You Can Go Home Again (*with conditions)

"He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out -- through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it."

– 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.