homesick

Before anything happens between us, I want to make one thing clear. I don’t really get homesick. I only remember vividly. 

I grew up on an island, on a cramped street lined with lamp posts and mopeds. The air is often muggy and the hills wave with overgrown weeds and newly sprouted trees. Some streets are paved but most are just dirt roads weaving across the countryside. Most of the world doesn’t recognize us or our independence–opting to argue among themselves in air-conditioned rooms about the fate of my home. 

I closed off Taiwan in my heart a long time ago, because I knew the reason I moved here was to look forward to something better. The cliched notion of a beautiful American fantasy to escape my childhood around the impoverished. The Taiwanese have been fed the American dream since birth and this sentiment is reflected in their gross obsession with American commerce and products. Every time I go back, I feel part of my homeland’s identity melting at the greedy hands of globalization. 

But Taiwan was my first love and if we are ever to fall in love, I would like the two of you to meet. I want you to see how this island has shaped the colors of my world and why I keep coming back. 

I was born in Yingge District on the cusp of Taoyuan county in the north. Yingge is, for lack of a better word, a village. I lived in a three story house on DaHu Road. If you go to the third floor balcony, you’ll find a small gate leading into our neighbors’ third floor balcony. Sometimes I’d sneak next door at night to play after dinner. Because these weren’t just my neighbors. They were my brothers and sisters, borne of the same blood that ran through my village. 

Do you see that light flickering at the end of the block? I’ll race you there and whoever wins gets to eat fresh fruit first. The fruit lady comes at exactly 10:30 every morning and the neighborhood aunties gather around her truck to gossip and pick the ripest fruits to feed their families. I like papayas and guavas and wax apples. We can always source our fruit right to the village they are from. I grew up seeing farm to table right before my eyes. Because my grandmother didn’t take me to supermarkets when we went grocery shopping. We went to outdoor open air markets where local farmers would come sell their produce daily. 

If you’re brave enough to go into the kitchen when my grandma is inside, remember to compliment her cooking and eat whatever she tries to feed you. She doesn’t get to see us often so she’s got a lot of food to catch up on stuffing us with. She’s becoming a little hard of hearing and she might repeat the same sentence again a few times. But she’s a wicked chef with a heart of pure gold. She’ll love you, I’m sure. 

Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll catch my grandpa around today. He works every day of the year and alternates shifts every two weeks. He either works in the dead of night, in the middle of the day, or right between day and night. If he’s just getting home, he’ll sit on the couch, take off his shoes, then make a beeline for the kitchen to eat. If you’re trying to make conversation, better do it now, because after he eats, he’ll head on up to his room and you won’t see him until after his next work shift. If you’re really lucky, he’ll come downstairs to watch TV for a spell. He switches between the news, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel and home makeover shows. This rarely happens. 

On the weekends, my aunt will grace us with her presence. She moved out when she married my uncle and lives with his family now. My aunt is almost always in a good mood and she worries a lot about her weight and the length of her hair. She is the only person that asks me questions about myself and is patient enough to sit through most of my answer. When she’s not grinning at me, she’s scouring the house for snacks or munching on her own. When she and my grandma are together, they always talk about visiting us in America. I’m still waiting. 

If I wake up early enough in the morning, I’ll hike up the hill to my grandma’s farm. It’s always sunny at the top of the hill and there’s a gorgeous view of the town just over the hillside. Here, my grandma is uncannily quiet as she examines her plants, waters them, gathers them, plants them. I watch and then sit on the hillside, observing the bustle beneath until she is ready to head back. 

She dries her vegetables in the garage, which doubles as a storage area. When I was really tiny, the entire neighborhood would convene on our house after dinnertime and play the most intense games of mahjong. I’d sit on a tall plastic chair with no back, eyeing the table as the tiles danced between the adults’ hands. With time, my eyes would droop and I’d begrudgingly stomp upstairs, upset that I didn’t know who would win that night’s pot. Mahjong happens at another house now, another house better equipped to handle the smell of stale cigarettes and clacking tiles past 2am. 

If we can head out one day, we can take the train to the city. Metropolitan transit in Taiwan is modeled after public transportation in Japan and the system is phenomenal. Everything on the island is cramped together like sardines–you can walk everywhere! The streets make sense too because the cities are built on a grid like most cities should be. The dichotomy between city and country is stark in Taiwan because cities never slow down. There are always people on the street, loud sights and bright sounds from all sides. 

The Taiwanese–as did I–thrive on street food. Grab and go culture is huge here because people are always in a rush to get somewhere–school, work, errands. So it makes sense the business of quick bites booms here. If you’re feeling daring, we can go to a night market, play games and snack all night long. I used to beg my grandpa to take me when everyone else was tired. 

I can’t wait for you to see the tea farms spanning the horizon and the cobblestones of the ceramics street in the old part of my village. I will tell you the story of every familiar face living behind each door. I will show you the ancient neighborhood shrine just at the end of the long driveway, tucked in the corner next to the small convenience store that’s been there for ages. I will take you to the back alleyway behind my neighborhood that leads to the big houses up in the mountains. I’ll drive you by the pigeon farm at the intersection and the smoking factories alongside the route downtown.  I’ll share this bygone world of mine with you because you fill me with the same sense of wonder I felt when I still lived there. And because these memories are all I have left to keep with me when I think of home. 

None of these are things I think about very often anymore. They only come into my mind here and there. I am only really reminded whenever I visit Taiwan. It feels silly thinking about all this because I moved away. I left it all for the promise of something new. Like I said, I don’t really get homesick because if I let myself dream, cast my mind far enough back, I can feel my heart break–one shattered fragment for every memory I made on the dirty pavement outside that rickety three story house. 

I want you to see my family. I want you to see my home. I want you to experience all this and more because if you want to love me, you have to love this part of me too. It helps me remember, preventing me from letting go. It keeps the memory alive.