Where Is Home?

By Li Jia-wen

When I was small, our father would often tell us how our ancestors had emigrated from their hometown in the South and come to settle in the North. I assumed that what Daddy referred to as hometown must have been the place where my grandfather had lived. It took me a while to realize that it had been several generations and more than two hundred years ago that our family's home had been in the south. But today, even after two hundred years of social change, Daddy still claimed to be a Southerner, despite the fact that he had never really been to the South. The beautiful southern scenes had never appeared before his eyes, yet they had never disappeared from his dreams. What Daddy was remembering was his sentimental feelings for his old hometown.

After I graduated from college, I abandoned the career path my father had planned for me and made my decision to go to the South to seek my own future. Again and again Daddy asked me, "Why are you wanting to leave your home and your parents?" I replied that the world was an exciting place for young people. But I didn't dare look into his eyes. Finally he sighed, "You have never been away from home before. It seems that your four years of college education have only made you think that your own hometown is not good enough for you." I did not answer, but I said to myself: "My hometown? But it's not even your hometown!"

Years later it was my daughter's turn to face the issue of "where is home?". Her mother was a Northerner and her father a Southerner and she was born in Guangdong Province. Legally she was a native of Guangdong. But the fact that she spoke Mandarin rather than the more common Cantonese had made her believe from childhood that she didn't really belong there. Sometimes she claimed to be a native of Guizhou and sometimes she said she was a native of Shanxi. She even said once,"I am both a Northerner and a Southerner because I can be either one. And all the people in the world are my relatives." As our family moved from place to place, my daughter would often ask, "Why do we live in so many different places? Why do we have so many homes? Which one is our real home?"

A child's most simple and most common request is to have a stable home and I felt bad that I had not provided a stable home for her. But I told her that one day in the future we were going to have a wonderful home of our own. And as long as we kept believing it would happen, it really would happen.

Once I heard a wandering poet share her experiences. When she was 18, she said, she wandered for love. At 28, she wandered for the sake of her career. It was not until she was 40 years of age that she began to realize that the whole of life could be defined as a wandering. To ask why we wander is to ask the wrong question. But we always try to find excuses for our wanderings. We did not choose wandering, but wandering chose us.

Actually, all of us have a kind of nostalgia or instinct for trying to find our own roots. We somehow feel that the soil under our feet is not the same soil our ancestors trod. And that the homeland in which we are living is not the same one as our ancestors knew. But which land is the inheritance of our ancestors? How far away are our wandering footprints from our original home?

In the Bible, there is a real and tragic story. Even with our eyes closed, we can clearly see the man, Adam, with his wife's hand in his own, unwillingly but helplessly leaving his original homeland.

Ever since then, human beings have been homeless. Generation after generation, we have yearned for a dream long broken and a home long lost. Our forebears wandered from one place to another, yet we in our turn call those places home. We do not realize, however, that our true home and the eternal dwelling place of our dreams is that place guarded by the angel with the flaming sword.

God said to Abraham, the father of the Jews, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you." From the world's point of view, Abraham was traveling farther and farther away from his hometown. Nevertheless, the moment he pulled up his tent and set out, a whole nation began their journey home. Likewise, the moment the Gentile woman Ruth resolved to follow her mother-in-law back to Judea, saying "Your people will be my people and your God my God", a wandering soul had come home.

The worldly tells us to stay where we are and retain our roots. But God tells us that it is as we act according to his will that we come closer to home. An ancient poet sang: "Twilight is approaching but where is home? Nostalgia flows over the smokey river." The poet realized that we are a people without a home. Although we have sentimental feelings for our hometown, we do not know how to get there. It is bad enough losing our home. It is worse to not even realize where our true home is.

Soon after I believed in Jesus, the first song I learned to sing at the little fellowship was "I have a beautiful home": I have a beautiful home far in the Heavens, which I treasure. Oh Lord, Oh Lord! Do not abandon me and always remember me. That joy of finding home is still fresh to me. Wherever I go, I may be getting farther and farther away from my hometown. But I know that that home far off in the Heavens is my true hometown. It is the hometown in my heart that is my home.

The author graduated from the Chinese Department of Beijing Normal University. For several years she worked as a journalist and newspaper editor. She presently lives in Singapore.