It was when I was rewatching Bao, perhaps, that my partner asked me if I was homesick. “But you still miss Shanghai, right?”

My father asked me if I missed grandma at her funeral, too, following the same sentence structure, “but you still miss her, right?” In my childhood head, the care in his voice twisted into lighthearted mockery symbolic of my Westernized dad: “but” you still miss her, just a little bit, right? Because she was never important in our family — she didn’t know anything about holistic, Western education before she came to become my nanny she didn’t even speak the language we speak, rudely intruding into our life as a modern, three-people family. I avoided that question in respect for my father’s craved dignity in this family.

“Homesickness”. It’s a similarly lighthearted word — superficial. My partner probably only asked that question because I was crying watching that film – how an Asian mom dealt with isolation through cooking and eating food, or her child. But my mom doesn’t even know how to cook. Perhaps I was seeing grandma, but my grandma never even had the chance to express her isolation, because she didn’t know the words – whether it was the Shanghainese that we spoke, the regional food we loved to eat, or even just how to speak to herself. Grandma was illiterate and almost deaf. I avoided the question again, leaving the bitter taste it coated me in.

I can’t even start to describe my family as people that I miss, let alone answering yes to that burst of homesickness. I hated the question, the Asian-ness in it: East Asians are known for their collectivism, and that’s why we always seek companionship and return, my therapist said. We cannot say “I love you” except through food; we all struggle to lean back to our heritage language; we can’t stop quoting a bit of Foucault and Rousseau and Confucius here and there because we all are highly educated. I do not care for that cloying Asian-ness. When I left home for good I swore I was never going to set foot on that land again.

So it’s a love-hate relationship, you would say, like that feeling of being neither here and there. It reminds me of all those Asian American novels expressing how the main characters hated their Asian tiger moms but cannot forget how mute love, scared to admit their identity but guilty about their fear. 

But how could my experience be dialectical like this? How are heres and theres to be found? In fact, I am very sure where I am, in this “me” that always fulfills what they decide to do. In making that promise to not return, I planned in my concrete notebook how I would not indeed – and I have fulfilled most of it. The experience of being me is full, unlike the wobbling two ends of ethnicities that are constantly shifting.

But there is something behind homesickness that I cannot deny, and it lies in its exact, evanescent lightness. The relationship between me and home, or me and the home in me, is one of commonness: home emerges from the bushes in my thoughts where I from time to time find a moment to fly away from reality, away from the xiaolongbao, Chinatown, or whatever is symbolic of my identity. In that most crude feeling of homesickness, I release myself from who I am – a subject I am usually sure of. And it is a straightforward sensation that everyone experiences, including me, without having to scratch the surface questions of whom or what to miss.

So I could not escape that question, although I could not say yes to it either. Homesickness harbors me when I forgo myself from identifying with myself. That day, with my partner’s wondering face, I mumbled a yes and thought to myself, the day I could admit that homesickness is the day I stop being “sick”.