Sunflower Seed: On the Notion of Going Home
Past
As I write this, I am evading sleep. I’m thinking about love tonight, and the way it fits so irregularly into the pieces of my life.
For a little while now, people have been asking me if I’m excited for my trip back to Macau, and I’ve been practicing the most succinct way to communicate the world of emotions that it comes with.
To those I don’t know well, I tell them about the food I miss.
One level up, I might add a few lines about missing the language.
To those closer, I talk about the worry of travelling with family.
To those closer still, I attempt to amalgamate some version of these anxieties.
But to myself, trying to put all of this into words feels impossible, and these little anecdotes of my sanitized longing feel trite.
In a few weeks, I will be going to a place I once called home, a small island continually challenging my memories of what it is. Every time I go, I am reminded that nothing is the same, and progress is always trying to justify de-contextualizing who we are. When you’re caught in the rosy webs of the diaspora, you can only imagine so much, no matter how much you want to feel that beautiful sense of belonging.
The Eastern side of me is heavily fractured, and many pieces are lost. Language, in all its forms, is like watching yourself through static. I’ve always mourned the impossibility of understanding that world, while simultaneously marveling at how quickly the pieces can come together when I am on those lands. The latter is a privilege I know many do not possess. In that way, I am both excited to surround myself with language and anxious about the West tucked up inside me.
One thing I don’t think many folks think about is the impossibility of getting even a visitor’s Visa to Canada sometimes. In all the years my family has been here, we’ve received only a few visitors from my parent’s closest friends and relations. It’s an arduous and expensive process that ensures we do not bring home here, lest the country be forced to implement some Head Tax-like manoeuvre to keep the numbers in control. With the privilege of our passport, it’s a lot less fussy and expensive to go home from here, but the downside of this is that those in the motherland will always have some gauzy impressionistic idea of the West, likely through media and a brief trip to Banff if they’re lucky. In other words, we are—by design—destined to misunderstand each other, to abstract our thoughts into easily communicable and referential pieces, to capture our lives in contrived snapshots, and never wonder what any of us are missing.
I am also thinking about the race against time and citizenship to a place that might vanish overnight at any point in my lifetime. I have such a deep, deep love for this place that I can’t explain, and perhaps it is the doomed nature of this love that draws me in. I am desperate to record what is left of my memories and absorb the sights and scents of that bustling place into my cells in the event that all I’ll have left someday is what’s mine.
I was listening to an essay on James Baldwin and the different periods of his life where he escapes across the world, yet is never able to escape his Blackness and queerness and what others did to him. There is this sense of heavy grief in interviews with him in Meeting the Man, where it feels like there is no place on earth this man belongs, yet his love for the world is so immense. Being able to continually hold grief and to continue to love and dream—the essayist makes the hypothesis that all of these continuing cycles of pain and grief is a symptom of being unable to hold it in the first place.
I’ve still been thinking a lot about hyperreality and the idea that we no longer have shared realities. All of us are wandering, even when we physically attempt to root ourselves in land that should feel familiar. Mourning, loving, grieving, dreaming—to speak the reality of your world out loud is to fundamentally shift your own perception of it, yet it is only by speaking things out loud that we can invite others in. adrienne maree brown says that the act of longing is what moves us forward and allows us to grow, and I consider myself an expert at longing.
Present
The incomplete essay above was written in September 2025. I found it recently, tucked in my drafts, and it felt like reaching across time and holding these thoughts that I will never complete.
So much has happened since, and I have no memory of writing any of those words down. I searched up hyperreality and Baudrillard, and pieces of my fixation returned like a passing trend. I have the sense that this concept has opened my world once upon a time, but it’s the same sense that tells me light-up boba was once a questionable viral sensation at the Night Market. Nostalgic, yet something that no longer belongs to me, which is perhaps the crux of nostalgia itself.
Coincidentally, I was gifted a copy of A Minor Chorus by Billy-Rae Belcourt for my birthday in February. I started reading it only in the last few days. His writing is really one that has to be consumed slowly, savouring it the way one might enjoy a cappuccino in a café in Italy. Idyllic, perhaps, to balance the flavours of his pain seeping into your own. I bring this up because he writes a lot about “mourning, loving, grieving, dreaming” in such a delicious way, and I wish I could extend this book to the me who wrote about going home, just as Belcourt does.
Instead, perhaps I can extend myself in this moment—the person I am to the person I was, a mirror and a time capsule for the person I will be.
Dear September,
I don’t know where to start to best capture the grief you write so beautifully about. You don’t know yet how it’s about to grow and change, stretching across your skies to snap into a million pieces. I think I’ve lost some of those pieces now, but you’ve helped me recover a few. My memory has been scattered lately, at times sharp and at others like a spiderweb of cracks across glass.
