symbol of Bucharest for over 100 years (we saw your comment next to the photo and we thought we’d give you the answer 🙂 )
Have a great day,
Cheers from Romania!
All those false starts? They made for a beautiful post. Seriously I – and I think a lot of people who read it – felt like you articulated our experience better than we could.
The layers of friends and places and experiences, the different lives. Sometimes I feel I’ve lived a dozen lives in 36 years~
Thank you. And yes, all those years, all those layers… it’s hard to explain to people who have lived in the same town all their lives, still tight with their high school friends, why I have 400+ friends on Facebook yet claim to be frequently lonely… it’s because those friends are all from different eras, different countries, different incarnations of my life. It’s like my life (and yours, I’m guessing) gets reinvented every year, with new friends, new job, new location, possibly new focus, new dreams… I’m 36 too, and who I was at 20, at 15, at 30,even at 35 are very different people from who I am now at nearly 37. I guess the core remains constant to a degree but everything else…well, not constant!
Fred, I did not realise you were from the Island. It is very beautiful and I plan to return one day. I last visited in 2004. Had a job interview in Tofino for a outdoor program on King Island which worked in my favour. The principal assumed I was a giant who wrestled bears. In meeting him in person he walked out of his office craning his neck skywards only to look down and say “I assumed you were taller!”
Hank, yes, am from the wilds of the Island, barely a step up from feral. Grizzly wrasslin’ was part of my high school final exam. There are height requirements for success, as I guess you have learned. You still at that school in the middle of nowhere? Sucker punch any koalas?
No, am living the average life on a suburban block in my home town teaching History. I am awaiting a baby in January and then long service leave somewhere down the track in order that I might explore the world again with family. Hope you are well.
Congrats on the baby- am guessing it will be delivered by FedEx? 😉 Am doing well, keeping busy with this and that in Shanghai. If you’re ever in the neighbourhood in your future travels, let me buy you a watery Chinese beer…