As we come close to wrapping up Season 01 (Migration) of the CulturallyOurs Podcast, the concept of home, hometown and homecoming has come up repeatedly in almost every interview.

Nik Sharma talked about his home country of India and how leaving it behind was the best thing for him. Being a gay Indian and growing up in a time when that was not so commonly accepted and talked about in India, life was very challenging and hard for him. Coming to America was a way for him to be free to be who he was.

Sachiko Eubanks talks about how even though she has lived away from Japan for so many years, she now has a renewed sense of cultural pride and is looking to reconnect with Japanese culture by way of learning about the tea ceremony, Ikebana and other Japanese customs.

Yulia Denisyuk talked about being an eternal wandered, being away from home for so long that now home is wherever the road takes her and the people that she meets during her travels.

Mili Ghosh‘s childhood in Africa made her long for a way to connect to her roots and her Indian heritage with such passion and fervor that she made it part of her career.

Alicia Isaacs Howes takes about England with such nostalgia but still knew even as a child that she was meant to travel the world. Her intuition was so strong and guided her life’s path even as a child.

Sonia Nicolson-Guðrúnarson has a very practical approach to moving away from home and considers each journey as a chapter in her book of life. Each chapter teaches her something and prepares her for the next.

Minh Cao shared her memories of Vietnam and how moving away helped her grow her confidence and her career. But yet family and childhood memories of her home town are so near and dear to her heart.

Maggie Wu‘s life of migration and movement is inspiring. Her analogy of each culture being a mosaic instead of a melting pot is something we will lways carry with us. Every place that we visit or even live in adds its own charm to that mosaic of life experiences.

Ella Leya and her journey from communist Azerbaijan had us hooked. And yet, when she visited Baku 30 years later, she said that feeling of living there and all these memories came rushing back. She could almost smell that familiar smell from 30 years ago.

So what is home? Is it just a feeling tied to a place or is it a physical place that stores all our life’s memories? Can we have a sense of belonging to more than one place?

As an immigrant, there’s no place like home and sometimes there is no returning to it.

A hometown is a place left behind. Those who have moved away carry with them stories of how good it used to be, and yet, of how they can’t go back. Sometimes the place is gone like in Mili’s case where she doesn’t have any family left in Dar es Salaam anymore. And in other cases, the person has changed too much like Nik who never thought he fit into the classic Indian mindset or Ella who left everything behind to start a new life. Sometimes all that is left is the past – the old house, the after school playground, the ice-cream truck’s song coming down the street. It’s the way things used to be, whatever that was.

While there are some who are born, live and die within a few square miles, there are others that travel thousands of miles away from all that they know and love, just for the chance of a better life, work or even love. Did you know that the number one reason why people migrate is work? This blogpost breaks down all the reasons why people move and the opportunity to find a better life in terms of career is among the top ones.

Today, most people especially Americans move about 11 times in a lifetime, and most don’t live where they grew up. Everyone has a hometown buried in their past, and likely everyone misses it, in some way, even if they hate it. You might love your hometown, memorializing its parks, mountains and alpine lakes. But most people have complicated relationships with them; they are simultaneously repelled by and attracted to it. And so, like many others, they rebuilt it somewhere else. Sometimes in writing and other times in their mind.

Nostalgia is a great way to hide the ugly and focus only on the good. Maybe it was really hard to live a happy life like Ella’s childhood in communist Azerbaijan or even Nik’s childhood in India. Or perhaps that feeling of waiting for something bigger and better elsewhere was always lingering in your mind like Alicia’s childhood in England. But regardless, that sense of leaving everything behind, a life that was lived and now might be a faint memory, brings out something in us that causes us to miss home and all that it stood.

We would love to hear from you on your feelings on homecoming and what home means to you.

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