Roots

On choosing to settle down, or not.

photo by Pim Yanaprasart

It’s been almost a month since we left Hong Kong and for some reason, it feels like a year. I am writing this from a sun-filled terrace overlooking the sea in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, after spending the previous two and a half weeks in Italy. I changed three countries in a month so, naturally, the journey feels much longer than it actually was. There is a complicated net of emotions that goes with relocating that is quite hard to decipher, let alone explain or write about. It’s all very intense but also elusive and rather unquantifiable. We are moving countries which means that, at least for the time being, we are homeless. This homelessness now exudes an almost romantic aura only because it will last for the brief space of a summer, and I am letting myself enjoying it.

Traveling across countries these days involves many forms to fill. All of them bear the same question: where do you reside? Where is your home? Our traceability needs to be more and more rigorous due to a global pandemic that is still very much a reality. A couple of times I’ve hesitated to write my answers. My husband suggested let’s put Hong Kong as our home, but it doesn’t quite feel right to give as a domicile a house and a life I have packed up and left, albeit recently. Not only that, the physical act of going through all our stuff, the heart-wrenching good-byes, and the process of deciding what to keep and what to let go of, has been enough to give my Hong Kong life the finite feeling of closure.

 People ask me where I come from. At the bank, at the post office, when trying to put the landline at my father’s house under my name, during friendly conversations. Where do I live? I was in Italy for the past three weeks, but in actual fact, I haven’t lived there in fifteen years. Where do I physically come from?  From Hong Kong, yes, but this time I am not returning. How about Portugal? Well, that’s my destination for now but I am not there yet.

And why on earth did we choose Portugal to settle down and not Italy? Or Israel?

I am not sure we are settling down, actually. Of all the choices open and available we picked the less predictable one, but also the one the kept the door of our ex-pat life still somewhat open.

People share their stories. “After a certain amount of years of ex-pat life, I wanted to give my children roots”, my father-in-law told me. Roots. The word echoed in my mind. Why am I not preoccupied with the same thing? Don’t I want to give my kids roots? Are roots even important? What are roots anyway in a world that is constantly changing and shifting and identities demand to be fluid while at the same time more and more labels are created as protection of these very identities? I am allergic to labels of any kind and the first thirty years of my life have been dedicated to the religious effort of uprooting myself from a soil I didn’t necessarily felt like mine. I was eleven years old the first time I asked my mother to send me abroad, on a language exchange program, as she had done with my sister and my brother. I had to wait a few more years before I took my first airplane out of Italy. Once I realized that studying was a good excuse to get out of my own country, off I went, and I chose as a destination a place that couldn’t be further away from my home both geographically and culturally. All in the effort to become an “International Individual”. Fifteen years in China, an Israeli husband, and three children later, here I am, doing the reverse trip back. I landed in Italy after a year of losses and grief lived mostly in solitude. It felt like going home after a war. Counting and hugging the survivors. It felt strange, scary, and at the same time incredibly good. I found myself reexamining my roots not as something imposed on me by birth but rather, because of my choice to go back to them. I found the familiarity of the language, of ordering a coffee at the bar, enjoying the food, and seeing the pace of history carved on nearly all the buildings around me, comforting. It was as if somebody had wrapped a fluffy, cozy blanket around me. Even the air smelled different. I sat back, in front of an alfresco dinner in Rome and asked myself, why did I want so much to leave this country? This place is awesome, I could actually live here!

But yet again, I choose to leave, yet again my heart sunk a bit when I set off to the airport. Goodbye Italy, it was too short, but at least this time I know it won’t be long until I’ll be back.

 Isn’t this sense of belonging that is so innate and effortless the very meaning of roots? Or rather was this just the illusion of a brief summer trip? And is that feeling of belonging enough to make us want to stay?

 I wonder. I very much felt at home in Hong Kong too. In a different way, it was home.

Putting down roots is tempting,  but finding a place for them might be less important than what we think. It’s often just a geographical conundrum. We are tempted into thinking that our home is where we come from when in reality many times this is just the easy, sometimes a bit lazy answer to a much more complex question.

I was in a guided meditation session a while ago and my coach was asking me to imagine roots growing under my feet, to keep me grounded and help me in a moment of great upheaval. I liked that image of myself anchored to a nameless soil. A human tree of some sort, engaged in the extra-human effort of growing imaginary roots. As grotesque as it might seem, it did help. So much so that those portable roots have become my trusty companion in this time of change. They are there to remind me that while I am constantly shifting and changing, there is something to keep me centered. Perhaps this is the meaning of roots, more than a place, a way of being grounded, anchored, deep into the soil of our own soul. “Bloom where you are planted”, I once read somewhere, and the words stayed with me for a long time as a reminder to make the most of every place or situation I found myself in. But can you bloom without roots? Allow me to rephrase.

Wherever you are, grow your roots, and indeed, bloom where you’re planted.