rivers and roads 'til i reach you
fragmented musings on home - through the years, across cities
This is an essay in fragments — disjointed pieces of memory and letters throughout many months and cities, esje at different stages of his life, mimicking the very experience of a lifelong search for a place to call home. There’s a complexity to my relationship with these cities, some more positive than others, that I hope to one day dedicate a full essay for each one.
For now, this is simply a man’s messy ramblings on his search for home, so far.
Thoughts of home plagued my twenty-minute GrabBike ride home tonight (Uber for Motorcycles, for those who live outside of Southeast Asia). This is not the first time.
Bangkok
It’s a normal Saturday in Bangkok.
I woke up after a tame night out and wasted four hours rotting in bed. It’s my 5th time heading to the bouldering gym this week, fingers reeling from my sanity’s crippling dependence on climbing. Uncomfortably lied down on my couch to watch “It’s What’s Inside” on Netflix because it took too much effort to move to a more comfortable position. The twenty-minute GrabBike coming from a spontaneous decision to grab Tonkatsu with my best friend because we’ve been rotting too much. We needed to get out.
Normal has taken an unfamiliar form in recent months. Days, weeks, and months have passed in the same way. We need to get out of here.
It’s a normal Saturday at home.
Home, home, home, like a word you repeat too many times it morphs into something unfamiliar, a memory of a word that once held meaning. So I say the word now, familiarizing myself with the movements in my mouth, relieving the pressure that comes with meaning and allowing it to simply be.
Manila
Since 2022, I have written about home 4 times and filmed 1 video. That’s a lot of times for someone who has only recently gotten comfortable sharing his writing and videos in public. None of them have ever had closure.
Neither will this. I will revisit this many more times.
Growing up as a queer, brown-skinned Filipino Chinese kid that looks anything but, racist remarks disguised as jokes stemming from prejudice against countries he often gets mistaken for, and general colorism in a region of the world where whiteness is king, is a tough card for a kid to be dealt with.
At the risk of turning this essay into one about identity rather than one about home, i’ll keep this part short, that’s a crisis-nay-topic for another day (if I ever get to it).
October 2023 — the day I officially left Manila
The little kid caught up today.
Three weeks ago, sat by my apartment in Bangkok, the little kid caught up to absorb fulfilling a dream.
Today, 7:20 am, the little kid catches up to absorb the reality of leaving his first home.
A single luggage and a box full of books, a quarter-life’s worth of love.
I type, and I type — trying to put into words the surge of thoughts and emotions plaguing me. How do I compress a quarter-life’s worth of life’s seasons into a written piece — making sure the nuances remain intact?
I’ve never been shy to complain about the daily stress of navigating Manila’s dysfunction. Cancelled plans, lost time, wasted money, all at the attempt to have something that resembles a life, acknowledging the already privileged position I hold.
But more importantly, and what truly makes Manila feel like home.
Family, and friends turned family.
How do I bring out the ecstasy that comes with family dinners in Binondo, meals that bring me back to childhood? How about the the long drives to our province that are equally exhausting yet so sentimental? How do I bring out the joy of bumping into friends in public, new and old, in the middle of running errands, a nightmare to some but a joy for myself? How about the relaxed feeling from hard-earned hang outs to see people I love, no matter how busy life gets?
Close to impossible, I can only hope these words and these photos bring these moments justice. As I close these two weeks back in Manila, I see the little kid confronted with a twinge of sadness.
For the first time, absorbing the reality of moving a life.
The complexity of emotions that go side by side with leaving one home for another.
leaving all that is familiar and comfortable, for a long-time dream that will surely come with its own set of struggles and fulfillments.
As I write this, I’m reminded of the movie, “Past Lives”: “If you leave something behind, you gain something too”. I hold on to this passage.
That as I take an unknown path, that the gains are more than the losses, that by this very move — I build another city that the little kid can call home.
