Can you be homesick for a place that was not your home? What does it mean, exactly, for some place to be your home?
To a person who has always lived in the same place, maybe the first question seems nonsensical and the second one seems obvious. But I am not one of those people. I have lived a lot of very different places, and I don't always know what it means to be "home." I didn't, for example, feel like Missoula, Montana, was home until after I had left it; going back there after a three-year absence made it suddenly feel as though it had once been home. At least, I still did know many of the local bands (rock on, Volumen!).
The two places I really get homesick for, though, are (perhaps appropriately) two of the places I lived the least long. One is Arkansas. I lived there every summer when I was growing up, because that is where my father lived after he left us. The other is Japan. I lived in Japan (two different cities) for three years. I married a Japanese fellow. He is not homesick for Japan, but I find myself spending much of my downtime at work searching for blogs of Japanese people and expats, looking to get a sweet nostalgic taste of cherry blossom.
What do I miss, exactly? Obviously, the ramen, but besides that... I think Japan was one of the first places I felt at home because it was one of the first places I felt that it was obvious why I didn't fit in, so I didn't feel so bothered by not fitting in. Everything about Japanese culture says, "Hey, white girl, you don't belong here," so I never felt like I had to. It just was, and I just was. I made my own life there exactly how I wanted it without worrying so much. I didn't care about the fucked up political situation like I always do here in my "home" country. I didn't care that people watched so much TV and did so much shopping and hair-and-nail maintenance that they were left with little brain space for anything interesting. I just didn't care. That was so freeing. I try to carry that over into life back in the states, but I can't quite pull it off here. Something about speaking the same language and nominally coming from the same culture makes me feel as though I ought to have something in common with other Americans, and yet...I have trouble there.
Anyway, probably what I'm missing is the sheer freedom that I felt in both Japan and Arkansas. Being in Arkansas in my youth meant a very severe lack of parental control; it meant summer and Johnny Cash and hitting the open road and spending all day swimming in the river (watch out for snakes!). It meant drinking nothing but Dr. Pepper for months on end (and so, sadly, Arkansas also meant severe bladder infection). Japan meant being fully and completely myself because I could. In Arkansas, there were no rules. In Japan, most of the rules did not apply to me since I was foreign. Is this what I am calling homesickness? Probably. That and missing the food in both places. But is this what homesickness actually is--a longing for a return to youth and/or freedom?
That could explain why my Japanese husband has a distinct lack of homesickness for Japan. He was markedly less free there than he is here, particularly because he does not fit in in Japanese society. At all. I do know that a lot of my Japanese friends feel homesick for Japan, though, even when they do fit in, so I think homesickness may also have a component of missing knowing things. Shit. That was awkwardly phrased. What I mean is that I think to miss home is to miss the place where you knew how everything worked, where you knew what was expected and what your role was. Even if you only use the rules to subvert them, there is a home-like comfort in knowing them, isn't there? Well, if that is what homesickness is, then I suppose that is not what I feel for Arkansas and Japan. Having spent the least amounts of life-time in those two places, they are the two places where I am in most respects not in that comfort zone of knowing all the rules and roles and cultural workings. Yet they are the two places I feel most comfortable. A trip to Oil Trough (Arkansas--yes, we're damned hillbillies) or Osaka...it always cures what ails me.
reposted, with slight editing, from GinBaby (which was also me)
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