I Can’t Go Home Again

 
   Many of my students are from small cities and towns all around South Korea, and elsewhere. A common series of questions I ask them usually goes something like this:

“Where is your hometown?”
“I am from _________.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Yes!”
“Will you move back there after you have completed university?”
“No. I want to live in a big city.”

 

   I am quite certain that several of my students have and will return to their hometowns to live. Returning to take care of family members, or help the family business, or even just loving where you are from are all excellent reasons to go back to the place where you grew up. However, it seems a majority of young people will seek their fortunes elsewhere: Seoul or Busan, Tokyo or Shanghai, New York or London. To some of my students, even Daejeon is the “big city”!

   Our relationships to our hometowns can be quite complicated. There are usually things we miss while we are away, people we long to reconnect with, and places we have fond memories of. However, many people experience a certain feeling of liberation when they leave their hometown for good and move away.

 
   My own hometown is a city of 2.2 million people called Charlotte, North Carolina. When it was first settled by white Europeans in 1755, it was a crossroads between two trading paths utilized by local Native Americans. It was named for Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, ruler of Great Britain during (among other things) the time of the American Revolution. Today, it is the largest city in North Carolina (though not the capitol), and known nationally for being a headquarters for the financial sector (it is the second most important American banking center behind New York City). Its reputation is pleasant enough, and it is thought to be a good place for families, but it is also known for being somewhat boring and for being made up of people who are transplants (i.e., not originally from the city, but having moved there from other places). An American satirical magazine, The Onion, recently made fun of Charlotte with a fake article entitled “Horrified Man Suddenly Realizes He’s Putting Down Roots in Charlotte” (Jan 29, 2014). This was meant to make fun of this transplant phenomenon of people who end up living in Charlotte who never really intended to.

   Being born there, I suppose I never really intended to “put down roots” either. Today, I have mixed feelings about my hometown. When I do visit Charlotte, about once every year or so, I am continually taken aback by how it has changed in my absence. These changes are not limited to physical things, such as shops or buildings that have moved, or streets that have changed names, or forests that have been cut down. Rather, the changes are often in the people I grew up with; friends with whom I once shared so much, but who are now somewhat distant from me. By choosing to live in South Korea, I have in a sense chosen to fundamentally change my relationship to my home. The map in my head has altered, and I have often felt disoriented while at home in Charlotte. Since my own relatives no longer live there, I have no “home” to go home to when I visit. Instead, I feel like a guest in my own hometown, the place I have lived longer than anywhere else. Charlotte has changed, but more importantly to my own experience, I have changed. This is not to say I have “outgrown” Charlotte, or to suggest that since I have been living abroad and experiencing a very different life than the one that I once knew that I am somehow “better” than Charlotte. Rather, a strange but altogether natural sense of alienation has seeped in to my sense of the place. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus put it, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” The river runs continuously, and it will change whether you are there or not.

   Thomas Wolfe has been widely quoted on the subject of home, and how many of us can never really return to it. This is from his 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again:

   “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.”

   There is a great amount of truth to this sentiment, though I am sure it is not a universal experience. When Wolfe said “You can’t go home again,” he meant it in a more metaphorical sense than a literal one: of course, a person can physically return to their hometown. What Wolfe meant by his statement is that part of life is accepting that everything changes and the place you call home changes, too. More importantly, you yourself change, and this can have a big impact on how you view your hometown.

   I do not imagine that I will ever “put down roots” in Charlotte again, though I have my fond memories of the place. No one ever said people are forbidden from still liking a place even after they have left it.

By Prof. Matthew Ross
/ Dept. of English Language and Literature

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