Home and Place in Our Placeless World

Seven years ago, a few months after graduating from college, I found myself in the throes of making a momentous life decision, one of those Frostian forks in the road that could determine the course of one’s life. I had moved to another country, to a wintry metropolis halfway across the world, an ambitious twenty-year-old eager to indulge in the juvenile delusion of starting over from scratch and leaving everything behind. The future was supple and mine for the taking: I was free to engage in the tempting project of creating the self by mere force of will.

It did not take long before the heady taste of freedom wore off. Increasingly I had trouble articulating to myself exactly why I was there, and the reasons that prompted the move in the first place no longer sufficed. I was living in a place that did not mean anything to me or to anyone who came before me. Its story was not, in any way, my story.

The categories, associations, and webs of meaning on which I had come to rely to put together some semblance of self became meaningless in that strange land. I was perfectly aware that my quandary was a privilege, that if it were not for the largesse and forbearance of other people I would not have even had any luxury of choice. In any case, the dilemma presented itself and demanded to be resolved: the question was whether to stay or to come home.

It was the first time that I had ever had to think long and hard about the meaning of home. I have always found at once enviable, confounding, and self-delusional the ability of many in our modern world to cast off at will like garb their identity and their home.

I have always thought perplexing the ease with which people today could at the snap of a finger see themselves as being from another place, ridding themselves of everything that might betray their origins—down to their accent, mannerisms, and habits. For one reason or another, this tendency—which to me is violence to narrative, an insistence that the past be blotted out—seems particularly acute in the case of Filipinos who move abroad for good. Unlike, say, the Italians or the Irish in America, many Filipinos who leave home rarely make it a priority to preserve and transmit to their children their heritage, the chief concern being total assimilation into their new home.

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This should not be viewed as a reproach of our countrymen who are in a kind of economic exile, forced out of their home by dire economic circumstances. On the contrary, it is in them that the idea of home is most alive. They spend most of their waking moments thinking of people back home, keeping fresh the memory of what they left behind, and what most impels them to continue day in, day out is the promise of return. Nor is this a rebuke to those who move elsewhere and tell our story to the world, acting as de facto ambassadors of the country.

I know of Filipino expatriates—mostly scholars and writers—whose preoccupations still revolve around where they came from. They continue a long Philippine tradition of going out into the world to introduce us to foreign lands, starting with Juan Luna and Félix Resurrección Hidalgo, whose victories at the Madrid Exposition of Fine Arts in 1884 put us on the map. (The themes of exile and return in fact figure predominantly in our national story. The ilustrados are our quintessential example of those who left of their own volition with the idea of home foremost in their mind. They could have stayed in Europe but they returned.)

This is rather a lament at how much home and place have been devalued in our placeless world. It is unfashionable today to treat where one came from as part and parcel of one’s identity—we are content to view one another as rootless individuals who sprang out of nowhere, having no sense of place and free to put down roots wherever one pleases. This is, of course, a particularly modern attitude bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, the idea that anything unchosen is meaningless, even oppressive, and the only acceptable arbiter of meaning is the individual self. The self is sovereign, and anything not decreed by the sovereign self does not hold weight.

The logic that treats the individual as having come from nowhere—having emerged, as the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, “from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other”—is the same logic that sees the human person as a replaceable, fungible unit of labor in the global marketplace. It is the same logic that has given rise to an increasingly homogeneous, anticultural world, where the astounding variety of local cultures has been supplanted by a deadening sameness.

It should not come as a surprise that those who see the world with a piercing clarity and tell what they see with radical honesty are those with a strong sense of place.

Joan Didion, to whom, the New York Times once said, belonged California, wrote that “a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”

James Baldwin wrote with such an unflinching gaze about the people of his native Harlem and understood so lucidly the strange position in which black people found themselves in America. He poignantly observed in an essay that “in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the Stones of Paris, to the Cathedral at Chartres, and the Empire State Building a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search them in vain for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.”

Amid the consensus that New York was the greatest city in the world, Ernest Hemingway famously hated it, declaring that it was “a phony town, a town that was the same in the dark as it was in the light.” He preferred instead the vivacity of Havana, Pamplona, and Paris.

Doreen Fernandez refused to look down on our islands’ culinary traditions and instead saw them as a cuisine worthy of study and attention, knowing perhaps intuitively that what we eat could tell us something about who we are as a people. She gained, in return, a peek into the nation’s soul.

There were many others: Georgia O’Keefe, Cormac McCarthy, Anthony Bourdain, Flannery O’Connor, Nick Joaquin. It is not a surprise to me that these figures had such distinct public personas and embodied style not in opposition to substance but style as substance. Their cool was not a superficial cool of mere appearances but a cool with gravitas, one that approached style as character.

It is a fitting coincidence that a few weeks before I finally made the decision to come home, the film Lady Bird came out in theaters. I saw it at the cinema, and it remains to me to be one of the most moving meditations on home I have ever seen captured on film. Christine McPherson, a high school senior who christened herself “Lady Bird” (“a name given to me by me”) and who would have moved mountains to leave her native Sacramento (“the Midwest of California”) for the East Coast (“where culture is”), finds when she is finally in New York a newfound love of home. It took going somewhere else for her to finally embrace where she was from.

The film ends with a touching montage of iconic Sacramento landmarks, places she has known all her life: the Sacramento River, Cookies Drive-In (Fruit Shakes, Low Fat Ostrich Burger), a red-brick restaurant called Pasty Shack, the Tower Theatre with its crown of neon lights, the golden Tower Bridge, and a mural that says “Sacramento Kings Forever.” The towering skyscrapers and beautiful brownstones of New York will never mean as much to Christine as these familiar places that evoke the warmth of home.