Home is a smell. Home is a piece of what draws near to your heart. Family. Friends. Or people with whom you feel a close affinity. Home may be identified various ways in a diverse environment where various cultures intersect. What is home in an environment where people from various backgrounds and socioeconomic classes all are asking, “What is home, and what do we want home to be like when our children and grandchildren ask why the world is how it is?” What is our legacy and what are we leaving behind in this world but just parts of it, which we call home? When the world is so interconnected that in visiting a new place you could potentially come across people who fulfill your definition of home. Perhaps this is the story of what has happened during the past four years here at Amherst and my time away – which I call apart of my Amherst experience as a whole. It is this story of making and remaking what is home that I wish to share with you. It is a story where different cultures, identities, and people come together to weave a tapestry of what is, more than individual experiences, a sense of belonging, comfort, and an ever-changing notion of home.
What began as an academic interest – Narratives of Suffering – ended up being a personal inquiry and quest for significance and identity in this sadness-stricken world. I was moved by Benjy’s cry in The Sound and the Fury in reference to Shakespeare’s famous line “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” or Sethe’s desire in Beloved to fill in the void resulting from the loss of her daughter. Or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest which questions the world’s sense of validation of meaning – which refers to Horatio as a fellow of “infinite jest”, of most excellent fancy but in the world no more. In these major canons of English literature, the questions of life, self-worth, and meaning or meaninglessness are raised in position where grounds are shaken, security divested, and a sense of home nowhere to be found. Home is an accessory, a luxury to these characters for whom life is but full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but infinite jest. Hearing echoes the “All is meaningless” rhetoric underlying Solomon’s Ecclesiastes, one is posed with existential questions of what Kurtz’s question, “The Horror, The Horror” signifies in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, why Ahab in Moby Dick embarks on a journey to catch a whale that tore off his leg, and what sores Benjy’s heart when he bellows a loud cry from his belly – his body seems a mere instrument signifying the cosmos as a whole. All of these multifaceted layers of personal insignificance and significance, revenge and evil, failure and futility, lament and emptiness are drawn by these works, and these themes are especially relevant today, in a time of national confusion and grief. We cry out, “Absalom, Absalom” into the air, as what we had trusted have turned against us. At this time when our roots – a sense of trust, belonging, and safety – are under attack from all directions above and below we are left with the sorrowful cry: where is home? Where is the home upon whose ground we can stand on, whose fragrance assures us that we belong, whose members allow us to be who we are, where we are done and undone without threat of exile? Where is our place, and what is our home, when all we have amassed turn vanity– like elusive sand between our fingers? Or is home a luxury reserved for those who have the time to dwell on these matters? We again return to the same place to ask, where is our home?
I have asked myself a million times when people cannot recall where I am from, can’t read beyond my accents, when I have trouble giving my name in the coffee shops: where are my roots? Where do I belong? Home cannot be a corner in Frost where I constantly fight my laziness in order to keep up my grades to maintain my financial aid, even though there is no direct correlation. This is where the story begins. When life met trials, and academic work became more than just a passing thought and spilled over to real life scenarios, I had to decide for myself, what the nature of suffering was.
It was first semester of junior year when life became a series of events I could no longer hold on to. Away from home for the first time in college, I failed to make a sense of home and failed to let myself be vulnerable to those with whom I could have made a home. And after failing most of my classes that semester, I went to see my parents in Myanmar for winter break. I couldn’t tell my parents about the situation, so at the end of break I flew to Korea instead of the States. I was in a limbo state where I could not move forward or backwards. Home was nowhere to be found, and so for two weeks I lived at the Korean airport, using all I could from my Dad’s credit card. Eventually, my dad traced the credit card information and found me at the airport. After two weeks being stranded alone in an island uprooted from all connections and communication, I was at a horrible state mentally, not to mention hygienically, which was a side issue. My dad had to take me back to his hometown in Korea where he grew up as a farmer’s child, and we spent hours at various coffee shops near the beach – him listening, and me speaking about what needed to be let out, both good and bad. This was the moment when home began a reconstruction from the ashes, but it was founded upon vulnerability and care, not expectation and apathy.
