Blog

Is Home Where We Come From, or Where We Are Heading?

When I Stopped Looking Back and Saw a Harbour — From the Body, Ancestral Roots and Chu Ju to a New Understanding of Belonging

When Coming Home No Longer Feels Like Coming Home

Recently, I came across a LinkedIn article titled When Coming Home Doesn’t Feel Like Coming Home. It was written by a German woman who had spent many years living in Taiwan. After returning to Germany, she discovered that the country she had once called home no longer felt entirely familiar. She had grown accustomed to the rhythms of life and the ways people interacted in Taiwan. Returning to Germany meant learning to adjust once again.

Her experience made me think about my own life. I was born and raised in Taiwan, have lived in Germany for more than twenty years, and have followed the history of my family back to the ancient state of Chu, more than two thousand years ago. These three places belong to my life in very different ways. Taiwan is where my childhood memories were formed. Germany is where I have spent much of my adult life. Chu is where my search for ancestral roots has taken me.

For a long time, I had thought of home primarily as somewhere we return to. Yet the more I considered these different origins, the less certain the answer became. The place where we were born, the place where we have built a life, and the place to which our ancestry leads may not be the same. If all three are part of who we are, which one should we call home?

Three Ways of Remembering Where I Come From

Taiwan remains part of my bodily memory. I remember the temple forecourts of my childhood, the streets, the voices and the familiar rhythms of everyday life. Even after many years away, certain sounds and smells can bring back an immediate sense of recognition. I do not have to search consciously for those memories. Sometimes my body seems to recognise a place before I have found the words to describe it.

Germany holds a different kind of memory. Here, I learned another language, studied, worked and raised my child. More than twenty years have passed, and what was once unfamiliar has gradually become part of ordinary life. Germany is not the origin of my family lineage, but it is where a substantial part of my adult life has unfolded.

Then there is Chu. This connection did not begin with a childhood memory. It began with family genealogies, ancestral names and historical records. Following those traces, I began investigating the ancient civilisation of Chu and the history of my family more than two thousand years ago.

Eventually, I travelled to places that had previously existed for me mainly in family records and historical accounts. I visited the ancestral hall in Luwu, Lingshan County, Guangxi, followed by Jiangxia in Wuhan, Jingzhou and the ancient city of Shouchun. Near Huainan, I visited the site locally identified as Huang Xie’s tomb and the tomb of King Kaolie of Chu. Names I had encountered in my research were now connected to landscapes and places I could see with my own eyes.

These journeys gave my ancestry a physical dimension. Yet they also raised a question I had not expected. I could trace my family history, visit ancestral places and recognise the different origins that had shaped my life. But did knowing where I came from necessarily mean knowing where I belonged?

A Life That Never Followed a Straight Line

My life has rarely followed a predetermined route. After moving from Taiwan to Germany, I lived through different stages of migration, education, work and family life. Some decisions were practical; others began with curiosity. Experiences that once seemed unrelated only revealed their connections much later.

I eventually began using the idea of Chu Ju to understand this pattern of movement. The ancient text Chu Ju, preserved among the Tsinghua bamboo manuscripts, records the places where the ancestors and rulers of Chu lived and how they moved between them. Rather than seeing migration as a single departure from one homeland towards another, I began to see my life as a continuing process of encountering places, adapting to circumstances and forming new relationships with the world.

My way of learning has developed along similar lines. I often enter an unfamiliar environment before I know exactly what I want to investigate. Something catches my attention, I begin asking questions, and those questions lead me towards books, historical records or technical explanations. History, languages and engineering may initially seem to belong to separate worlds, yet fieldwork has repeatedly brought them into contact.

I have described this approach as my modular learning physiology. The body encounters something first, knowledge gradually accumulates, and connections sometimes become visible only years later. Not every experience needs to fit into a complete plan from the beginning. Some of its significance emerges through what happens afterwards.

For years, much of my curiosity had been directed towards the past. I followed ancestral names, investigated Chu history and travelled to places associated with that civilisation. Then another world gradually entered my life: rivers, lakes, ships and harbours. I began studying maritime history, visiting historic vessels and exploring how waterways had shaped cities and human movement.

One day, standing aboard a ship in Hamburg, I looked out across the Elbe and watched the vessels moving through the harbour. I had spent so much time following traces of the past. Now I found myself looking in another direction.

What if migration was not only about leaving a place or returning to one? What if it could also mean moving towards a form of belonging that had not yet taken shape?

A Harbour Is Not Necessarily a Home

Hamburg had fascinated me for some time. I loved its harbour, the ships moving along the Elbe and the historic vessels that preserve different chapters of maritime history. I read about the development of the city, explored its waterfront and turned my field observations into articles. I also tried sharing my work with institutions connected to the maritime world.

