The Meaning of Home

Home: A Feeling of Familiarity

            When being asked of missing home or not, Hillary shared, “I do not miss home. I miss my parents.” For Hillary, missing home means “you need support from your home or you need care from your parents, so you miss them, you want them to be with you.” Because she wants to “give more care” to her parents and she does not “want to give more burdens in terms of emotional or economic problems,” she does not miss home. Instead, she is more obligated to give back to her parents. As she said, “I want to give them support. I want to take care of them. After I get a job, I will give money to my parents to let them have a better life in China, try to ask them to come to visit me and stay with me in the US for a few months.”

            Hillary’s differentiation of missing home from missing parents seems to suggest that home is more of a feeling grounded in care and support than of a concrete geographic location. I resonate with that. My receiving a hug on a Mother’s Day communicated the same message. Home is not so much a geographic location as an emotional harbor where authenticity is guaranteed. Home allows one to comfortably expose the most vulnerable aspects within oneself without any worry. At home, people converse through hearts not mouths. The feeling of home warms a lonely heart, cultivates an authentic being, and completes the yet-whole human soul.

Longing for a Home: The Ground of Humanity

            “My name is Ai Zhang. I came from China.” I introduced myself. “What’s your plan after graduation? Will you go back to China?” In these situations, I was always reminded of being different and of the fact that the United States was not my home. It was only a place that allowed me to stay temporarily. As Hillary shared, “The life that I have right now [in the United States] is pretty temporary not authentic.”

It seems logical for international students, far away from home, to develop an urge to embark on a home-searching journey in a foreign place. The journey seems long and never-ending. We still do not know whether we could find a home, a warm feeling that infuses your heart with the very thought of home. Would there be a home for international students in this wonderland of the United States? As Hillary shared, “China is my country. I am a Chinese forever. It is my home definitely, particularly in terms of emotion. I have my parents there.” She further contrasted her feeling of being a legitimate citizen in China and an international student in the United States, “China is like your mother; America is like your parents-in-law. You left your own home and you become a member of a new family” Would this new family of parents-in-law generate the same feeling of home? Hillary did not give an answer. But, perhaps only people who have the experience of living together with parents-in-law could offer a satisfactory answer. Home-searching and longing for home, the journey has just begun.

Heidegger discusses “forgetting of Being” (Moran, 2000) and states that, “forgetfulness is actually a positive phenomenon, a mode of relating, which reveals Being and brings it to presence in its own special way” (p. 196). Studying abroad is a learning experience of forgetting who you are. Yet, this forgetfulness of who we are opens up our hearts to embrace the unknown and to expand the frontier of our being. Forgetting of being frees us from our present being of living in the United States and the past being of living in China. The forgetfulness transcends a current level of being to an upper dimension that is connected through human soul. The forgetfulness heals the fragmented heart and encourages it to look at the world with a new eye. The new being reveals and reinvigorates the spirit across race and ethnicity transcending race, class, and gender. It creates unity.

Home-searching should not be a journey unique to international students. People native to the culture need home as well. Having a place that you could comfortably call home warms a lonely heart, completes the yet-known humanity, and nurtures authenticity. Home is feeling that familiarizes one and make one become authentic, grounded in the authentic being of self. If human nature has an authentic root to it, human life is meant to live authentically. Home-searching is a race that all human beings should be engaged in on a global scale. Regardless of a person’s race and ethnicity, he or she deserves a home. For international students, until they could be surrounded by people with whom they could engage in authentic conversations, home in a foreign place would just be a dream.

As international students continue their home-searching journey, at an international level, home is a collective effort co-created by people living in the planet. Humans should take a break from the busyness and the inauthenticity of our everyday life to engage in more authentic moments by demonstrating genuine care. The world would eventually become a more homely and peaceful environment by having more people dwelling in the presence of authentic moments. Everyone will then have a place called home.