The Idea of Home

The Morning Routine

When I was a child, I lived with my family in Hong Kong, a short walk from the Rocky Bay beach in a place called Shek O.

On school days, Mom or Dad would wake my sister and me at about six in the morning, and we would crawl to the bathroom and wash our faces before coming to the breakfast table.

We would each have a small bowl of sugary cereal – often Froot Loops, Cap’n Crunch or Frosties, and just occasionally, an exotic option called Weetabix (which you’ll note is distinct from its Antipodean cousin, Weet-Bix). That would be followed by toast, jam and Flora margarine (because butter was bad in the late 80s), and then again by a breakfast ‘main’: French toast, bacon and eggs, or pancakes or crêpes if we were lucky.

When we were done we would walk down across Rocky Bay Beach to the bus stop to get the number 9 for the 30-minute trip out to Shau Kei Wan, and there we’d take the subway to Causeway Bay, a short walk to school.

These memories of our morning routine are vivid, they’re enduring and persistent. Already I can remember the bleary-eyed difficulty of getting up at that hour – particularly on winter mornings, which in that part of Hong Kong at 6.00am could be below 10 degrees. I remember the taste of Cap’n Crunch, or the sound of the old Leyland buses arriving, or leaving if we were late (and you can imagine, if we were late, no French toast).

If you ask me about ‘home’, it is often Shek O in Hong Kong that I will think about.

Where is ‘home’?

‘Home’ is such a powerful word – I’m certain one of the most powerful there is. The emotions and connotations it can conjure are so diverse that it can mean all kinds of things to all kinds of people, and indeed, in my life, ‘home’ has a variety of meanings.

You should, I hope, get a clear sense from my childhood that I had an undeniably good home, that I had nurturing, involved parents, and so, at its best, the word home reminds me of sunny afternoons and apple pie, of climbing trees and chasing dogs. It reminds me of Shek O.

In preparing to speak to you tonight, I thought about why I go back to that childhood experience of home, why so many of us, I think, find in our childhood homes the deepest essence of the idea represented by the word.

There’s something of the work-in-progress about the homes we inhabit in the present. As, often, memories, our childhood homes become something of a keepsake, something more permanent, though not necessarily unchanging, than our present homes.

There’s something there in our childhood homes that hopefully cuts directly to our very identity. And that is one of two things I’d like to return to: identity, and belonging.

When someone asks me the seemingly simple, seemingly straightforward question, ‘Where do you come from?’ – a kind of shorthand for ‘Where is home?’ – I feel the need to answer with a convoluted, sometimes-anxious explanation of where my parents are from, where I grew up, and where I live now.

Identity, I think, over belonging.

There are three places that count as homelands for me, and note the distinction from the simpler ‘home’. They are Hong Kong, where I was born and where I grew up; the Philippines, where my parents are from, and where we visited most summers when I was a child; and the last, at least to date, being Australia, where I’ve now lived for thirteen years.

I believe in making my current situation ‘home’. It makes it easy to be in the world – to have all places become home. When I first moved to Melbourne, people kept asking me why I didn’t seem homesick. ‘Well, Australia is home,’ I told them. ‘As long as I live here, I am home.’ Did I miss Hong Kong? I did, but adopting as home wherever it was that I was made it easier to be there, made it easier to love what was great about the place, and made it easier to accept its shortcomings.

That was a great coping mechanism, and yet, sometimes I feel that that ease of adapting was perhaps the result of an absence of home, not necessarily the result of all places being home.

All of those places I mentioned are, in very real, very intimate ways, home – and yet, and I will need to explain myself here, none of them are, really, or at the least, none of them are fully.

When we visited Manila when I was a child, my sister and I were exactly that: visitors. We did not speak Tagalog, we did not know our ways around. We looked like our cousins, but very different, too. We understood some of the customs, but not all – so while we would observe enough of those to create an expectation of a cultural fit, we would transgress enough for people to tut-tut, to smile in that benign bemusement at the ‘yes-they’re-foreign’ kids who should really know better.

And in Hong Kong, which I consider home above the others, there were many reminders that it was not my ‘natural’ home, that we were still foreign. There, too, we didn’t speak fluent Cantonese, and we didn’t look like everyone else, didn’t understand all the customs.

So I lacked in a kind of belonging at that level, and yet these places are still – strongly, comfortingly, powerfully – home.

I get a very large sense of relief, for example, when I fly back into Tullamarine. I know a trip is over when the Customs folks eyeball me for food or wooden souvenirs.

I’ve been describing, I think, a hierarchy of elements that can cause one to feel ‘at home’, something along the lines that shelter, comfort and nurture are basics that need to be fulfilled, and then you can step up to ‘belonging’. But it isn’t belonging that has made me feel that these places are ‘home’, it is another step in that hierarchy. I feel they’re ‘home’ because they form a part of my very identity.

I hope many of us here tonight can relate to that. This College and this Chapel, for example, are homes. In both cases, that sense of their being home arises not from any one thing: I think first there is the physical or spiritual shelter they provide, there is the comfort and nurturing offered by the tutors and staff or the reflection and prayer that takes place within it, and from the belonging that comes from being a part of this community. And I think sitting atop all this is identity: that of being a ‘Trinity student’, that of being Christian.

At times, I’ve worried that not having a more concrete concept of home has caused me to lose something, because nowhere is truly home. But I don’t know anymore that that’s the case. My reckoning is that in the end, I’ve gained more than I may have lost. This ‘rootlessness’, if I can call it that, allows me to float in the world, to identify with anywhere, even if I don’t quite feel I belong. And much of that has come from creating an identity as a floating person, comfortable anywhere, comfortable with floating.

At Home at Trinity

So by way of coming to an end: I hope you see in Trinity a home, a place of belonging, one in which you can see a part of your identity.

I hope you continue to cherish the other homes that exist in your life – physical, emotional, spiritual. I hope that if your previous experience of home is one of lack or absence, and even if it is not, that you find here something more present – people that are or will come to be like family, a place that offers you rest, an experience that nurtures you towards dealing with the successes and challenges of your life.

I hope that living and learning and gathering within the diversity of this community enables you to more easily find common ground and bridge gaps with all kinds of people. And I hope that being a part of the village that it is allows you get to know most of its people, and know, deeply, a sense of its friendship.

And finally, I hope you can see it as a part of you. I hope that even many years from now, whenever you step through the College gates or the doors to the Hall or this Chapel, that you can sigh, sit deeply and say with gratitude, ‘I’m home’.

A reflection delivered in the Chapel of Trinity College in the University of Melbourne, 16 May 2010. You can 'like' Trinity on Facebook here.