Homecoming

Bad son confession incoming: up until this past July, it had been nearly seven years since the last time I visited home. Home being Toronto, Canada, which I maintain is still one of the all-time best cities to spend a summer. Despite this very strong take on my part, I had regrettably somehow let a full touchdown’s (plus extra point) worth of years pass between my previous visit, when I came back for a month in August 2016 right before I went back to school, and this past summer when I, and the rest of the family, finally made the trip over.

There were some mitigating circumstances, mostly the three years of the Covid pandemic that made travel in and out of Hong Kong all but impossible, but seven years is still seven years, especially when I thought about Miles and Olive and my dream of taking them back to my childhood home. I wanted them to see the house I grew up in and the places around the city that make up my sense of belonging and identity, and I wanted them to meet so many people.

We weren’t the only ones looking to make long-awaited trips home, however, and flight tickets back to Canada reached unheard of levels this year – some friends had to rethink their travel plans after being quoted HK$30,000+ for a single economy class ticket. I don’t know how we did it but we somehow lucked into airfare that was only a little bit more expensive than pre-Covid times, somewhere in the range of HK$11-12,000 – direct flights with Hong Kong’s flagship carrier Cathay Pacific as well.

With flights sorted, my plan was simple: give my parents some quality grandparenting time with their grandkids, let the kids experience some quintessential North American summer activities like sidewalk chalk and backyard pools, reconnect with old friends (with young families of their own), and check out some of the kid-friendly attractions around town with Miles and Olive that I had grown up going to in decades past.

Parting thoughts

The two weeks and change we spent in Toronto this summer went by too fast – you really can’t squeeze in seven years’ worth of catch-ups and nostalgia into such a short timeframe. I don’t know if it was the pandemic that disrupted my experience of the passage of time, or if I passed some unknown threshold in the intervening years, but it really hit me this time around how long I’ve been away from home. Things in Toronto seemed to generally be the same the first few times I went back, but this summer I felt very strongly that I’d lost something, or had something diminished. Maybe there was the illusion or the impression in my early years abroad that I’d eventually end up back in Toronto, perhaps sooner rather than later, and that is becoming less and less of a potential reality the more I put down roots in Hong Kong. I don’t think I realised just how much comfort I took in the thought that I’d always have a place to come back to, and perhaps now I’m confronted with the possibility that, bit by bit, my sense of home has shifted somewhat. It’s still Toronto, and it’s increasingly Hong Kong, but it’s also something else.