Home Is Where The Heart Is
im.prof endeavours to develop young writers who will form an intellectual society. Along this line, we welcome the youth to submit opinion pieces and articles that are internally reviewed for suitability of publication while retaining the originality and opinions of the writers.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any members of im.prof
This article is contributed by Maazin Buhari, a Politics, Economics and Social Sciences student at the University Of Edinburgh.
There's something about leaving home at 18, something that makes you think you're invincible. A sense of accomplishment, having accomplished nothing, a sense of empowerment whilst remaining powerless; alas, I wax lyrical.
An 18 year old in a foreign land, perhaps for the first time for a prolonged period without my parents, what I missed the most about home was a sense of familiarity. Not a sort of grandiose ideal of abstract familiarity but, the nuances that make you feel as though you belong somewhere.
Despite the tired clichés and the age-old sayings, home truly is where the heart is – and I believe you don’t really appreciate this enough until you leave home for another city. I thought it would be easy to acclimatise to university life and a new city fairly quickly, having been born in one city, spending most of my childhood in another and graduating high school in a third – never have I been more wrong. That isn’t to say I don’t love Edinburgh and don’t feel a sense of belonging here, it is just that it’ll take years before I consider it on par with any of the places I consider truly home.
Time might be a crucial aspect in this case, perhaps it isn’t the activities you do or the places you see but truly the amount of time you spend within a city, marinating in it and soaking in the people, the culture and its values before it becomes an integral part of your life and very existence.
What makes it difficult to acquaint to a city that isn't "home"? Despite what most people think, it is immensely easy to acquaint oneself to a new city or surrounding, almost immediately. Following a few days of reading maps and talking to people, most tourists could even pass for locals in most major metropolitan cities, but the city will never belong to them - like it does to the locals. What's usually missing in foreign cities, are the nuances, that make you suddenly and unapologetic realise that you've found yourself in an unfamiliar locale. The tiny, crucial elements that make home what it is, and that's what makes it difficult to assimilate. Familiarity for me, at home, in Singapore was being able to know where my favourite 'teh tarik' stall was; knowing the right landmarks to tell the 'uncle' in the taxi to get to my destination the fastest; even something as simple as knowing which side of the escalator to stand on.
Perhaps, what was difficult to imbibe about Edinburgh was, the realization that not every city is as modern and fast-paced as Singapore is. Edinburgh has that wonderful, almost raffish old-world charm that only comes with a city that is centuries old, something completely dissimilar to Singapore. Being a ‘city brat’ for my entire life means that I crave concrete structures and skyscrapers, I feel at home among the glitzy lights and fast cars – getting used to a smaller, and slower city will take me a year or two.
When we talk about homesickness, it's the small details of familiarity that we crave. The ability to live our routine lives without as much as a thought, everything becomes second-nature. Being able to leave your house and traverse to school or work in one streamlined motion across a series of walks, bus rides and train journeys. Being able to go into your favourite food centre and navigate towards your frequented hawker without having to even look up. Just being able to wake up in the morning and know where everything is; a sense of familiarity that we imagine ourselves to possess after a few months in new surrounding that never truly actualizes. Perhaps what happens when we leave home is we leave a piece of ourselves behind, and no matter how used I get to Edinburgh I will always crave the attachments I have to Singapore.
I didn't really believe my parents when they told me I would miss home. I didn't want to believe, at the time perhaps, that I would crave the food, the company, the air, the everything that I was used to, for so long - that would suddenly be out of my grasp while I try to fend for myself for the first time in a city almost 11,000km away from my bedroom. I didn't know how to laundry properly, I didn't know how to fold a fitted sheet, I could barely fill out forms until a few months ago - perhaps what helped me survive was having a vague sense of knowledge about cooking and eating.
It helped that Edinburgh's massive Asian diaspora has opened restaurants to cater to (almost) every possible nation's tastes and preferences, sub-culture and minor states included (but still not quite the biryani I would get at home, still not quite the perfect laksa). The sense of tolerance and understanding of different lifestyles and values by Edinburghers made it immensely easy to integrate into the population – rather than remaining a perpetual outsider. Much like Singapore, Edinburgh’s makeup is not just of the ethnically Scottish but also the myriad number of immigrant’s communities that give the city its unique mosaic makeup and eccentric magnetism. One then realizes it isn’t all that difficult to reconcile the roots that they might have to their homeland, with living in a city like Edinburgh.