The Stranger

A few weeks ago, back in Taiwan, a friend asked me:

“After all these years away, how do you think you’ve changed?”

I thought for a moment and said, “I think it’s this feeling of being a stranger everywhere, no matter where I am.”

The conversation drifted on, but my thoughts stayed behind. Three weeks earlier, landing at Taoyuan Airport, walking from the plane through the jet bridge, the familiar humid heaviness hit my skin all at once, and memories began pressing themselves back, one by one. Strangely, though, they wouldn’t quite stick. The distance that had grown between me and Taiwan over these years in the States had apparently given my body some kind of non-stick coating.

And yet I wasn’t sad about it. I didn’t think the distance was a bad thing. If anything, I finally understood something about my past self.

How so?

After living somewhere quiet for a few years, I came to realize that life in Taiwan had always kept my senses in a state of constant overload:

the grinding shriek of train wheels rounding the curve between Dongmen and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall MRT stations;
the suffocating stillness just before an afternoon thunderstorm breaks;
pedestrians darting across streets without a glance at the crosswalk;
the firecrackers and piercing suona horns of a temple procession winding through the neighborhood;
the night markets blazing with signs in screaming colors and clashing contrasts,

and countless other experiences I could never quite catalogue, all of which left me thoroughly worn out. I always wondered why most of the people around me seemed to manage just fine, rolling with the noise, joining in the gossip. I had grown up on this same soil, yet somehow never grew the eyes, nose, or ears to match it. (My mouth, however, adapted beautifully. Taiwanese food is unbeatable.)

Leaving that land for North America, I found streets that were calmer, more harmonious in color, neighborhoods where houses sat in quiet order. But there was plenty here that demanded its own kind of adjustment: customer service calls that route you through number after number before leaving you on hold for half an hour; a two or three hour drive counted as nearby; restaurant servers who interrupt your meal to check on you, and then you tip them on top of it. (How is everything tasting? Great, thank you. How is everything tasting? Great, thank you. How is everything tasting? Great, thank you.)

Do I miss Taiwan desperately because of all this? Not entirely. Do I miss the States desperately when I’m back in Taiwan? Not entirely either. I suddenly understood what a classmate once told me: “I’ve now lived in the States longer than I lived back home. I’m always missing Sri Lanka when I’m in America, and missing America when I’m in Sri Lanka.”

Which leads me to a hypothesis: what if home is simply the sum of everything we miss? Home no longer confined to a birthplace or a childhood address, but stretched across time, made of the people, places, and things our hearts are tied to. Or perhaps it doesn’t even need to be something we love deeply. Just somewhere we can exist without feeling out of place, somewhere we fit rather than merely tolerate, is already remarkable. In this wide world, in environments that so often make us feel like we don’t quite belong, finding even one or two spaces where we can simply rest and breathe is an extraordinary stroke of luck.

Writing this, I find myself thinking of the family and friends scattered in different places. Why do we become family and friends to each other? If it were purely biology, then by my own definition,¹ some people who share my blood don’t really fall within what I’d call family. If it were shared interests, how many interests does it take to truly become a friend? Does any common interest qualify? If it were shared values, then why do we sometimes meet people who are better than us in ways that make us willing to change?

And sometimes, if we had met the same person at a different point in their life, or ours, perhaps we wouldn’t have become friends at all. So why is it that meeting someone at a particular moment can determine, for the rest of a lifetime, whether they become family or friend?

The answer feels too mysterious for me to fully grasp. For now, I can only call it grace. Because this is not something we can get through effort, or arrange by carefully scheduling the right encounters. The grace of meeting someone who fits, someone with whom we simply belong, is what allows us, wherever we end up, to catch a glimpse of home: no loneliness, no need to stay guarded, time together that passes like seconds, old unspoken understandings quietly growing into new ones.

And it is somewhere in that accumulation of seconds and unspoken understanding that the overwhelming sensory experiences and the cultural frustrations suddenly become a little easier to bear. I’m grateful that some people in my life have become a place I can rest when I’m tired. And I’m honored to be that place for some of them in return.

May we be home to one another.

NB: This article was first published in Chinese on 04/18/26. It was later translated with assistance from AI tools, edited by me, and published in English on 05/02/26.