#5 | home 🏡: shanghai & photo series, musings, nostalgia
in this update, i write about what home means to me. the photos in this series are of downtown shanghai in 2020. the alternating order of old and new shops reflects the commonly-seen contrasts on the streets. a city historic yet hypermodern, with traditional food stores and third-wave cafe culture side by side, young people on their phones next to grandmothers buying sweets from a hundred-year-old establishment.
i grew up in a city that changed before my eyes. you could say we grew up together. every summer as a child, i’d go to los angeles, and come back with suitcases full of english books and hard-to-procure items (trader joe’s roasted nuts, plain cheerios for me, froot loops for my brother) to find the city more developed. the summer after sixth grade, we didn’t have to bring cereal back as the supermarket near my house selling it at non-inflated prices, along with other imports like cream of tartar and popchips and iberico ham. the year after that, three new shopping centers opened, because if there is anything more shanghai than constant change, it’s change at a rapid pace.
the superapp ecosystem (wechat, alipay, etc) was ubiquitous by high school, coinciding with when i got my smartphone. and after my first year of university, wallets and subway cards were functionally obsolete. they still existed, but served no practical purpose; the subway terminals scanned QR codes and the street food stalls took mobile payments.
as i got into the habit of drinking coffee, the city adapted and accommodated. new specialty coffeeshops opened on every corner. i once counted five within two small blocks downtown. (shanghai now has the highest quantity of specialty coffeeshops of any city in the world.)
i love observing contrasts in the city, like the reflection of old signage in the window of a new cafe
snapshots of city life, traditional and modern, side by side
i started buying work clothes for internships. cue the pop-up shop era, with china retail analysts speculating about a “more mature consumer market.” like me, shanghai was exploring a new adult identity and a wardrobe to match, retail concepts rotating like influencers change outfits. new shops, new spaces, new everything flooded social media every day of the week. (this trend eventually slowed, but by then, i’d acquired everything i needed anyway.)
the city was restless, demanding, always looking for the next interesting thing, ever-evolving as a result. vibrant even during the first years of the pandemic. when i left shanghai, when my parents moved, when i returned less frequently, it still seemed like home because it felt like me. like looking into a mirror at your reflection; you won’t recognize day-to-day changes, and your perception is in fact different from what everyone else sees, but you’ll know it even if you haven’t seen it in a while, since it’s inseparable from who you are.
and then. lockdowns and shutdowns. small businesses shuttering, unable to cope with the uncertainty of it all. halted reopenings. what is the city like now?
what does it look like, feel like, when a restless city is finally forced to sleep?
i miss it. but i wonder if the shanghai i miss, the shanghai i called home, still exists.
this new shanghai, the one where my favorite breakfast place and coffeeshop and rice cake store and restaurant may exist one day and close the next due to the zero-covid policy, where rules and regulations might change any minute, where i have not visited in a while, doesn’t felt like home anymore. hasn’t for some time.
which brings me to the question: after living in ten (now eleven) cities, what is home for me now? if not a place, then what does it feel like?
waking up to familiar sheets, a familiar view, the familiar placement of items on the nightstand. preparing a family recipe with the proper ingredients. eating pizza at midnight while binging tv shows on the couch.
(is this what home feels like? is this what home feels like? is this what home feels like?)
perhaps “home” is just certain patterns of consumption—paying rent, buying groceries, ordering things online—conducted often enough in one place that they become habits.
while some of these patterns—replacing an often-used matcha whisk, becoming a regular at a cafe—are comforting (home-y?), others I perform purely out of practice. purchasing shampoo, soap, detergent whenever i relocate. ziplock bags and travel size everything. pouring fluids from large bottles into small containers into my hands, into sinks and pipes all over the world. while this consumptive ritual is necessary, it doesn’t seem significant. this is not what home feels like.
so. eleven cities later. is there one place, or collection of comfortable habits, that constitutes a home? this question becomes quite a conundrum when you define periods of your life by the city you lived in at the time, if you have a habit of uprooting yourself on a regular basis, if the primary constant of your adult life is change. i know that i may very well be somewhere else in a year, and at least for now, wouldn’t want to live any other way.
actually, change is not the only constant. the other is nostalgia, which feels like sinking my feet into warm sand; i’ve rooted myself in it without even realizing.
i think i’ve made nostalgia my home, wrapped myself in it like a blanket.
i’ve made a home from places that now exist only in my memory, constructed of different cities, confined to a particular time. and nostalgia is a blanket, soothing and familiar, so i’m often content to be trapped inside it in a state of warm, bleary reminiscence. i tend to come back to it at night, let it cover me while i slip into sleep. but i’ve learned to leave it behind during the day, or at least to try. the blanket is too heavy, and i need to be able to hold new memories, carry the weight of their significance, pay attention long enough to let them sink in. and only later can i add them to the quilt. i don’t want to reside in places of the past, at the expense of experiences in the present.
perhaps home is where you put your feet up, where you feel safe, where you return to after a long journey. and right now, home feels like nostalgia to me, even if i don’t want it to. but it can also be other things to other people, physical or otherwise. maybe home is something you create, out of whatever you deem most necessary. as for me, i am still figuring it out.