Long before landing in Beijing, I imagined time after time how I would get out of the airport and see mom. I would don my yellow Ecuador T-shirt to show my pride in the country I had just visited and stand out from the crowd with the dazzlingly bright color. I would walk in relaxed steps and put on a non-descript face to avoid being stopped by the customs officers. Then my eyes would move from person to person in the huge crowd gathering outside until I see mom and dad waving at me, dad snapping a few pictures with his phone and taking away my heavy luggage.
That was my imagination, my anxiety perhaps because long before I went home in August,
I realized I had been away from home for too long. Long enough for me to feel a pull towards a warm woman who welcomed me in Ecuador.
“Make yourself at home,” my Ecuadorian host mom told me during my month-long stay in Quito.
I was a little shy to ask for things at first, but I later delighted my host mom by eating the ice cream in the fridge and ordering whatever I wanted for dinner. While missing my “real” home in Beijing, I did feel comfortably at home in my host mom’s apartment overlooking Quito’s fabulous mountain landscape. I had great food, long hours of sleep and meaningful conversations in the house. But something was missing.
During my freshman year at Yale, my mom in Beijing often asked “Do you miss me?” during our online video chat sessions. But my dad and I would laugh and ask, “What is there to miss?” On the one hand, home is where my parents, relatives and many friends are. On the other hand, home is also about bad air quality, unsafe food and blocked websites.
It was the people I love that made me crave home, but what mattered more was the long time I had been away from home. It was six and a half months, longer than ever before.
In the future, I suspect there will only be longer periods away from home.
Before I left for America, my father reminded me that our home in Beijing would become a temporary stop for me in the future. I didn’t know what it meant at the time. But it indeed has become just that for me. At the same time, my idea about home is also slowly changing.
Among the many definitions of home, I appreciate the view of an older and wiser friend: “Home is where you are.” Having lived in multiple dorms at Yale, a rented apartment in New Haven and my host family in Quito this summer, I cannot agree more. Now I’m only a rising sophomore in college and this change of mindset is still evolving. From now on, I need to adapt wherever I am and look ahead.