Where is home?
I was invited to my friend’s house recently. The moment I opened the door, my first feeling was fascination — strange as it might sound. She had a whole set of matching couches, a long wooden table, healthy green plants, and a coffee corner beside an open kitchen. There were also shelves filled with books and photos of loving family members, along with paintings that her friend designed and put up for her. The warm yellow lighting, soft background music, and the subtle scent of lavender made me immediately sense that this was somebody’s home — a place that could be a shelter for oneself from the outside.
This moment also made me start to reflect on myself, have I ever considered the place I live now at home? – I ask myself. The thought slipped my mind, probably never. I still remember that two years ago I enthusiastically described the design of my first place abroad to my friends. Then why did it get delayed? I try to remember what happened, however I got nothing. But I do remember once I talked with my friend about this that “I may leave tomorrow, maybe just better not to be bothered with decoration.” And here I am, two years later, living in the same place with the same furniture from the previous owner. It seems that I always consider myself a passerby. I cannot make any commitment. I’m scared of any investment that involves time – even just a buying a plant. I always told myself that something may change then maybe I should wait still it settle down but it seems that day will never come. Everything seems to eventually fade away, right?
For me, the most profound question that need to ask after all of this yapping is that actually where is my home? Although with no surprise that I did grow up in a house, other than that everything is changing. I was born in the early years at the turn of the century. Like myself, the following years mark the fastest development in China. Living in the center of Beijing, it is hard to find any consistency in my early childhood memories. As the surround environment – the bus line, the people, and grocery shop are consistently rebirth, recovery, and reconstruction. Ironically, the only place that holds my memory is the Internet. I can still find the picture of my kindergarten gate in a random introduction flyer of Beijing, but never in real life. Sometimes I consider myself mentally hometown-less, as the absence of an emotional anchor. However, when I’m abroad, I find myself very much miss Beijing – so much that I start to miss every part of it. Therefore, once again, my home is existing in the cloud.
Home is on the cloud
The astonishing development of digital media allows a possibility to live a doubled life that I can walk on the street in the Netherlands while talk about the old street in front of my house with my mom on the phone. It also causes a deeply distraction of the sense of belonging, the idea of home is no longer single-threaded, but multiple. To make things worse, the internet censorship drives China to develop its own distinct digital world from social media, online shopping, and music player. Therefore, it is like having two worlds open simultaneously in a browser’s tab bar, the body is here but emotions in far and thoughts are stuck in between. Digital media has turned me into a perpetual migrant. It feels like is that even when standing in a warm, quiet living room, there is a feeling like I’ve just arrived and am ready to leave at any moment.
The notification form WeChat, the social media update in Xiaohongshu, and daily music recommendation from NetEase Music have fixed an irrevocable other reality. The very existent of myself is increasing mediated though digital media so that part of my subjectivity is living on the cloud with my memory, friends, and families. This is more of a bitter and sweet mix as we can never leave that part behind, what I’m also trying to sketch in here is a reality that real life could be partly replace by the digital life. That is the reason that I was stop at my friend’s foyer, is the fact that I realized digital life has made me absent from my own life, and that is the real danger at the heart of it.
Anyways, I do hope tomorrow is a sunny day, because I will be heading to the plant shop to buy myself a promise.
Message to my friend (and others!)
There is also a fascinating feature about digital media is that I can sit down to map what I am thinking through a small piece of life with a simple click and typing, and later I will upload this to the course website, then a few (hopefully) people may read those dream talk like words in a boring evening. Maybe – just maybe, this will also trigger some of your throughs and you will share them to even far. This connectivity is the magic and absolutely a gift from digital media, yet its consequence often come with a more subtle form but for sure decisive for understanding some of the most important inquiry about how we position ourselves and organizing life accordingly in the real and digital world.
To conclude, if my friends ever read this blog – I just want to say that you have an amazing taste on design and always an admirable love for life itself, which I think could be one of the answer … that living life whatever in what shape it may takes.
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