Janet’s Journal: Going Home

By Opinion Editor Janet Guan

When summer began back in June, alongside relief for the end of a tumultuous sophomore year, I was met with anticipation for what I expected to be two months of time just for myself.  That was, until a 20-second WeChat clip of the Jiangsu countryside reminded my dad of home. 

Weighing hefty plane ticket prices against the enticing vision of his parents’ cooking, my dad spent the first week of summer contemplating a family trip to China. Caught in the net of his indecision, I found myself wavering too: two weeks in the sweltering heat of my dad’s hometown or a complete month of studying for the August SAT? 

After a stretch of tentative decision making, we ended up not going at all. Jiangsu province, my dad was dismayed to learn from his weather app, would rain for an entire week. Part of me shared my dad’s disappointment — the last time I visited China was more than two years ago. Yet, I also saw summer as an opportunity to build myself. I had so many goals: ambitious study plans, long-winded reading lists, and even dormant hobbies I wanted to revisit. Family time just wasn’t one of them.

It was only miles away from the Bay Area and any semblance of home that I began to change my mind. I spent the last seven weeks of my summer at a summer program in Santa Cruz, returning home only on the weekends — visits that quickly switched from being a nuisance to the comforting familiarity I needed at the end of each exhausting week. 

On the Friday nights I returned home, my parents would take my brother and me to one of our favorite noodle shops. As I devoured tomato and beef soup noodles, my brother would update me on his ever-changing hobbies while my parents would chat about everything from the stock market to childhood memories. These evenings, I realized, were the most at home I had felt in a long time.

During the school year, wrapped in my own bubble of stressful classes, tiresome extracurriculars, and the classic pressures of MSJ, I had somehow convinced myself that time alone was the most worthwhile spent. Somewhere along the road, family time had disappeared from my list of priorities — including family vacations, monthly restaurant dinners, and the cornerstones of my childhood that I had once found mundane. 

Yet, the summer I spent bouncing between two worlds reminded me that independence and crafting a path for ourselves doesn’t mean letting go of all that is familiar. In a world riddled with impermanence and uncertainty, there’s nothing more valuable than the people willing to care and stand by us no matter what; these are the connections we’ve held on to all our lives and will continue to support us unconditionally in the future. 

Even as life gets busy and we drift away from what once was, there will always be a place we can call home — whether it be a hometown, a favorite restaurant, or the smiles of the people we love the most.