home is where the heart is?

I’ve always had trouble figuring out where “home” was.

The facts are these:
I was born in Hong Kong.
Immigrated to Montreal when I was 6.
Moved from Montreal to Vancouver when I was 14.

Whenever people would ask me what I consider home, I never really know how to answer. On one level, home is most definitely here in Vancouver. But if you factor out family, friends, and community (you know, who needs them anyway?), and if I base my decision strictly on geography and cityscape…I’d have a much harder time.

I really believe people can have genuine relationships with the places they live in…
For example, there’s nothing like walking down a familiar street or making a trip to your go-to coffee shop to cure the blues. You grow to love or hate the public transportation system…find your own nook at the public library…and get those butter cookies you always get when you go for swimming lessons.

Here are some of the things that make Montreal home for me:
- Riding the metro: I’ve been traveling the city ever since I was 11…it felt like there wasn’t anywhere I couldn’t go.
- Saint Denis/Mont Royal: This was church street/neighbourhood. If my friends and I had no plans…we would wander around the boutiques, eat apple pie a la mode at Rockaberry’s, go on the swings at this dinky little park
- Champlain Mall…the “Richmond Centre” of the suburb I’m from. That was my first real mall experience…and my first ever meal at a Tiki Ming (My mom thought it would be funny to eat American Chinese food…let’s just say it only happened once), and where I bought my first CD (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, fyi). As a treat, my mom would occasionally let me pick candy from Sweet Factory…:)

I’ll write about Vancouver in another blog…but I gotta say, I feel pretty lucky to be familiar with several cities instead of just one. Who said you can only have one home?