Home Away From Home

I’m back in the bedroom that I’ve called home for six years. But it doesn’t feel like home anymore. New York is familiar but isn’t mine anymore. I moved to Shanghai before some of you did, when I was 13. I left when I was 16. When I moved back to New York, it didn’t feel like a return home. My friends from school had left, or didn’t remember me. My house was the same, but I had been away for so long that I didn’t remember it’s little quirks. When I was 16, Shanghai was my home. Two years later, I returned, with you, to go an adventure.

This is the second time I have come back to New York from Shanghai, and it feels even more foreign. My family had adjusted to life without me, just I as adjusted to life without them. My bedroom has become my mom's office, and I became a tenant in my house, rather than a resident. I have always heard that New York was a scary city, but I never understood that when I lived here. I always thought that idea was a relic of the ’70s, the lowest point in the city’s history. But now I understand. Being out in Puxi at 3 am, in an altered state of mind, in a city whose language I do not speak never felt like a dangerous experience. New York feels dangerous now. I feel as if I am a stranger in my own city.

There are of course many silver linings. Home-cooked meals, instead of whatever I could throw together in the “kitchen” in Jinqiao. Familiar faces, a familiar language, friends who enrolled in the New York campus. But I miss Shanghai. I miss the metro, where it was unusual for a train to take more than two minutes to arrive. In New York, you’re lucky if a train comes within six minutes. I miss WeChat, where all I needed to pay was my phone. I feel like it’s the 1940’s every time I have to take out paper money to pay. New York is no longer my home. It isn’t really even a home away from home. But it keeps pulling me back from Shanghai. I wonder if it will let me go.