About place and identity

The concept of place and identity always has a complex and sentimental feelings to me. Basically speaking, when we live in a certain place for long enough and therefore start to get familiar with the surrounding situations, we will gradually generate a kind of inenarrable emotional feelings towards this place. This feeling is especially strong and obvious when we leave the place. For instance, when we travel to other cities or countries, although the new environment is appealing and exciting, we always hold a sense of unfamiliarity deeply in the heart, in other words, this place just do not feel like “home”. Another example would be: traditional Chinese still believe in a perception that “fallen leaves return to the roots”, which means that where you born, where you die. This further indicates people’s territorial complex towards their native place. In one word, the longer we live in a place, the more the place grows on us and gradually becomes who we are- our identity, this is my understanding of the rhetoric of place and identity.

I have been in America for almost ten months, but until recently do I begin to realize a fact that my determination of leaving China and spending my college life in a different country means a total farewell to my previous life with my parents, after four years of college I am going to a graduate school, after graduation I have to find a job, get married and therefore stick to my own family, I will never have the chance to live with my parents like the old days. I am a grown-up now. In the past ten months, I always have the difficulty finding a sense of belonging here, so when I do something, I do it with a sense of responsibility and mission but not with passion because I constantly believe that I am not belong to here, and that I will eventually go back to where I come from one day. But after the above-mentioned idea suddenly occurred to me, I start to rethink about my perfunctory life: since studying abroad is my own choice and I still hold an explicit target about my future, I have to change and start living passionately and actively, if I cannot “take fate by the throat”, I will completely lose control of my own life ˙˙˙˙˙˙

From my personal experience, I further understand the relationship between place and identity. Just like the famous saying states: “there is no place like home”.