Reminiscing Memories of Home

Many plants from my childhood memories don't survive the winters in Canada, but they grow here, in miniature forms as houseplants. There were mango trees grown for shading the sidewalks from the summer heat, with their unripe but heavy fruits reaching down towards the passers-by. There were ficus trees with shades for a few families to picnic beneath them. Unsurprisingly, the homebody versions are often out-of-place, tiny and limp, resembling nothing of the ones in their home habitat. 

@rpbiswal from Unsplash

A faint melancholy comes to me from time to time as a reminder that the place I used to belong is no longer where I belong. My childhood home is likely lost in a massive urban development project, and the streets that my parents strolled me around when I was a toddler have probably met the same fate. The city that I knew of as a child isn't the tech enthusiasts' fantasy that it is now. Time changes everything, and space apart tends to discredit the realness of my memories. I don't know if I had ever known my hometown even as a toddler, now that I have grown so far apart from the lived experiences of this city. I was born in Shenzhen to my parents, who left their hometowns to settle in Shenzhen, yet I'm no longer from there like I once were. 

I don't think I ever resent the journey that landed me in Canada. However, I do remember a lingering sadness throughout my entire teenage years: the sadness, in hindsight, resulting from not being there for my hometown's "coming of age" and at the same time losing touch with my "coming of age" as I struggle to find a foothold in the disorienting, monotonous landscape of a Greater Toronto Area suburb. A transplant shock, you may say, is an entirely appropriate description. What surprised me was that everything felt foreign when I eventually went "back home," where I worked as a productive member of society for a brief amount of time. The place I called home and I grew apart, and somehow "back home," there was more white-assimilating demanded of me than being Chinese in Canada. I happened to be that out-of-place tiny and limp plant longing for the home soil, yet upon returning to it, finding itself jarringly unfit among an already altered landscape. Now I only return periodically to Shenzhen to tend the last few threads connecting me to this place, and the pandemic restrictions seem to diminished those few threads already.

No amount of intellectually believing that everything is in flux could have prepared me for this, particularly the certainty of losing the threads to the land where I was born. Instead, my body got more in tune with the land where I settled, but I stubbornly resisted this fact. Naively, I went through a phase of searching for a tiny handful of fruits from "home" picked prematurely and airlifted to a supermarket near me, only to taste nothing like they do fresh off the trees. Lychee, loquat, mango, whatever... The act of searching for these fresh fruits pacifies the ache, but it doesn't soothe. Still, stuffing my body with foods that remind me of home does wonders. I can now relate to why people travelled across continents and oceans with the seeds and tubers that would grow and yield the foods from their homeland with determination. I see why it happened in the first place — the ache and longing for a taste of the home soils, thousands of miles away. Some unfortunate ones end up in the invasive species category, while others are tagged "exotic" and often misused. I still find it offensive to see these plants being marketed as exotic hype superfoods when the diasporas had lived with them for decades and even centuries as the last threads to their home soils. The overpriced goji berries from a trendy health food store are no different from those you get from Chinatown (before Chinatown got trendy too.) The only difference is who gets associated with this plant, and specific associations guarantee higher profit that doesn't account for the original producers and cultures. 

Those who can't stand the "odd smell of your foods" have no issue chugging down cups of anti-inflammatory herbal concussions from an “exotic” culture; those who think seaweed is gross have no problem taking daily supplement capsules made of kelp; those who call non-western health practices uncivilized (**to be fair, many hoaxes disguised as traditional medicines emerged as direct products of greed, patriarchy, and colonial belief systems**) go to yoga and tai-chi classes taught by people without any entanglements to the cultures these practices were from. The similarities are that they are all marketed under whiteness — a brand that sells. Not just here where I live now, but where I came from too. Whiteness is associated with superiority in every aspect of Shenzhen's urbanization and globalization. Toddlers celebrated their birthdays at McDonald's in the 90s and early 2000s, and in later years, Teens would nag about getting plastic surgery for "European style double eyelids." Companies fancy candidates educated in Europe and the USA, interns embellish their sentences with English words in the wrong contexts to sound more educated. The body in all its DNAs longs for the land it has grown to adapt to, but the whiteness lures with globalized notions of success, instant beauty, and a superficial measure of intelligence.

I'm sitting here reminiscing memories of home and romanticizing that perhaps the soils back home remember me the same way. However, "home" also constitutes a place that flirts with whiteness and uses whiteness to justify greed, patriarchy, and the disgusting habit of shallow assimilation towards the West. This enabler of prosperity and success called whiteness encroaches on the soils in my memories of home in the same way that the office towers and condominiums along roads, highways, and high speed trains spread like cancer, displacing and devaluing the local ecology. The sickness has always been there, only now, faster and more unstoppable. 

It's a difficult pill to swallow, to know that I can no longer tend the land that nurtured me in the sense of cultivating its soils physically. However, the soils of my home live through me: the whiteness force-fed to our peoples, the traumas from generations of assimilation... At last, the diasporas that I'm now a part of helps me find comfort in tending the land that nurtured us in worlds of found pasts and histories, despite being far away from the borders of certain territories demarcating where "the land" starts and ends. The land which nurtured me as a child lives in me and all that I can touch with my being — that’s all I could tend.