Most of my life has been spent in Manila, a full 24 and a half years. I’ve long held this belief that two decades is too long to be living in one place, especially one you hesitate to call home.
I’d like to say that I have a love-hate relationship with Manila, but the latter tends to win out more.
I’d like to say that being away has softened my strong feelings for the time, in turn, the life, Manila has stolen from me, and maybe it has, but it’s still there.
I’d like to say that Manila is just not for me, that it’s simply a city that can’t hold the life I envision for myself. But I know it runs deeper than that.
I would like to say so many things, but I’m afraid my emotions will get the better of me. At the end of the day, 24 years is more than enough to know that the city and I are just not a good match. Every visit since then has been a loud reminder.
Don’t get me wrong, despite the complexity of my feelings — I recognize the role that Manila has shaped who I am today. It is the city that has given me so many beautiful memories, with friends and family who I will always happily visit. However, sometimes I think the city has reduced itself into a vessel that simply holds the people I love, and mostly the only reason I would visit.
There’s a level of guilt that lives in my hesitation of calling Manila home. I hesitate but I feel bad for hesitating. It is, by definition, home. Yet I don’t know if it has ever earned the full weight of its meaning. I could just as easily be placing so much pressure on a word. Though, most of you would know that words matter to me a lot.
What do you do when the very city that you grew up in and owe many of your formative years to, a place that should default as the city that you should call home, just doesn’t feel worth the weight the word holds?
I’ve made peace with the reality that this city will always hold a special place in my life — just not quite the home it’s expected to be.
Saigon
The first time I ever wrote about home was back in December 2022, fresh from a visit to Vietnam that forced introspection. Up until then, my search for home was a faraway dream, simply leaving Manila at the forefront of my mind — home can wait.
Dec 3, 2022 — my first musings of home
“Have you ever found your city?” I asked an expat friend from Saigon, interested to hear his perspective as someone whose relationship with the word home has likely grown complex from years of moving.
Unquestionably, wholeheartedly, he answered: “Ho Chi Minh”. There was a fullness to his response that was a shock to my system — the certainty of just knowing.
What must it be like to find a city you feel so much as your own, as your home?
In the same trip, I asked my friends the same question bringing with me the intoxication from this encounter, and each and every one of them had some semblance of an answer. Just not the certainty.
Me? I couldn’t tell you.
But I’m sat here, by a river in Saigon on my last full night in Vietnam, head over heels in love with the city. A realization that’s been brewing for the past few days, slowly but surely falling.
Did I fall in love at first sight with this city? No. Did I end up falling in love with this city? Easily. Do I think Saigon is a city that feels like “home”? close, but ultimately no.
But I find it exciting. This possibility of discovering a city I will fall in love with so much as to call it my city. To call it home.
As I’m writing this, I have a feeling which city it would be, and it’s one I’m excited to visit (spoiler alert: I meant Taipei). But for now, I’ll enjoy not knowing — the thrill that comes with the possibility of discovery.
Taiwan (Collective)
The very first time the word home reacquainted itself back in my life was in January 2023, a mere month after my Vietnam visit.
January 2023 — on finding my city
It's funny how much impact fleeting encounters can have on you. I arrived from Saigon in December with an insatiable itch to find my city, one that feels like home.
An itch borne out of a simple conversation with a new friend that would not leave my head, a search tangled to my own sense of identity.
Identity is a complicated thing. I was born Chinese-Filipino, but I look South Asian / Middle Eastern. One being a genetic reality, the other dictated upon my appearance.
Both, now, coexist in my sense of identity. Though, it wasn't always the case.
Making space for both realities was a central struggle growing up, the most central, if I think about it now. It’s not until you realize that identity is such a personal and intimate reality you live your whole life with, tied to a search for home that can accommodate your many realities.
chinese. filipino. looks south asian. or middle eastern. or north african. or i dont even know anymore. queer. lives and breathes literature. yearns to see the world. unhealthy relationship with words. loves feeling life’s emotions. values human relationships. lives through life’s questions. (strives to be) okay with uncertainty. searches for home in everything.
