The house is not what it used to be. This year, I will be building a new home in Hilltop, moving back to my childhood home, and soon flying to my hometown of the Philippines. What does it mean to return home to a dormitory with friends, a town with family, an archipelago with a nation? In a world of blurred boundaries, where rootlessness is a must and globalization is rampant, the comforts of home are far more evidence of a grounded idea of home than the land itself.
Diaspora communities around the world know better than anyone what it's like to have a homeland without borders. They live in disconnected connections, and the academic literature outlining imagined communities, transnational identities, and global capitalism is littered with paradoxes. I grew up whitewashed, but in my search for home, I have witnessed Fil-Am's efforts to build a bridge between the two places. For me, it's Philippine TV, Taglish, family gatherings, and bridges made of warm pandesal. For other Fil-Ams, the bridge back home is different. Perhaps it was made from a balikbayan box, a long-distance telephone, or a Filipino language school. But for all of us, it is a bridge that not only connects far-flung places, but also reconfigures near spaces and creates a metaphorical rather physical home.
In other words, I learned that home is not home and home is not home. This is a well-founded cliché for me as I prepare to leave yet another home this summer. I ask myself, am I really leaving my home and moving into another, or am I simply improving and expanding the one I already have? I realized how a house is an invisible work in progress, something that is not static but evolves. A home may be a physical place you stay, but it is an abstract space that you live in, and a space that lives within you wherever you go.
Pico Ayer, author art of silenceexplains how, in the face of globalization, home has less to do with where you've been than with where you're going. I advocate a combination of both. Your house needs to expand into a new area versus the old land. I keep this in mind during my summer in the Philippines. I will pass on every bond I have with my homeland to new bonds I wish to forge.
Going to Manila to reconnect is like returning to a region of the Philippines that is already present in my life and updating it with summer experiences.
In college, I had to figuratively build an entirely new wing of my home from scratch, complete with just a 224-square-foot cell on a hill. Yet, rather than “build a new home,” as most people like to say when entering college, in hindsight I realized that I wanted to build on the foundation I had already laid in my hometown, a suburb of Philadelphia. It was a. In the past, home meant a Mini Schnauzer and Saturday family pancakes. At Georgetown, that meant brunch with the Bulldogs and Leo teams. Now that all this is done, there is plenty of room for what happens in Manila after that.
Eight months have passed, and despite the obstacles during construction, Georgetown has become one of the coziest rooms in the maison of my heart. Now, on my trip to the Philippines, I'm excited to make Manila just as comfortable. Although both rooms are decorated differently and physically separated, they are still part of the same house. We should not be afraid to build a home without borders and make it a home that nourishes not only ourselves, but also those with whom we happen to share it.
Sara Santos is a freshman at the McDonough School of Business. Coconut Girl appears every other Friday.