There is the unwanted home, the home you never elected, or the home that you don’t feel connected to, but it is home nonetheless because it’s familiar and what you were born into. Or perhaps it isn’t the whole home, but rather a room or corner that you see or think about the least.
You can sometimes outgrow home.
Like a favorite garment you could never imagine outgrowing, it gradually makes its way out of rotation, until one day it ends up in the donate pile. How did that hap- pen? When? What replaced it? How many of those will we go through? I hope the next person finds joy, comfort, and solace in it like I did.
What narratives, expectations, norms, structures, constraints, and styles have I outgrown? Which did I outgrow for a moment, but later return to? Which have I redefined for myself? What’s next?
Going to any Chinatown, I know the smells, the etiquette, the mannerisms, the pace - like factory settings built into me. I can navigate the storefronts as fluently as the aisles of an American grocery store - understanding this store sells the dried things, the booth next to it has the produce, followed by the butcher, then the bakery. Each one has its own scent profile, not all of them pleasant, but it smells real and un- adulterated. It doesn’t appear as clean as a Safeway, but at least I know they don’t track the filth of the world into their homes by their shoes. Being able to parse out the different affects in yelling, I know that Chinese people aren’t just mad all the time. There’s the warm greeting and friendly banter yelling, the “I don’t understand, can you clarify” yell, the bargaining yell, the “I’m just making myself heard so you don’t have to yell back for clarification” yell. I can’t say I embrace all of these cultural norms, but they are familiar, so it’s a home I have access to.
I may not understand the language fully, but it doesn’t sound foreign. I’ve never been able to explain it. It’s some in-between literacy that maybe only the children of immigrants can understand. It’s certainly not comfort- able - to not know what’s going on and to not have the tools to decode and start making meaning of anything. But it’s also not jarring like going to a foreign place where you don’t know the language and alarms are going off in your head that you really don’t understand anything you hear. Like everything else that is part of this Asian-American experience, it’s something in between. The not-quite-fully-belonging, not-quite-fully-understanding, not-quite-fully-being-able to communicate is familiar.
That means home can also grow with you. A notion, a resting place, that gets renovated a couple times. Or maybe you move to a new spot. Then you make home again. And like the water in our bodies and bodies of water, we’re perpetually in process, for the duration of our lives, of finding, making, re-making, resting, and finding again, home.
If a lifetime is a home, they are the land upon which it is built. The cycles of growth and decay that create the soil, fertile with hopeful dreams ready to nourish any seeds planted, held together by the deep root systems of labor, love, and sacrifice. If a lifetime is a home, he is the groundbreaking that determines where this house will go. It takes a lot of digging and it’s not pretty. The vision is hard to see. You sure this is a good idea? If a lifetime is a home, he is the poured foundation, the floor plan, the bones, and forever part of this home. If a lifetime is a home, they are the plumbing and elec- trical that will make this house livable. If a lifetime is a home, he is the drywall. You think those walls are set, permanent fixtures of the house, but they can be removed, edited. Maybe you want more of an open floor plan. If a lifetime is a home, they are the things that don’t quite work or belong in this house as you figure out your aesthetic and lifestyle - not quite the right paint color, the cheap piece of furniture, the hand-me-down things you never would have chosen for yourself, the kitchen appliance you’ve only used a couple of times despite swearing you would use it “all the time if you had it.” If a lifetime is a home, she is everything that goes inside that makes it warm and memorable. She is the collec- tion of memories that are made and fill a home, that turn into family heirlooms and legends to pass down. She is the plans, projects, and dreams of what you want to do next in the house. She is the promise of finding, making, and sharing home, forever. If a lifetime is a home, I wonder what will become of mine. NINA WU (she/they) is a queer, second-gen, Chinese- American interdisciplinary artist, dancer, mathematician and educator. They believe in the power and promise of community, critical thinking, play, and imagination.
And sometimes, what isn’t home can inform what is home.
The day after the 2016 election, I sought home, somewhere to land and be held. The scrolling of Twitter feeds didn’t make me feel connected to anyone. The blank pages of my journal couldn’t help me sort out my incoher- ent thoughts. Music couldn’t drown the dismay in my spirit. What could I possibly draw or paint that wasn’t just a smear of feces? My appetite didn’t crave anything for me to focus on and make. Waking up, I didn’t know what to do with myself. But my body knew. As if on auto-pilot, my body took me to a dance class - the first, closest one I could find. (Thank goodness it was Nina Haft’s.) Emotions and thoughts that could only be processed body first, before they could be turned into words, conversation, analysis, reflection, and action, were released - kneading the knot from my gut, sending through my spine, squeezing through the tubes of my limbs, out through my fingertips and toes, roof of my mouth, evaporating through the crown of my head, absorbed by the floor. We found home in com- munity and together, we exorcized our turmoil to create a slimeball of grief that became our new dance partner. Few words were exchanged, but the sharing and collective processing was a potent release. The way dance is a conduit for a synergy that can only be unlocked through a collective practice, made it the balm and homecoming needed for that day. To be cut off from this synergistic exchange of energy made the loss of dance class during the pandemic feel so much more tangible. I missed bumping into sweaty bodies, seeing the nuanced choices of other dancers to in- form my own, feeling inspired and driven – all of this information that could only be gleaned from sharing a space and practice with others. I’ve taken four online dance classes during the pandemic, and cried during two of them. For this time and circumstance, it was not the home I sought. But if this wasn’t home, where else could I find it?
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
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