Homesick? Me? Naaaaaah.

There's a difference between going overseas for a vacation and living overseas for any reasonable amount of time. When you're on vacation, the strangeness and unfamiliarity of a place has a delightful novelty which carries a sense of wonder largely because it is transient. Time passes too fast, and you yearn to stay longer to soak up the gorgeous unfamiliarity of it all, the foreign sights and smells and sounds that surround you. But when you live in a place which is not where you grow up, quickly you realize that it is the not the place that is strange, but you that is the stranger.

I find myself automatically gravitating towards the things that remind me of home, without conscious realization. I find myself turning to look at the source when I hear someone speak with a familiar accent, and once found, to my chagrin, that I was unconsciously tailing two men who spoke in the unmistakable mish-mash of at least three different languages and the accent of home. When I pass someone with an Asian face, I find myself looking at them, searching for something that speaks to me of home. Sometimes they look at me for a fraction too long, and I imagine that sometimes I catch sight of a yearning that is probably mirrored in my own face.

Sometimes I feel like going up to them and saying, "Do you miss green chili in soya sauce, like I do? Do you miss hanging out at Coffee Bean with your friends and sleeping your own bed? Do you miss talking to people who know how to use 'lah' and know what you mean when you say 'cheena'? Do you miss hawker centres and buses that don't just run once every hour? Do you miss having more than four Chinese vegetables and being able to go across the Causeway for cheap shopping? Do you miss economy rice that doesn't cost more than three dollars and sun that doesn't give you reverse panda eyes when you wear sunglasses for the whole day? Do you miss seeing people who look like you and talk like you? Do you miss the places that that are more than just a name because they are invested with memories, like the bench at that reservoir that you sat to talk to that girl, and the cinema where you both got caught? Do you miss not being cold at night and watching movies with people who’ve known you and loved you for years? Because I do too."