LaoChaofengMy Hometown Is No Longer My Hometown
My hometown is no longer my hometown
This is neither a complaint nor a pose.
It feels more like a confirmation—at some unremarkable moment, I finally realized that, in a place once familiar, I had slowly become a stranger.
The streets are still those same streets; their names unchanged, their directions unchanged, even the tree at the corner still standing where it always has.
Yet when I stand there, I cannot find a place that truly belongs to me.
It is not being lost, but a tacit sense born of drifting—always feeling that nowhere is entirely my own.
In the long course of wandering, I came to realize
that no place is completely unfamiliar, and no place is ever fully familiar.
When a person has been gone long enough, a hometown begins to rewrite its own narrative.
New orders, new relationships, new layers of memory pile one upon another,
and I am merely someone who remembers an older version.
Only later did I realize
that perhaps I never truly had a hometown to begin with.
Childhood is not fixed to a single coordinate,
but cut apart, transported, and settled across several different places.
The people in those places gradually lose their memory of me,
as if I had appeared only briefly,
never long enough to be remembered.
The relatively clear memories
(merely a psychological dwelling, though in reality the people and social relations of that place may already have changed)
remain confined to the period from sixth grade to middle school.
There once stood a white magnolia before the door,
reaching high toward the sky,
like light snow feathers drifting in a summer breeze.
Now it has long since withered,
leaving only shriveled branches behind.
Yet I still remember clearly the fragrance of its blossoms,
a faint scent seeming to spill from deep within memory,
gently encircling the space before the doorway.
While other scenes gradually blur and fade,
this white magnolia remains especially vivid—
not because it mattered more than anything else,
but because it left the most vivid imprint in my memory.
Before and after that time, places kept changing,
while emotions never had time to take root.
What is called “being unable to return”
is ultimately an acknowledgment of one’s own drifting self.
I can stay anywhere,
yet find it difficult to treat any one place
as my true whereabouts.
Perhaps what truly disappeared was not the hometown,
but the self that once grew slowly in a silent corner.
And yet, gradually, I came to understand:
perhaps true belonging
does not lie in deeply rooting oneself in a single place,
but in learning to build hidden connections
among multiple shallow roots.
Like those seemingly isolated fragments of memory—
a sixth-grade classroom,
street corners in different cities,
a withered white magnolia—
deep within my neural network,
they are exchanging nourishment in ways I cannot see,
slowly growing into a new, geography-transcending inner landscape.
The “hometown” lost in the text
is quietly being rebuilt within my written sentences,
in another form.