I have found that home in so many people, company as comforting as one’s own. I've also found it in books, words that explain my life better than I ever can.
Home, too, is what i found in Taipei, a city that embraced my many selves.
The many realities, and identities that exist within.
Maybe that's what a home is, a space to house the many realities and identities that exist within. Regardless of if it’s a place, a person, a book.
You know what? it makes life incredibly exciting. The everyday possibility of finding a home. So, I, for one, am ecstatic.
I spent my 26th birthday in the Nordics, to the shock of most people in my life.
“Oh, you’re not visiting Taiwan?” — there’s a running joke in my circle that I probably can’t survive a year without visiting Taiwan. They’re not mistaken — in two weeks’ time I would have visited Taiwan for the third time this year, and for the fifth time since 2023.
There’s this old cliche about love that you’ll just know — you can have checklist, a type, and a vision for what you want, but at the end of the day you’ll just know. (I am so single that I am using a relationship analogy on a city).
The same goes with my love for Taiwan. I’ve been asked plenty of times what is it about Taiwan that I love and adore, and it’s true, it’s easy for me to list it down.
If you’d allow me: It has that sense of order of places like Tokyo and Singapore, but a healthy dose of chaos similar to Southeast Asia. It’s a nice blend of everything I love about East Asian culture and food but holds the warmth of places closer to the Pacific. The country is tiny enough for it to be easy to get around but also big enough that there will always be so many places to see and experience. I hold a deep love for the mountains and the coast, and everywhere you go in Taiwan you are assured of at least one, but more often than not, you’ll be blessed with both.
I could go on and on, but that’s besides the point.
On a more personal note, there is comfort and warmth to simply being in Taiwan — making space for the many realities and identities I hold. No city has ever made me felt as accepted as a queer Chinese Southeast Asian as Taiwan. It feels like being held, that I don’t have to be anything different to be accepted. It feels like being home.
Bangkok
Here. That’s all I wanted to be.
I promise. — Ocean Vuong
Thailand was never on my radar as a country to move to. I’ve visited twice, the first time around 7 years ago now — the same country I got a monkey bite from and got stuck for two weeks due to COVID (separate trips). Not really the best travel memories.
It’s been a year and a half now since I’ve moved out of Manila. The word home rolls off my tongue much easier. It’s hard to say if Bangkok is home, but I’ve put less pressure on the word and call it as such.
It feels okay and familiar.
It’s been a year and a half now, and I realize I’ve never journaled about the city. I’ve written many essays about my gratitude for being here, reminding myself not to take it for granted, but never on the city as a whole. I have homework now.
Sometimes I wonder if I love Bangkok, or I simply love being in a city that can hold the life I want to live.
For now, I’m okay with the not knowing — for the softer version of the word home to envelope my time here in Bangkok. It feels worthy of at least that much.
This turned out far longer than I planned for it to be (I even tried to cut it down) — though plan doesn’t seem accurate for a spontaneous free-flow rambling that reminisces on the past three years’ search for home.
I have far more thoughts on the topic — people as home, magnetism to Taiwan, appreciation for Bangkok, and so many more that I’ll save for separate essays.
Have any of you found home? how does it look like for you? is it a person, place, memory, or something that I have not even considered?
from our usual spot,
esje
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First: I gasped when I saw the title because Rivers and Roads is one of my favourite songs.
Second: This was beautifully captured! You described a lot of my emotions that I have been trying to grasp for years, about the same topics and the same search for home. As of now, I have found home in two of my best friends, a person and my dog. I certainly have hopes for which city I hope to find home in, but maybe that is more to do with the person I hope to visit that city with, instead of the city itself.
Again, thank you for your words <3.
Your writing changes me. Never stop writing please.