A Study through Homes

When people ask where I’m from, where I’m really from, I ready my permutations. My mélange of autumnal streets, my obscure cities, the countries I found built on a mound of papers and tears, the pebble-sized universe occupying my left shoe—I want to tell them everything. I want to see how far we can go.

A Venezuelan couple moves into our neighborhood. They share their story with me, why they migrated to Peru: the inflation, their hunger and fear, their love—they are relieved they can send money back to their families. They say they miss the soup their grandmother used to make, the sleepiness after eating it, the magic. When I ask what’s home for them, they say home is a fist that dreams.

Instead of calling home by the name of a country, I imagine calling it by people’s names or pronouns. Hello, I’m from Sang-Hee. I’m going back to Alejandra. Have you ever visited Daniel? I’m proud of you. I miss me.

I realize I’ve been acquainted with my husband for less time than I have my parents, who received and kept my first laughter like a pressed flower in the folds of their memory. Less time than my sister, who would only fall asleep when my hair was twined around her thumb, an amulet against nightmares. I didn’t expect I would end up staying in the United States after finishing my studies; I find it strange I fell in love with a stranger. Though maybe it was because he was a stranger, and it’s easier to love strangers. One day, the years I’ve known him will claim half my life, then maybe most of it, but never all. This, the life of an immigrant too.

I ask my parents whether they miss Korea. My father crosses his arms. Says home is now. My mother, next to him, adds home is also then.

A BBC documentary explains how, at some point, a hermit crab must look for a new home, a new shell to protect its curved abdomen, pliant as a grape, easy cooking target for the sun. It’ll meet others by the shore, where they’ll line up patiently from largest to smallest, to swap shells that match their present size. A systematic method of survival that benefits everyone—except for the one left out. It sears into my mind. Not the idea of one being left out but the image of the crab, its toy-orange legs flailing, hurrying after a shell with a hole on its roof that will just have to do for an uncertain while.

I ask a friend whose life oscillated between Trujillo and Lima where’s home for her these days. She says home is any place that calls her name.

At the airport, the day I would stop sharing a roof  with my family, my mother tucks the word saranghae deep into the pocket of my ear. She repeats, saranghae, saranghae, saranghae—until the word I’d heard every day sounds like a foreign language, until the word sheds the husk of its meaning and is replaced with music.

At one point, I thought my home was a pair of hand-me-down pants I’d eventually grow into. But home was the blur of my body, in which the same bloodstream didn’t flow twice, in which a deep breath made my lungs embrace my heart tighter, before letting go.

​​​​​​​In my mailbox: a welcome letter and a 3x2 inch card. It declares I’ve been granted temporary permission, acceptance, to be where I already am. I could drill a hole in it with my stare: this small key on the palm of my hand, green like a pair of emerald earrings I never had, green like bad breath and anxiety, green like the application fees that continue to increase like an insidious dream of bloating grass. Green, the color of my conditional privilege. All condensed into a single object I’m asked to carry at all times but made so I could, easily, lose so much more.

​​​​​​​I’m tired, so I read about how policies attempting to restrict immigration constantly fail, unable to forbid the body, the cities and deserts it carries inside, the winds wrinkling its lakes, the finches darting not only above but under its airport ceilings. I’m tired, so I lie down. The earth spins for me and the dead continue their orbiting. It gives me strength to remember there is no such thing as an immovable object.