No Way Home

Mom said on the phone: "Why do you even think about coming back here? I myself just hates I can't get out of here. I can't stand its backwardness, its lack of civilization. I can't stand it every day and every minute and I absolutely don't want my children to come back here, EVER! You're born in this damn place, and you actually want to die here?!" Her voice broke in a sudden outburst of anger.

I put down the phone calmly. But there's undoubtedly a hard bump forming in my chest. Then I realized that the last ditch of efforts of my mom in her life long battle against her cursed destiny is to keep her daughter from returning to the place she was born in. The bitterness of my mom has a long root, but let's just say, she's from a better place.

 

I had left the K city at age eighteen with the same distain of that place, and the great expectation that I was going out to the big world, the real world and I was never going to come back, EVER. I had made my efforts. I went to a top University of the country, in the "developed region", I took a job in Shanghai. I took an MBA in Hong Kong, I stayed briefly in the U.S. and I came back working in Shanghai. It was not my plan to go back the K city. The plan was to live in a nice European city, or a small town is better.

 

But I'm tired at the age of thirty-seven. I had worked double the hours than my generation before and perhaps ten times the hours than the average person in my parents' generation. And Shanghai has been getting on my nerves for a while. The maddening crowds, the unending construction, the unrelenting noise, the corruption of morals (which is no way to run from, actually, unless I run out of the country), and the rocketing real estate price that kept the house of my desire eluding my power and finally a CPI index that seems to be spinning out of control, that drove me to draw up this back-up plan to finally wind up an apartment in the K city, as an insurance against the depreciation of my hard-earned money.

 

As the turn-around of mind works in favor of the K city, I started to miss its blue sky (still much bluer than all most all of the cities in China), its abundant sunshine with pleasant climate, its mushrooms in the summer, its air at least fresher than Shanghai and everything much cheaper. As to the backwardness and lack of "civilization" as my mom calls it, actually is an ignorance in itself, but not malicious or harmful. While the local people on average do lack in the grace of manner or style or sophistication compared with people in Shanghai or other "developed" cities, they're generally considered to be more honest, down to earth, or even good-hearted. To be true, there're more than a few people who actually told me that they are so drawn by the city's lay-backness, the good weather and cheap price that they want to retire there! Imagine how shocked they would be, to hear my mom's verdict on the city.

 

Still, my mom's protest has revealed a startling fact to me: that there is No Way Home for me. The draw-backs of the K city might still gets me, with a good chance, shall I really go back there.  Shanghai is becoming too expensive, plus too noisy. And the respective effort of me and my boyfriend to make a breakthrough outside of our jobs on projects with potential financial success may never born a fruit. 

 

Just yesterday I had been mourning about Lily's destiny, that she has a home she couldn't go back anymore and she has no place in Shanghai. But now, am I at a better place?

 

But if there's anything I'm really proud of, I have a heart of a rock, and I'm in this life a self-proclaimed passenger anyway. Home will be where my books are, home will be where my pen is (or actually keyboard and Internet connection). So if I have no way home, I'm not on the way home either. I'll just be on the road. Keep the music on.