The Remains of My Home

Imagine a lone sailor out on the Pacific Ocean, with North America on one side and the Asian continent on the other. This sailor is stuck between two ‘islands’, two worlds that are not quite home. I am this traveler who glances in the water to see my reflection. Only then do I see the lines and scars that are proof of my history. Our bodies become the place where our past leaves its mark. As a Chinese adoptee, the history of my birth culture is embedded in the strands of my DNA and left on the tastebuds that make me crave Chinese cuisine. My parents and their Euro-American history settles itself like I’m a canvas with layers of work upon itself, remaking the piece until its unrecognizable from where it began. This process is not done to actively erase what was there; but to survive my body rebuilds itself, cell by cell, reforming a new meaning of what home can be.

Alone at sea, I’m expected to find my way with only the map of my Asian features to guide me to the past I have left. My mother tongue was the song that reminded me of the words I once sang. Even that voice has gone silent. I’m left to sail without the stars to guide me, for my past is a murky storm that I must navigate. When I think of what it means to be Chinese, at best I can see what I lack. Living near Chinatown or visiting my Asian friends, I yearn for what I don’t have in my home. It’s a continued melancholy for the home that exists in an untouchable land. I don’t even have a memory of the history that I come from. My parents have stories that recall the child, I once was, who mourned for a homeland that was ripped away. But the trauma of my past has become shrouded to protect the pain that lives within. My Chinese blood flows through me like a ghost of the culture that I no longer possess.

Waves and currents push me forward, until my boat has landed. A traveler, fresh off the boat, who like a turtle, has carried their home with them. But will I ever lay roots? My past and my present coexist as I trudge towards my future. Sometimes I seek to access this home, that at birth was abandoned. But it’s this home that my family now shelters me with, that I know to be where I belong. Instead of home being a place that I inhabit, history inhabits in me. My biological ancestors are those I will never know, but whose life have given me existence. The versions of myself that once lived, are not brought back from where they remain, yet they inform upon the history I’m creating.

I have my brothers to lean on, who know the experience of a lost history too. Among my friends we speak of different pasts but share our feelings of floating in the middle, between what we are supposed to be and where we came from. It’s sitting together with our common identity crisis, a feeling that sometimes overwhelm us. Although the suffering is silently felt, it’s knowing that it’s shared that we can breathe life to one another. In a way, what began as a solitary journey, is a crew of family and friends that will travel this untapped history together. What was lost can be the seed for what we make anew.