i am ready to go home now

I am ready to go home now, to my parents in shanghai. I am ready to go back to that country which I have so many heavy and unbearably complicated feelings about. do I want to return, simply because — in the time of COVID travel restrictions, I cannot?

is it my curse to always want what I cannot have? to live forever in a state of longing, in that space of in between-ness?

since I got my American citizenship less than two years ago — these papers that magically open-sesamed much of the world to me — they (the chinese embassy) cut a square off the corner of my chinese passport. now, in the time of COVID, no foreigners are allowed into China. so it goes. (tell me about my country, I wrote, over a year ago, when I went to the Chinese embassy)

but why am I ready now, apart from the masochistic impulse in me that seeks the eternal state of longing? it is a mixture of other things. my grandfathers — both of them — are ill, in different hospital beds in my hometown. since I’ve chosen a tumbleweed life, I miss the physical rooted-ness of home. a country that bears your history, even if it’s been decades. and people who will call me by my name. my birth name.

(and where is home? home is where my stuff is. no, home is where my parents are. no, home is where love is. no, home is wherever i say it is.)

after deciding on embarking on this career path, I deliberately avoided China and my family because I didn’t want to be defending myself against them all the time — I could not hold against their pressure. why aren’t you making money, why don’t you have a job, why did you not meet any of our hopes and expectations for you? why are you LOST?

it was utterly exhausting. soul-crushing and mentally agonizing to always defend myself every week and say — you don’t understand. I’m not lost — and each time I picked up the phone, I was left very, very upset. it would take me whole days to recover. I felt like no one understood me, nor what I was trying to do. it was exhausting and deeply lonely in an existential way. there was nowhere to simply lay my head down. no home pillow.

but maybe. now. I’ve cultivated enough solidity and assuredness in my inner world — in my personal practices, in my writing, my art, my daily routines, in filling this website-house with all its varied contents, in the quiet accumulation of all these years — of finding my way in the darkness — that I am certain, now, that it was not for naught. I am full and rich and abundant.

perhaps, my own world, the one I’ve cultivated as an adult, is finally dense and solid enough, now, to handle the weight of a lifetime of anxieties and expectations from my family, from my birth culture — and not crumble. to not become infected with self-doubt.

perhaps my own world is finally strong and rich enough to hold me, finally “home” enough — true home, like true north — so that even when I go back to that childhood place called home, I will still be here. here home. I will not abandon myself. nor abandon this world.