#170: Stranger in My Hometown | On Diaspora, Saudade, and the Myth of Return

Camellia Yang (0:30)

What home might mean for people like me who left on purpose and kept moving?

Let's start with some background. In 1991, a scholar named William Safran wrote a very influential paper on Diasporas. His center idea was that people living far from their homeland carry a shared memory of it, an un-idealized picture of it. However, long they stayed abroad, they believe the homeland is their true spiritual home and that one day they will return.

For a long time, Diaspora literature was built on that idea, a deep attachment to roots and side beautiful songs for the exiled. But the 21st century looks different. We have globalization, people moving between countries as a way of life, and people who choose to live abroad. So the old picture of Diaspora is starting to come apart.

Take me as an example, I was born in Jinan, China. I built my adult life and career in Auckland, New Zealand. Then I drifted between London and Lisbon in the past six years.

For a while, I assumed my story was just a modern version of the classic one. You leave your homeland, you explore, you get homesick, and eventually you go back. But there is another idea I found more helpful. In 1994, the scholar James Clifford argued that The Diasporic identity isn't really about roots, it's about roads, the path we travel and the way we keep rebuilding ourselves along them. When I look back, my life isn't a straight line from A to B, it's a chain of cities and each one gave me something different. Qin'an, my hometown, was where it started. It gave me East Asian order, pressure to achieve, and Confucianism way of moral standard and social behavior. New Zealand was an open, welcoming immigrant country. I built my Kiwi identity there and I learned that my words could be recognized in my profession. London was a global hub full of elite narratives and class tension. It pushed me to think hard about existentialism and what it means to belong anywhere. Lisbon was bohemian and free. With a digital norma lifestyle, it loosed me from institutional roots.

Here is an important difference. Traditional Chinese diaspora writing, like much Chinese American literature, often centers on suffering and identity crisis. It's about the clash between the old world and the new, and about the struggle just to survive in a foreign land. But many writers today, including me, were not pushed out by poverty or forced into excel. We choose to live, looking for room to think and to express ourselves. So our writing often moves away from the identity crisis. It explores absurdity, wider boundary for life, and the blending of many cultures. We are not victims of culture. We are makers of our own path.

While I was in Lisbon, I met a world that changed how I think about all of this. Saudade.

It's hard to translate into English. Because it isn't quite homesickness, and it isn't quite sadness, it's a deep longing for something lost that can never come back, or even for something that never existed. Compare that with traditional East Asian homesickness. It's often tied to duty. Going home means answering to your family and your bloodline. Saudade is poetic and existential. It accepts that something once lost are gone, and that you can feel absence even while standing on your own native soil.

This echoes something the scholar Avtar Brah wrote. She said that a desire for home is not the same as a desire for homeland. Think about what that means. What we long for isn't really a piece of land, or a green card, or a particular house. It's a safe space, somewhere big enough to hold all our experiences, our vulnerabilities, and our unfinished dreams. For me, using Saudade as a lens was a way to take the pieces of myself I had left in Auckland, London, Lisbon, and Jinan, and build a sense of home in the middle of a movie.

Now back to William Safran, in his Diaspora model, returning is the ultimate ritual, the moment of spiritual salvation. So what happens when you actually go back? When I returned to China after all these years, I didn't feel what I expected. There was no sense of a fallen leaf returning to its roots. Instead, I felt a deep shock. I didn't come back as a local, I came back as a stranger in my hometown.

I was surrounded again by things I knew well, pressure to achieve, a cult of speed and success, and heavy collective expectations. And the values and beauty in New Zealand and Europe, like allowing yourself to pause, respecting personal boundaries, and valuing pure self-exploration run straight into the practical, fast rhythm around me. That experience changed my writing. I realized the homeland isn't a place of salvation. It has its own ordinary tensions and limits, like anywhere else, and I came to see this as a kind of second diaspora. My body landed in China, but in spirit, I still live in a third culture space built from childhood Jinan, the sea breeze in Auckland, rainy nights in London, and golden sunsets in Lisbon. Returning didn't end my journey, but showed me that the myth of the homeland had cracked.