What Constitutes a Home? | 真正的家是什麼？

September 22, 2024

“Home” evokes so many emotions, memories, and stories. I think of Chicago as “home” and was alarmed when, during my sophomore year of college, I referred to St. Olaf College as “home” while I was in Chicago. “I’m going home to Minnesota next week!” Ummmmm. Since when has Minnesota been home? Chicago is home, right?

In Chinese, the word for “home” is 家 (jia). Funnily enough, the word for “family” is 家人 (jia ren) or “home people.” You can also refer to the people in your family as just 家. For example, if I want to say that my family has four people, I just say 我的家有四口人。Hopefully my non-Chinese speaking readers are still following. If the word for “home” and “family” are interchangeable, is family a requirement for a place to be considered “home”? If that were the case, it would imply that people who are estranged from their families or who do not have family are unable to have a home (let’s ignore, for just a moment, the 4000+ year history of the Chinese language and the historical lifestyle implications that likely caused the word for “family” and “home” to be the same). If we expand the definition of family to include close friends and one’s community, this all works a little better. After all, I sometimes called Minnesota home, but my immediate family doesn’t live there. If I travel with my family and we stay in an AirBnb, I don’t call the AirBnb “home” because I don’t live there permanently and it is not a familiar place. So, “home” is a place and requires some sort of family, community, and a sense of familiarity.

“Home” is also context-based. At the end of the work day, I say “I’m heading home now,” implying my apartment in Taiwan. But if someone asks, “where’s home?” Chicago is the answer. I wonder if that will ever change? Will Taiwan ever become “home”? It’s hard to ever imagine that happening, but life is so unpredictable, who knows? In Taiwanese society where I stick out as an obvious foreigner (such is the case, being a tall white woman), it’s hard to feel the sense of belonging among the local community that comes with the territory of calling a place “home,” at least in my experience.

Objects also make a place feel like home. I’ve hung up some decor I brought from home to make my space feel, well, more home-ey. I also brought a mug that I made. Perhaps my most…unique? interesting? particular? item is a small wooden dish I purchased for my keys. When Amy was visiting, I explained to her that I was on a quest for a key dish, and she gave me a bit of grief for it. Once I found a dish and placed my keys in it, my apartment felt, in the slightest way, more like home.

I’ve written the word “home” so many times at this point that I’m not even sure if home is the right word to describe anything that I’m actually talking about. Thankfully we have dictionaries, so I’ve double checked. This more philosophical post was inspired by my fellow PiA fellow, Sam from Chicago, who takes a philosophical tone in his own Taiwan blog and is the only person from Chicago that I know in Taiwan.

I would love to hear your thoughts on what “home” means to you :D

Philosophically and with love from Taiwan,

-Miriam

P.S. I still need to write about work, it’s just hard to write about work when all I do all week is think about work.