Not Home

The clock strikes two.

My cousin's sleeping soundly beside me, unstirring, but I'm still awake and hungry. I would wake her if not for the fact that she had work early the next morning. The stove shouldn't be too hard to figure out; I'll manage.

The clock strikes three.

I'm back in bed, belly stuffed with some concoction of noodles and vegetable scraps—not the greatest, but it would do. At least I thought it would. My stomach's rumbles no longer keep me awake, yet my eyes refuse to stay shut.

The clock strikes four.

We have a popcorn ceiling. Lumps and chunks of plaster splattered to cover any imperfections in the paint job beneath. I've started to see shapes in these bumps, my eyes trying to make something of the nothing I've been staring at for hours.

The clock strikes five.

I've had enough. It's clear by now that lying awake in bed isn't going to magically induce sleep. I get up, bunching the floral-patterned covers to the side, making sure not to wake my cousin, whose alarm is set to ring an hour from now.

A pair of slippers wait for me on the cold tiling. They’re new and clean—a crisp, dusty beige that my grandmother had gone out to buy earlier today, right before my flight was set to arrive.

“What happened to my old pair?” I remember asking as soon as she presented these to me at the door.

“很脏/Very dirty,” she said. “掉了/we threw it away.”

I had been upset, but irrationally so. Did I really expect her to keep them for 12 years, watching them collect dust for the day when I might come back, only for them to be many sizes too small? I’ll find a similar pair when I visit the market tomorrow anyway.

The door to my grandparents' room is shut, but my aunt’s is still open. I’m careful not to make a sound, which is a task in these rubber slippers. The living room is cramped, with the dining table pushed up against the back of the sofa, barely leaving any space to go around it. It’s been two years since they moved out of their old apartment in the back alleys of Yuen Long to this newer, but still cramped, apartment. Cramped or less cramped were the two housing choices in Hong Kong, unless you're swimming-in-gold rich and could afford a house. I have an inkling that even in a house my hoarder of an aunt would manage to make it cramped again.

It's hot and humid, making it uncomfortably stuffy, so I open the door to the balcony to let some air in, but it doesn’t help much; the night breeze is equally as stuffy. There’s a light rail station outside our apartment complex that my aunt takes to her office downtown. Across the station is the junior high where my cousin teaches. She promised to show me around the neighbourhood on the weekend — when she doesn’t have work — but it’s still only Tuesday.

My phone vibrates in my hand, the faint light from the small notification illuminates my face.

“Keep the lights off at night" is the first thing my cousin tells me when we arrive. “It attracts too many bugs.”

It’s a text from my boyfriend.

Arrived safely?

We should call when you wake up.

It’s 1 in the afternoon back in Vancouver.

I’m up. I text back. Can’t sleep.

I’m about to get lunch. He replies right away. Call?

Call. I sent back.

I’ll need to step out if I want to make a phone call. Not only are the walls paper-thin, but it's also small in here; I’d wake the whole house if I called him here. I reach for a jacket at the door but stop. This isn’t like back home; over here, it’s about as cold outside as it is inside. I’ll be fine without it.

Back home, I think, but here is home.

The elevator takes its sweet time coming up. There should be two, but the other is getting renovated; the lobby boy assures us it’ll be fixed by tomorrow. I step in and wait the agitatingly long minute it takes to go from the 12th to the 1st floor. Well, technically, it’s the 11th since the number 4 is missing from the button panel.

“In Chinese, it sounds too close to death." My mom explained when I first saw that the number 4 existed on Canadian elevators, “四 and 死, they say it’s bad luck back home, but here it’s different in English.”

There it is again—those two words—back home.

I step outside, and I'm immediately hit by a wall of humidity. I was right; it’s just the same as it is inside, maybe even warmer out here. The lights in the booth at the gate are already on; perhaps they never go out. Just imagining night shifts in that tiny room gives me shivers. The man inside gives me a nod as I step out with the spare key card in hand.

My phone vibrates; it’s my boyfriend again.

Hey. 

Hey yourself, I type it out, but before I can send it, he’s already calling me.

“Hi,”

“Hi,” he says back. “How are you?”

“I’m good, tired, but I can’t sleep at all." I start walking, not sure where yet, but I walk. “How about you? Work?”

“Work.” He replies as he takes a mouthful of whatever he’s eating, “I got a sandwich for lunch, so good.”

“Sounds good from the way you’re eating it,” I say. “I made myself some noodles earlier and tossed some veggies in a stirfry; not so good.”

“Not so good.” He repeats.

And then there's a pause. I let it linger in the air, dreading what was coming next. He wants to know; anybody would. I get it, if he had been the one telling me out of the blue at 3am that he was on a plane headed home, I would want to know too.

Why’d you leave suddenly? Are you okay? What’s going on?

No sane person just quits their job and buys a one-way ticket to the other side of the world. But I’m not sane; I’ve always been impulsive. There was the time I took a ferry to the islands on a weekday during my senior year of high school, or when I donated 8 inches of my hair on my 21st birthday and spent a week sobbing over a pixie cut of my own doing.

But my boyfriend doesn’t ask because he knows, he knows I’ll tell him when I do, so instead, he asks something else.

“How’s being back home?”

And for some reason, this is even harder to answer.

Truth be told, I’ve been planning this for months.

Maybe it was the lethargy, seasonal depression, or a quarter-life crisis, but I wanted out. I thought going home would be the answer. Blame the stories plastered all over the media of immigration kids moving back home and having this amazing revelation of belonging. I thought that was what I longed for—to be back in my birth country, with my family and culture.

Yet all I feel now is a stranger in my hometown, a foreigner, with the way I stumble over words in the mother tongue I once was fluent in. Looking at maps of new bridges and malls that were built in the decade that I had been gone.

How do I tell him that I am not home? How do I explain that the same day I left on that plane all those years ago was the same day I trapped my home in the past? How do I put it in words that I don’t think I’ll ever really be home again?

I don’t. I don’t know how, so I lie. 

“I love it here; I missed my family so much."

It’s a half-truth; I do love it here, and I did miss my family, but my reply doesn’t answer his question. I can’t tell him how I feel being back home when I’m not actually home.

“That’s good,” He knows it's not, but I love how he pretends for me. “When are you coming back?”

I don’t know, but I tell him, “Soon.”

“Okay, I hope you enjoy your time there; I’m going to finish eating and head back to work. Text me?”

“I will,” I tell him. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

I’m walking in silence again. 

I’ve walked a block, maybe two, and have made it in front of a small commercial area now. There’s a 24-hour Circle K and a mom-and-pop curry fishball stand that’s just starting to set up.

The weekend’s too far to wait; I’m going to have to explore the neighbourhood without my cousin.

Maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life missing a home I’ll never be able to return to.

But maybe, just maybe, I can learn how to make this my home again.

I turn and walk to the stand with a wad of cash in my pocket, a rumbling stomach, and a vocabulary of broken Cantonese.