Return

For my graduate thesis in creative writing, I intended to write a travelogue about my first trip - as someone who had grown up in Taiwan - to China. In 1999, my then boyfriend (now husband) and I traveled for 30 days by train, from Hong Kong to Beijing. The physical container and literary conceit of being on the train - watching the passing landscape, talking to other passengers, enjoying quiet moments on longer stretches to read and write - provided ample opportunity for observations about history, culture, and identity. A few essays in and I soon realized, I was not writing a travelogue about China, but a larger collection of observations about Taiwan. The outlines of home are always much clearer when you view it from a distance.

The graduate thesis became my first book, published modestly in 2004, by which time, I had been living in the US for ten years and had no intention of moving back home. After we got married and were pregnant with our first child, my husband and I moved to Singapore. A new friend I'd made in Singapore read my book and when she finished it, asked when I was moving home; it'd been clear to her that that would be the trajectory. But I was still under the impression that I was not homeward bound. So I started working on a second book of essays, one that I thought would be about new motherhood.

As it turns out, my friend knew before I that we would eventually make our way to Taiwan - we moved here when our children were 6, 3, and 18 months; they are now 18, 15, and 13. Twenty years after the first book, I have finally completed a second book of essays and it is, in some ways, a book about motherhood, but it is more so, a book about homecoming. The outlines of a book are often much clearer after you have written it.

This book has taken so long to write because what I have realized is that the act of returning is a continual, daily practice. The return isn't complete the moment you arrive home; you don't simply return and nestle your way into old habits. Because you've returned a different person, things are simultaneously familiar and foreign. I have felt, over the last twelve years of returning, that I am each day, learning what it takes to return to a place that I have now chosen to be my home. It can feel like hitting the return key on the keyboard, moving you back - almost to where you started, but one line down, advancing the story forward, a little bit at a time.

A friend, who had also grown up in Taipei, was sharing recently how he has found a second home in Taitung, after discovering a passion for free diving off the rocky cliffs of Taiwan's east coast. He asked me whether there was a place I considered a second home.

Can your second home be the same as your first? Because my answer is Taiwan.