It was a warm Sunday afternoon when two of my closest friends and I sat in a busy café, with our conversation disappearing into the chatter and calls for orders, and the sounds of utensils as people dug into their plates of food. We were all fully engaged in our conversation, when I became silent as it veered towards the topic of childhood, a topic that was at least fruitful for my friends as they continued to share joy in talking about the various adventures and misadventures that they had as kids prior to living in Macau, the differences and similarities their dialects have, what life and school were like and perhaps most importantly, the shared excitement of what it was like to grow up in a home that they have in common. A home that I should also know.
Having lived my entire life in Macau, a sense of alienation comes up when I listen to them tell stories and share experiences that I should somehow be familiar with or should have experienced, but haven’t. What happens when I do actually get to go home? Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, my parents would say every now and then that we were flying home for the holidays and we would be warmly greeted by family members saying “welcome home!”. But home always felt so foreign when it is only a place that you see once or twice a year. What’s supposed to be “home” is a place where I would feel more like a tourist as I enter a world that I don’t know and can actually get lost in. Home suddenly ends up being not as familiar as it should be.
Conversations when I’m around friends and family about things they have in common, meanwhile, often leave me pondering. I share the same nationality as them and when it comes to physical attributes, there is no mistaking me for being from anywhere else but my country of origin, even without using my passport as a hint. However, there are aspects that prevent me from ever feeling like I ever fit in the category that I know I should be in. I speak and understand our national language, yet I still need to mix and match to fully and properly express myself, while stereotypical qualities do not always present themselves. Moreover, with my love for literature and history, I can read with an endless curiosity, but I can only learn so much about my own culture. These often lead to feelings of detachment and disconnection, feelings that are unwanted while simultaneously being drivers into a continuous search and understanding of who I should be and how I can belong.
Aside from this, questions that ask where home is in relation to identity also tend to come up. The easiest way to answer these questions for many is to simply look at a document that states where you are from, but in my opinion, the officiality of a document does not always help with how you feel or in answering these questions. A document is something you can officially present over and over, while its contents are something you can use to repeatedly answer questions from new acquaintances to immigration officers about where you are from. They can be a direct answer, but it still leaves me wondering what I can do to extend it beyond just being a label.
Identity is not always as easy to define, even when questions like “who are you?” and “where are you from?” are asked directly. When thinking about nationality, home and experiences, it is straightforward to some to look at an official record that states who you are, but for myself and others who may share the same feeling, the answer is not always as clear-cut.
Home can be unfamiliar, while attributes and aspects that you either should know or are assumed to be associated with are not entirely present. Things like this drive a notion towards questioning, but it also drives me enough to try hard to understand and answer the questions that they pose. I still do not fully know who I am supposed to be and what I can do to be in the category I know I should be in, while circumstances that have either come up or are present stop me from having a deeper understanding. Regardless of these things, I am on a continuous search for the definitions of “home” and “identity”.
