家的幻觉 / The Illusion of Home
Why return is never simple — and why we do it anyway.
Home is often described as a place — a city, a house, a childhood room that still smells faintly of an earlier decade. But for most people, “home” is not a location. It’s an arrangement of memory: a set of emotional coordinates that rarely match reality.
When we return, we realise quickly that the place stayed still, and we didn’t.
I. The Return That Isn’t a Return
Every trip back to Beijing reminds me of this dissonance. The streets feel familiar, but the familiarity is hollow — like muscle memory with no muscle left. What I recognise is not the place itself, but the version of myself that once lived there.
Psychologists call this the autobiographical illusion: we mistake the continuity of memory for the continuity of self. But the child who once stood in those hallways is gone. The adult walking through them now is a foreign element.
I come home, yet nothing receives me. Everything is exactly where it was — and completely inaccessible.
II. The Family That Exists Only in Theory
Most families operate through scripts: roles inherited rather than chosen, behaviours reproduced without interrogation. When you leave — for school, for another country, for a different life — the script freezes in place.
You evolve; the family does not.
This is where the “disconnection” becomes especially clear: it’s not that everything back home changed — it’s that too little did. The physical environment, the family dynamics, the rituals — they are carbon copies of my childhood world. But the people I grew up with are no longer there. The landscape is the same; the cast has moved on.
And because I never lived an adult life in that city, I slide straight back into child mode the moment I return. I never learned how to be an adult in that ecosystem — only how to be someone’s daughter, granddaughter, niece. My adulthood happened elsewhere.
So of course the script doesn’t fit.
III. The Geography of Discomfort
Migration creates a split-level identity: you belong to two places and to neither.
When I return, I realise how little emotional territory I have there. If I stay home, I become the silent child. If I go out, I search for cultural or historical fragments — experiences I can no longer access in London but that also no longer belong to “my life” in Beijing.
And when I meet with old friends, I notice the predictability of their trajectories — career → marriage → housing → children. A majority pathway. Not wrong, simply scripted. But I can no longer relate to it, and I don’t pretend to. It’s not superiority — it’s a different axis of life.
Their concerns orbit local structures I am no longer embedded in. Mine orbit systems they don’t have the option to step outside of. It’s as if we are solving the same matrix but in different dimensions.
This is why I rarely discuss politics or economics with them anymore — not out of avoidance, but because our interests are no longer aligned in the same ecosystem. They are entangled in the daily realities of that environment; I now operate from a distance shaped by mobility.
Strangely, the distance helps. It creates a healthier space — free from emotional over-identification yet close enough to say, “I’m here. If you want to talk, no judgement. I’m exhausted too — just by different problems.”
Sometimes that’s all friendship needs to remain intact.
IV. Why We Still Go Back
If home is an illusion, why do we return?
Because illusion has utility. It offers temporary coherence.
Returning allows me to rehearse a past version of myself — to confirm what has changed, and to mourn what did not.
It is a diagnostic ritual: each visit reveals another fracture, another truth that can no longer be denied.
We do not return to retrieve the past. We return to measure the distance from it.
V. The Real Home Is Forward
The illusion of home dissolves only when we accept that belonging is not inherited — it is constructed.
Home is no longer the apartment I grew up in, nor the city that raised me by accident. It is the life I am building now: the clarity I fought for, the friendships I chose, the psychological boundaries I learned to enforce.
Perhaps the real illusion was believing that home was something to return to, rather than something to carry forward.
Home is not a memory. Home is a direction.
And I am finally walking toward it.