Yet as these exchanges developed, I began noticing something that had little to do with ships. Some of my messages received no response, and some contacts did not lead to further conversation. I could feel a strong connection to the maritime history of Hamburg without necessarily finding the same sense of connection in my exchanges with people there.

In Dresden, a city in eastern Germany where I had not initially felt a strong personal connection, I experienced something quite different. After visiting a transport museum and writing about its exhibition, I received a thoughtful response from someone who had taken the time to read my work. The conversation moved from my field observations to the philosophy of bodily experience, and then to Chinese mountains, waters and different ways of understanding landscape.

What had begun as an ordinary museum visit became an unexpected intellectual exchange. Someone had recognised questions in my writing and responded with questions of his own. The experience made me realise how much a genuine response can change our relationship with a place.

A beautiful landscape can make us want to visit. A harbour full of ships can give us countless reasons to return. But neither can guarantee that we will feel at home. That feeling also depends on whether people listen to one another, whether exchanges are reciprocal and whether there is room for trust and respect.

Ships need navigable waterways and suitable berths when they enter a harbour. People need something more complicated. We need relationships in which our presence is recognised and our attempts to communicate are met with a response.

I had once used Chu Ju to reflect on migration and the search for a place to live. Now I was asking a different question. When a person feels drawn towards a place, can that place also make room for them?

Perhaps finding home does not mean discovering waters where storms never occur. Perhaps it means finding somewhere, and someone, with whom we can finally drop anchor.

When Home Begins to Point Towards the Future

Looking back, I can see three different kinds of origins. Taiwan holds the memories of my childhood and my body. Germany holds more than twenty years of lived experience. Chu connects me to an ancestral history reaching back more than two thousand years. None of these origins needs to cancel out the others. They are all part of my life.

But this time, instead of continuing to look backwards, I turn around.

Ahead of me are rivers, ships and a harbour on the Elbe opening towards the wider world. I do not know whether Hamburg, or somewhere entirely different, will eventually become a place where I truly belong. The answer cannot be found in a family genealogy, a historical document or the beauty of a harbour alone.

Perhaps home is not exclusively something we have left behind. It may also emerge through the places we have yet to encounter, the lives we continue to build and the people who respond when we reach out to them.

I began this journey by asking where I came from. Now I find myself asking where I might be heading.

Perhaps home has a future tense, too.

Companion Essay | From Bodily Experience to Belonging

Going into the Distance and Encountering a New Self | Body, Shan Shui and the Making of Cross-Cultural Knowledge

The companion essay explores how travelling through unfamiliar landscapes, museums and cultural environments can transform bodily experience into knowledge and open new ways of understanding ourselves.

This essay continues that reflection with another question: when our journeys change who we are, how do we begin to understand where we belong?

Further Reading | Sources and Related Fieldwork

The English narrative is based on the original Chinese essay and the author’s independent fieldwork. Historical references to Chu Ju, ancestral places and Chu heritage are discussed in the Chinese text, together with links to related fieldwork articles.

For further context, readers may explore the author’s writings on Chu ancestry, migration, bodily experience and modular learning physiology in the Chinese sections above.

Across Civilizations

We Found Our Ancestors. Now What?

King Kaolie looked at me with satisfaction.

“You went to extraordinary lengths to trace your ancestry. You travelled all the way to Guangxi, then back to Jiangxia. You visited the site locally identified as Huang Xie’s tomb, and you even came to my tomb. Now that you’ve finally found your ancestors, I suppose you’ll be coming home more often?”

“Whenever my research takes me there,” I replied.

Huang Xie looked curious. “Then where are you going next?”

“Out into the world!”

King Kaolie stared at me. “And what about me and Lord Chunshen?”

“You’re coming with me, of course!”

Huang Xie smiled. “It seems your search for your roots has turned into the starting point for another journey.”

The king burst out laughing. “Ha! So you travelled all that way to find us, not because you wanted to remain in Chu, but because you intended to take us travelling around the world!”

“Exactly! Although I haven’t the slightest idea where we’re going next.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Huang Xie replied. “First, we’ll see which direction we’re heading. Then we’ll decide where it might be worth dropping anchor.”

“Excellent!” declared King Kaolie. “Then let us continue our journey!”

I once followed the traces of my family lineage into the past, standing before the site locally identified as Huang Xie’s tomb and visiting the tomb of King Kaolie of Chu. My search across more than two thousand years of history was never intended to keep me in the past. It helped me recognise my origins so that I could continue exploring the world with my ancestors beside me.

My origins help me understand who I am. My course gives me a direction in which to search for the future. And perhaps home is somewhere along the road we travel together, waiting for time to reveal its answer.