I am a Transplanted Tree

I do not know what “coming home” means anymore. I step off the airplane, that wormhole between one world and another, and suddenly I am in a space where I haven’t been in 4 years. It feels uncomfortable and strange. I no longer have my kitchen, my bedroom, my garden and my house, but I am a guest in someone else’s space. I can’t do the things I am usually doing at this new time; I will be on a completely different schedule. I will be seeing completely different people, I will be eating completely different food.

Everyone talks to me about how wonderful it must feel to be home, but I am not home, I am in limbo. I don’t know what’s going on in the lives of my friends and family anymore, and I am trying to absorb the changes in my home country that have taken place while I have been away. Things do change; culture and society are not static. When I come home there are big and small changes in everything. I find watching the news on t.v. every evening strange, and as I watch it I feel lost.

The carpet feels odd on my feet, the cold makes my nose run and the skin on my face flake. For the first week I am in shock, reverse culture shock. The next week is better, but it will take about a month to feel normal and be able to start really enjoying my time back in my country.

It is always like this now. The first time home, over 15 years ago, felt like such a huge relief. After several years of living overseas, however, going back “home” began to feel like an adjustment, even with the huge excitement of it all.

I feel stressed and uncomfortable, I miss my friends. I start gaining weight from all the delicious fattening food. My kids are alternately disgusted with the 4-letter words, sex on t.v. and enthralled by the luxury, cleanness, wealth and endless entertainment of the West. I wonder how it will change them, I wonder if it will be hard for them to go back to Asia after this.

I miss the cheap food at the market, having my own kitchen and my own things. I feel anxious about seeing old friends that I used to feel so close to. I wonder what we will talk about. I feel uprooted, lonely, isolated, and poor. There have been times I have felt wildly jealous of my friends’ comfortable and settled lives. I am amazed by their beautiful, clean homes and all their accumulations.

I know I have so much I ought to feel thankful for, I know I have seen and done amazing things, I know I will not have regrets if I am doing what I am here on earth to do. Yet I am human, after all, even in all I know to be true, I still struggle sometimes. I am a transplanted tree, and even unfeeling, inanimate trees have transplant shock when they are dug up and replanted.

(This post is from a couple of years ago, but it was published on a different blog.)