But you know, Macau was nice. It was just as you feared: an unstoppable, tide of change. Hong Kong perhaps surprised you more—you could almost taste the misery in the air. I don’t know what it was about that place that felt like hopelessness personified, and maybe it was because of my own post-2019 grief, but I didn’t expect to feel it in the air when nothing looked particularly out of place. Mom found a chestnut stand on a street corner in Hong Kong—she said it was exactly like the one she visited every time she came to see my dad over thirty years ago. That was nice. The chestnuts were really good.
The people you knew have changed too. A few have become more red—despite the nuances, being more communist seems to be exactly the same as being more conservative/capitalist. Most are still worried about their kids, so much so that one is hiding a cancer diagnosis from them. It’s like The Farewell, I told Mom. I think that whole situation hurt her more than she let on.
O said it’s tough being young and queer in 港澳, no matter how much capital they’re trying to extract from us. O’s changed too—less vibrant than you remember. It’s hard to blame them. I loved all the art I saw though, and the little snapshots into localized anxieties I saw there, but it also feels like smokescreen sometimes, sanitized into something palatable for the tourists. I can only imagine what it’s like for young people to watch the dissolution of identity and culture in real time. And yet, life has to go on. I hope O can make art forever.
Your anxieties around the trip were not unfounded, but there is so much more to come, so much that you could not have predicted in your current state, fighting for your life through simulacra of love and loss.
You saw Grandpa for the last time after that trip. You were annoyed that you had to cancel plans to take him to the hospital when he seemed fine, so you will always remember him, sitting up in a gurney in that horrendous makeshift waiting room—thin walls and folding chairs on the parking lot. I told him I had to go—I was rushing back to the interior for a reason I can’t remember, and it’s a long drive ahead. I told him I’ll see him again soon. I remember the way he looked: scared and mouth agape, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. I didn’t wait. My last memory of his voice—you must remember it far clearer than me, because you would’ve only heard it recently—was him telling me that he was there for me, that I could ask him for help if I needed it. It was the first time he ever said anything like that, and it will take weeks for you to realize that he was the foundation of the home you knew. Two things can be true: this was the home that has sheltered you, and this was the home you continually fled. All the same, the indignity of his death will make you wonder where you’ll fit in the legacy of queer tragedy someday.
You’ll visit him around 清明節, and for a moment you’ll feel like you remember the way your ancestors honoured the dead. Mostly, you’ll feel conflicted that he’s easier to talk to now that he’s in an urn behind the glass. Still, you’ll listen to Mom’s stories and get lost in her reverence of him, and you hope he’s having his good tea wherever he is and finally seeing how much love exists in the world.
It’s timely, I think, for me to have discovered your writing at this time. Home is a difficult subject to contend with, and at the time of writing, I feel torn apart by it. Like you, there is an indescribable sense of longing that feels as familiar as it is aching. Perhaps human beings were always meant to be nomadic, moving from home to home, from memory to memory, growing roots and replanting ourselves where needed. You wrote of de-contextualizing ourselves for others—I remember the people who made you feel that way, made you internalize the external, to reshape yourself and your stories just to be held at the end of the world. As a friend said the other day, it feels like you’re bleeding out on the floor, and all around you, all they could ask is why, as if why could stop the wound and make you whole. Why did you do this? Why did you let this happen? Why didn’t you aid them in granting you a swifter, less painful death.
In some ways, for all of your dreaming, so little has changed. We’re still rebuilding alone in our solitary corner. We’re still longing for the next pieces to fall into place. All of that philosophizing about hyperreality and simulacra feel cute next to the monstrosity of all you’ll be left to contend with on your own, and yet there will be moments of convergence that will reignite your imagination—moments that remind you of the vastness of this world and what we can make of it.
You will listen to Observations from a Crowded Room more times than you can count on your trip, bringing the grief from the West to the grief of the East. You’ll have “flowers” on repeat, because you can’t get enough of the aesthetics of resilience, of Oladokun’s myriad heartbreaks juxtaposed with yours. Unfortunately, you’ll forget about this song when other people’s grief fall on your shoulders, and you’ll continue to forget as others demand your wellness sooner than you could deliver. Whatever progress you make, you’ll be told you should seek therapy and want to flip a table all over again. (That said, you’ll find a lovely therapist who will help you claw your way back to your most presentable unwell self. Congratulations!) You’ll find other songs to bring you comfort, though I can’t remember what they are anymore.
As I said in the beginning, there is a lot I don’t remember, folded between lines of dialogue and etched into the memory of others. It’s mostly gauzy swathes of emotions painted across the months. I’m sure there is joy in there somewhere.
All that to say, there is a lot to come, September. Be gentle with yourself when the night falls. By spring, you’ll find yourself again, even if it’s not quite in the state where you left it.
Nonetheless, things will be okay.
Lots of love and 記得早D訓啦 :P
April