what eluded us in the places we once called home

"seeking something missing. missing something left behind."

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NESCAFFIER: i'm a foreigner, you know.
ROEBUCK WRIGHT: this city is full of us, isn't it? i’m one, myself.
NESCAFFIER: seeking something missing. missing something left behind.
ROEBUCK WRIGHT: maybe, with good luck, we'll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.

– wes anderson’s the french dispatch

---

seeking something missing

people often ask how i ended up, at 14, halfway across the world at an american boarding school in new jersey. my default response is that my parents shipped me off from hong kong because i kept getting into trouble at school. the joke is partly true: middle school kora ended up at the principal’s office more times than i care to admit. but the reality is that my parents never forced me to go to boarding school. i chose to go.

the ones who choose to leave home: we all leave in search of something. something missing from our current lives. adventure. opportunities. people with the potential to change our lives.¹

this sense of something missing, and the yearning to seek it out – it’s a feeling that courses through every fiber of our being. it’s a sense of disconnect that feels like debility and mental languor at the same time.

try as we might, this feeling cannot be suppressed or ignored; over time, it becomes a force of nature that lets us move the earth. in my case, it led a 14-year-old boy to move across the world to america on his own. me – a momma’s boy who had never lived away from his parents before, never even been to a summer camp.

don’t get me wrong – i loved hong kong. and yet at times i felt stifled, boxed in like a bird in a cage. my life felt stagnant: school took up so much of my time but taught me so little. even at 14, i knew i needed to explore another way forward. however far away, boarding school represented an opportunity for a life and education i couldn’t find back home.

missing something left behind

as my high school years flew by, i grew accustomed to the familiarities of my life in america. the freedoms of living away from home. the looser, distinctly american way of doing things that emphasized creativity and independence. i missed my family (and, of course, the food) but i never felt truly homesick – not even once.

it soon became impossible for me to see myself living in hong kong ever again. i enjoyed my visits home, but at the same time these visits always felt like a regressive step into the past. each time i boarded the plane back to the states, i told myself the same thing: i could never live here. it’s too different. the pace of life is too fast. none of my close friends are here.

and so i stayed. 4 years of high school turned into college. 4 years of college turned into work. the next thing i knew, 11 years had passed since i first stepped foot into new jersey.

and yet, something changed as i matured. gradually, bit by bit, i came to realize: wherever i moved, i sought out the places that reminded me of home.

growing up, i spent the sweltering hong kong summers playing in the ocean, and the cooler winters hiking up in the mountains. unsurprisingly, the first places i moved to after college emerged at similar convergences of the mountains and sea. santa cruz, off the pacific coast highway with its beautiful coastline and misty redwood forests. oahu, an island surrounded by pristine beaches and bifurcated by the towering koʻolau mountains. although i never explicitly drew the connection at the time, i had chosen to live in these places because they felt like hong kong.

views from california’s highway 1.

even now, one of the very first things i do in any new city is to find a restaurant that serves hong kong-style food. i don’t care if it’s a hole in the wall or a 45-minute drive away – my soul demands it as a requisite for surviving in a foreign land.

in hawaii, i spent a month trying out various restaurants around chinatown until i found the one place that served char siu rice and hk-style milk tea just the way i liked it (shoutout sandy’s cafe!). sitting in my usual spot in the corner booth, surrounded by people speaking my language, i could close my eyes and pretend that i was back home and not in a small restaurant off the canal in honolulu, hawaii. and that always seemed to make everything a little more okay.

it’s funny: i never felt homesick at boarding school, despite moving across the world by myself. but once i acknowledged the fact that i tried to make every new place feel like hong kong, i began to miss it more and more. it’s now as an adult in my twenties that i miss home the most.

maybe we'll find what eluded us in the places we once called home

i began the piece with this scene from the french dispatch because **it captured something those of us who choose to leave home can never quite put into words: a sense of longing for the future, juxtaposed with a desperate yearning for the past.

(photo credit: pinterest)

our search for something missing is a constant motion, a tension, a struggle between opposites. we leave home to find the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. but as exciting and novel as that journey is, we also inevitably miss the things we left behind.

i used to judge people for spending their entire lives in the same place they grew up. but these days, i often think that they’re the lucky ones. their first home was all they ever needed: they never felt the craving or urge to see what else is out there, or the kernel of dissatisfaction with their home – a constant, nagging sense of restlessness – that i wouldn’t wish on anybody. more than that, these people never had to know the experience of leaving.

but it’s only when we leave home that we see the beauty in everything we left behind. we realize, over time, that the things we left behind are just as important – maybe even more so – than the things we thought were missing. this realization alone justifies that journey of leaving for us. it makes it necessary and important.

hong kong’s skyline at night.

we tend to fixate on the negative and only think about home in terms of the things we didn’t like. i couldn’t stand the hong kong education system and the relative rigidity of the culture – but i let those things overwhelm everything i did love about it. in the process of seeking, i forgot how much i loved being in the city with my family and childhood friends, surrounded by the mountains and ocean and people who spoke my language every day.

have i reached an end to my journey? i don’t know. i’m still traveling a lot, and the free-spirited part of me thinks i may never settle down permanently, anywhere.

but this year, i moved my homebase back to hong kong after 11 years away.

yesterday, i flew back to hong kong after 2 months in berlin.

today, i’m writing this piece from a cafe overlooking the water. steam rises from the bowl of char siu rice in front of me. a light ocean breeze tickles my hair.

i’m home. and i feel… whole.

i feel complete.

everything I could ever need: a Hong Kong sunset, on the water, over the mountains.

many thanks to

Latham Turner

,

Charlotte Grysolle

,

Bennett Jacobs

and

Annabel Youens

for reading earlier drafts of this piece.

1. intentionally wrote this piece around people who choose to leave home and not the ones who are forced to. it’s a privilege to be able to choose.