– Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, 1940
“You can’t go home again.” The first of many times that I heard that particular phrase spoken to me, I had been walking through the backstreets of Shanghai with my editor. I’d been in China only a few weeks and it was my first time working in a foreign country. I had been doing a magazine internship as a bit of a lark, also hoping it would look good on my CV back in Vancouver.
I hadn’t invested anything
significant for this journey. I held my apartment back home, and I was taking a
leave of absence from my job, so that was waiting for me too. But according to
my editor, as he enquired about my visa status and talked about my future in
Shanghai, I couldn’t go home again. Really?
Although I was familiar with this little cliché, I obviously
didn’t comprehend its deeper connotations. In the most superficial way, I took
it to mean something along the lines of: The more time you spend away from
home, the deeper your roots become in another place. You’ve made long-term
friends, invested time in a job, maybe own a business or a home, or have a
family. You don’t just walk away from that.
What I didn’t get was that the adage came from a 1940 Thomas
Wolfe novel with a more profound subtext. I would only begin to identify with
its meaning a few years later.
But at this time, the job offer for a senior editorial
position was serious, and I had no real understanding how much the offer –
regardless of whether or not I accepted it –
would affect my ability to adjust to life back home thereafter.
I had set about this little overseas jaunt with some
triviality – a “holiday-plus.” Most people doing these types of internships did
so with long-term ambitions. I was just looking for some adventure to distract
me from some mid-life anxieties.
To my disadvantage, though, I approached this exploit as a
detached outsider, like the existentialist of an Albert Camus story, believing
it possible to experience extraordinary things and not be changed by them. I
considered the job offer, but I couldn’t move away from Vancouver; mostly
because my mother was entering the last stage of her life, but also because I
didn’t want my life to be too affected by the enchanting things I had
intentionally laid in front of me. To others, such as my editor (and those who
witnessed similar patterns in my subsequent years in Asia), it may have looked
like I was creating opportunity only to scoff at it, as if somehow my life was
already special enough. The reality, though, to pull another quote from the
Wolfe novel: “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.”
I was trying to avoid what happened to my brother when he
went to Tokyo in the 1980s to teach English. Initially hoping to pay off his
student debt in short order and nothing more, five years later he returned to
Canada (with a wife), couldn’t get a decent career off the ground, and
returned to Japan pursue work that paid him his worth, eventually becoming a tenured university professor. One more gamble back to Canada a few years on (this time with kids), and his age and
over-qualifications became barriers to finding work that would sustain his
family. Back to Japan he went, for good.
So I knew better than to take work in a foreign city and get
stuck. You plant roots, get settled into a certain life, and before you know it
… “You can’t go home again.”
As my editor mouthed those words, I thought, "It's only
been two months. Come on, are you serious?"
How little I knew.
By the time I reported back to my government job in
Vancouver, so much had changed. The long version of that story involves union reps and a re-written job description that was not to my
liking. I was reduced from case management (the part the union didn’t
like) to answering phones and filing. The clients I served now thought of me as
“not a team player” for my refusal/inability to perform the job as they were
used to, so conflict ensued. And I was moved to the reception desk as an
amelioration.
What I left behind was the opportunity to be a senior editor
in Shanghai; what I returned to was a reception job. Even if my job hadn't
changed, it would have been difficult to remain at that banal desk until
retirement knowing what I abandoned in Shanghai.
When you create new opportunity for yourself, you can’t walk
away from it and return to the same point where you left. The opportunity you ignore becomes a void, and like a black hole that alters the universe
around it, that void changes the reality of the world you return to.
Within short time, I quit the government job and left
Vancouver for Singapore, a city I adored from previous visits. As much as that
city agreed with me, I also fell in love with the feeling of self-reinvention.
Here is where I was going to cast off my demons and construct a new life on my
own terms. If the declined job offer in Shanghai had haunted me, then this was
my chance for a do-over. Not just a chance to work abroad on my own terms, but
to one day return to Vancouver right and proper with exceptional work experience and
colourful stories.
In other words, I hadn’t learned my lesson. The mistake
wasn't going abroad, but thinking that some kind of normal return was possible.
If I had to see something a thousand times to see it once, well, this was the
second time out of a thousand.
After finding some degree of success in Singapore, I
returned home, lured by my infatuation with the memory of the life once lived
and the obsession of finding it once again. This time, having no apartment of
my own, I crashed with a friend and continued living out of a suitcase for a
few months while I looked for jobs that existed only in the haze of reminiscence.
It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize my city so much, as that I didn’t recognize
myself, the person I had become, in this city. I chalked up my troubles to a
bad economy and perhaps not having spent enough time abroad. So I went back to
Singapore, baited again by memory of the life I had and the fantasy of what
life could be. I intended to stay several years. I lasted ten months. To
complicate matters, I believed that a short stay in another country would
buffer my memories of the two homes and exhaust my desire for worldly
adventures. So there was a three-month study period in Taipei. Now I had three
places that felt like home, all of them homes I “could not go back” to each
time I left.
The
significance of the Wolfe novel was starting to sink in. The story's protagonist is a
writer from a small town who leaves his backwater to find fame as an acclaimed
author, moving through exotic and unreserved social circles in New York, Paris
and Berlin. Longing for normal life once again, he returns to his picket-fence
hometown in America, only to find himself despised by his neighbours for his
barely disguised portrayal of their lives in his fiction, and unable to find a sense of
belonging in his birthplace after having re-invented himself as a man of the
world.
The penny
dropped. “You Can’t Go Home Again” is not merely about getting stuck in a place
far from home. To quote from the book: “You can't go back home to your family,
back home to your childhood... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and
of fame... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and
systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the
time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." At its essence, the
novel is an elucidation of what we in contemporary society call “reverse
culture shock”. Most damning, Wikipedia suggests “the phrase is sometimes
spoken to mean that you can’t return to your place of origin without being
deemed a failure.”
My friends told me that I was courageous to live abroad, but
the real courage comes in returning home to a place that has shrunk in
perspective to your growth, and may force you to deny the experiences that
shaped you into a better person. I found this to be quite literal when
employment agencies told me to take my overseas experience off my CV, as it
made me look either overqualified or irrelevant; if this is how it goes, why
did I leave, why did I come back?
But as much as I’d like to see myself as a better, stronger
person for having found new lives in foreign countries, there are aspects of
the odyssey that held an unwanted mirror up to my faults and failings. Having
been back home for over a year, alternating between looking for work and
avoiding looking for work, I can’t help but think of all I could have done with
the past 16 months. Not many people have the opportunity to take a year or more
off work. Those who fantasize about such freedom imagine all the wonderful
things they’d achieve, all the hobbies and dreams they’d pursue.
I look back and think of the stories I could have written, the articles I could have freelanced, the
business I could have started, the courses I could have enrolled in, or how I could have just not come home at all and enjoyed the success I found in whatever given place. But my
failure to fill this time with anything meaningful has revealed me to be a
person of much less ambition and creativity than I was overseas. Either my time abroad made me into a larger person that no longer has a place back home, or perhaps I was always too small a person to survive away from home. There's a case to made for either leaving and never returning, or never leaving home in the first place. It’s a harsh
insight, but one that makes me feel that, for this particular thing, I have now
seen it a thousand times, and now in its entirety.
This isn’t the home I left. Whether I stay here or go abroad
once again, I have to mourn the loss of the home that once was and move forward
– whether it's here or elsewhere – to a new place and a new life, uncoloured by
nostalgia and expectations.