And the process of rehabilitation began both in the individual and communal level. I was adopted into a bigger family than before– the paradigms and parameters of home were being reevaluated and reconstructed. What started off as a journey stranded alone in the Korean airport came to be a story of a son coming back to the father’s arms – or a father coming back for his son, a more accurate description of the parable of Prodigal Son – and a journey into and out of various places that I visited to reground and reconnect with my sense of self and belonging. U.S. to Korea to Myanmar, to all these people who I had lost touch with, it was truly a time of reconciliation and rehabilitation with my own sense of self and with others, without which a sense of self cannot ever be complete. Like an uprooted tree, my roots had to be reconnected back to the places where I belonged, back to family, back to friends and relatives who are a part of who I am. A year and half of moving around from place to place, with a year or so of medication, counseling, and Daniel Prayer – a prayer movement of having prayers three times a day like the figure from the Bible, but as a community – at a small campus church in Korea, I was able to find home in a community where they welcomed me more than I was ready to start over again. After which, I was able to return again on campus to give myself another try of what I had already begun. When I returned, home wasn’t waiting on this side of the world – I had to labor again to find a sense of community when all the familiar people had graduated and moved on with life. With those whom I encountered only a few times before I had to begin school all over again.
Home was for me a place where I could begin life again. I could find a part of myself and give another without fear of rejection or denial. Home was where I could be real, where I could be honest about my struggles to avoid the same mistakes again. Sometimes these places were professors’ offices, my advisor’s comfort chair, and occasionally in classrooms. But mostly I found a sense of community in Amherst Christian Fellowship where I could be undone and could share a part of my identity in Christ, which I had developed in the year I was away. Through my struggles here and while away I had realized my need of a Savior. I too needed a Savior, though having brought up in a Christian home and never realized the need for Christ myself, I discovered my wretched self and realized the need for a Savior who had died on the cross to cleanse my sins and resurrected after three days to give me eternal salvation from eternal death. Though this concept had remained theologically familiar to me, the realization of a new life redeemed in Christ was a new discovery and revelation that only struck me through my personal experiences in college.
There were also many spaces I had never really cared to set my foot in, or these spaces of vulnerability where I had to move out of my comfort zone. I was stepping into the prayer room for the first time trying to recite prayers in English as I was listening to how those around me were praying. And I met a group of faithful women of color who are leaders of Remnant, Resurrect (Gospel Choir) and various organizations around campus: areas in which I had very little crossroads with. Currently I live with a group of women from these Black Campus Ministries, entering into spaces like the African Caribbean Student Union and the Harlem Renaissance semi-formal, far beyond the notion of home I used to have for myself. And these are the communities through which I’ve come to stand here today, nearing the end of what seemed like a long and endless journey full of failures and triumphs. In Voice and Documentary we’re watching documentaries like Hungarian Passport, where the director disorients our sense of identity and sense of belonging, and in Anthropology of Food the question of home comes up naturally in an office-hour conversation. I have to stop myself and ask myself again; where is home? What is home for me? Was Benjy’s cry a plea for an eternal home where his cry could be heard and vocalized in words of meaning and significance? Is Solomon crying out all is vanity in the midst of a world where he has gained everything, yet in the end, everything amounted to nothing? Is life but a story told by an idiot, signifying nothing but sound and fury itself?
Past is never the past – as was echoed through the walls of the classroom during Narratives of Suffering – as it breaks into the present with such violent presence that it must be noted and felt; so present and raw are these emotions. Home belongs to the past. When we began our days out of the mother’s womb. Yet, there remains the possibility of the unknown, a possibility of newness, a possibility of growth and a future. There is always the possibility of rebuilding and rehabilitation in the dimmest places. And perhaps there is where we find hope in the hopeless world Benjy finds himself lamenting over. What is to be, or not to be, perhaps fundamentally boils down to the question of where home potentially could be, and how one constructs oneself around a group of people where one could be home with. When all else fails what will remain without decay is the question. Memories reverberate in the air, pointing towards a place called home where life de-centers itself and may call itself life. Where home is for me, and for those around me is a question to be continued.
EduContents 