The Journey Home

The Journey Home

As Asians set down new roots around the world, home is no longer a fixed destination, explains Pico Iyer. It is as much a favorite dish, a memory or an idea as it is an old house. In this special issue, TIME invites some of the Asian diaspora's top writers to embark on physical and mental voyages of return

Homeward Bound: For many Asians, home is an intangible thingWhere do you come from?" "what do you call home?" The simplest questions these days bring ever more complex answers—when they bring answers at all. Which is another way of saying that the fundamental, defining questions of any life have been spun around and sometimes exploded in the modern, mongrel world.

I, for example, am 100% Indian by blood and heritage. Most of my relatives live in India, my family name places me very specifically in terms of caste and region and religion, and everything about my face shouts out, unanswerably, "India!" Yet I've never lived in India or worked there. I speak not a word of any of the country's 1,652 dialects. And when I return to what is, on paper at least, my ancestral home—Bombay—I feel more a stranger there, often, than do many of my friends from San Francisco or North London. Ask me to take a journey home, and my first question is: do you mean Oxford, England (where I was born), or California (where I keep my things and pay my taxes)? Or do you mean Japan (my adopted home, where I spend seven or eight months of every year)?

The one place that does not come to mind is India.

For the Asian diaspora, home, like everything in the modern floating world, has gone global and fragmented, portable and underground. What once might have resembled a well-creased snapshot now looks more like an MTV video. To better understand what home means in the midst of constant flux, what exile truly is, and what it involves to live in many places all at once, Time invited leading Asian writers to stage some version of the classic journey home in the pages that follow. Some found themselves in places they hardly recognized. Others went to lands where the only roots they could see were as indecipherable as the roots of a language they could not speak. Still others chose not to leave their Western homes at all and instead fashioned their sense of belonging at their desks.

When Ma Jian returned to his beloved home street in Beijing, he realized that the only home that lasts, and will be safe from time and history, is invisible, inside himself. Gish Jen, an American by choice, takes apart the very meaning of "Chineseness," while Chang-rae Lee seems to dissolve the very category of "Korea" in his return to a family far away. Wendy Law-Yone suggests, thinking of her native Burma in her exile home in London, that home may be the place you long to flee (and exile may be a haven, a glad escape). And Pankaj Mishra, staying put, writes wistfully of how the quiet home he has found is changing around him daily.

My own sense is that the chance to choose a home, which many of us have, is a blessing. In my grandparents' time, homes—and with them our sense of self, community and tradition—were inherited. All four of my grandparents were born in India and fixed within its hierarchies and distinctions. Even in my parents' day, when they moved from India to England (and then to California), they traveled at first by ship, and every farewell seemed final. I, by contrast, was lucky enough to be an Indian in England who moved to California at age eight and so, from early on, could pick and choose among affiliations. I was free to live in many worlds and outside the limitations of my tribe. When, some years ago, my family home suddenly burned to the ground in a forest fire, and all my photos, mementos and notes were reduced to ash, I was reminded forcibly again that home nowadays has nothing to do with a piece of soil and everything to do with something I carry around inside me.

All this applies, of course, only to the fortunate among us, the ones who have chosen at some level to leave and can choose, at times, to return. The vast majority of the displaced these days are forced to move, by poverty or famine or war, and obliged to try to patch together a sense of home in a place where they don't and will never feel very much at home at all. The backward glance for them is not luxury but daily necessity. And even among the privileged, home is sometimes, surely, a notion in flux. Ved Mehta in these pages returns to Lahore and a family home that was taken from him by the partition of India and Pakistan. Monique Truong, though fashioning her first novel, The Book of Salt, around the defining Vietnamese figure of Ho Chi Minh, passionately denies attachment to the Vietnam she fled at six while acknowledging that her new abode in New York can never really be her home.

The Asian Journey Home, we quickly see, has grown complicated, mixed-up, in a world in which everything is spraying out in all directions. A modern Odysseus may find upon returning home that Penelope is in New York now and Telemachus has applied for refugee status. For many people, even if they're not among the desperately dispossessed, home as a moving target can feel unsettling. Living between cultures, they feel lost, neither here nor there. Instead of an abundance of homes, they feel a dearth or sense that a surplus of homes can be more desolating than a paucity, especially if none of them speaks to every part of you. People get caught in the revolving doors of cultures. The Asian part feels this way, the American says this—and it's all doubly complicated because you're living in Berlin.

Yet one by-product of this rotating sense of home is that those of us who are multicultures within may often feel a small kinship with others in the same position. The half-Thai, half-German living in Los Angeles finds that she has a lot in common with the half-Swede, half-Japanese based in Kuala Lumpur. More and more of us belong to a new community that could be called the deracination state, the spiritual home of many in the new century (whose actual location may be in such mongrel cities as Sydney or Paris or Vancouver). Homesickness has perhaps become close to universal in an age in which so many are living far from home, yet homecomings are more easily effected at a time when home is around many corners. I, though not formally connected to Toronto, feel instantly at home there, partly because it is trying to bring a European legacy together with an American sense of promise, and leaving it often in the hands of immigrants from South Asia. I feel at home in Hong Kong or Singapore, where many of the people I meet are facing the very same questions of belonging that I face. And I have no qualms at all about "going home" to a Japan where I barely speak the language, live on a tourist visa and will always be known, even after years of residence, as a gaijin, an "outsider person."

The Asian Journey Home, I suspect, has less and less to do with a trip into the past and more and more to do with a journey into our future, where people will have to think of home in more and more imaginative and nonlinear ways. The classic story of the exile's return—intrinsic to the human condition, some would say, since Adam and Eve (or the Buddha)—has gone virtual. And when I think of bringing all the pieces of my home into one place, I may think of an airport (where a cousin is at gate 43, a school friend is just coming through customs and I can get the magazines and foods of almost every one of my homes). "What is home?" someone asks me. I pull out from my pocket a picture of a longtime partner. I speak of the Benedictine monastery to which I retreat four times a year. I think of the English language, my companion for every moment of my life. I cite the books and ideas and loyalties I take everywhere I go. Home—the need for solid ground—is as vital as it ever was, but now more and more of us are obliged to find it on the move. For millions of us, the journey becomes the destination. And a part of us—at sea, in the air, in passage or in passageway—wishes that there were a simpler way home.