Tianni on Love: When does a home stop being a home?

My daughter has lived in Beijing since she was a teensy two-month-old baby. That’s not saying much, if you consider she’s only three. But if you take into account that these three years have also been her whole life thus far, it’s pretty significant, especially when the little one actually thinks of China as her home and speaks Mandarin Chinese as mellifluously as any other native preschooler.

In fact, the girl feels such affection for her home city, she refers to her little compact world -- literally the one square kilometer ringing our apartment that includes her kindergarten, favorite mall, park and comfort restaurants -- as “My Beijing”, a term always said with an undisguised hint of patriotic pride as if her tiny sliver of this vast chaotic capital city is the equivalent of a sovereign nation. To her it is. Infallibly, at the end of a day’s outing outside of this little fiefdom she presides over, or on the annual trips back to Singapore to see family, little K would begin missing the home that she has adopted (and which has adopted her in kind) and ask to be back in “My Beijing”.

Who could blame her for thinking she belongs to a different country from her parents? All the memories she’s formed in her young life –- her pioneering steps, the little friends in preschool, her beloved ayi, the first snowman, the tiny playground she gazes longingly down on from her window each morning –- all the big and little things that makes up one’s life, for her they have all been largely formulated here. And my heart aches thinking of the eventuality of tearing her away from all these memories she’s formed in her host country, from the only life she’s ever known, back to a country that I still consider as my home but which she’s a complete stranger to.

Yes, we’ve been recently thinking of moving back to our country of origin, for a variety of reasons I shall not expound on. And the excitement over the new chapter in our lives such a move could potentially open up has been countered by a host of complex emotions. Not least over the worry if little K would adopt her new home country with the same devotion she’s done with China. Yes, I’ve heard that little kids adapt easily, that they’ve short memories, that even perhaps that they’re too young at this point to have their feelings taken seriously. But I fear the little gal could, like her mum, be that tad too sensitive and sentimental. Complicating it all is, if I were to be honest, I don’t really want her to adapt completely to a new home and in the process forget all about My Beijing. For it’s also been both Our Beijing.

It’s been here that I first found my footing as a mother and where we gradually established our mother-daughter relationship, from the early antagonistic sleepless months of my fuzzy postnatal memory, to the breakthrough end of the first year during which I’d become to her, the indispensable “Mummeeeee!!!”, and she’d grown into this 1 meter tall chili padi (a tiny, very spicy chili pepper) who’s also quickly cementing her position as my youngest best bud.

Some evenings after putting her to sleep and with the significant other away on one of his perennial work trips, I sit in the silent hall of our rented apartment, trying to take in with my senses as much as I can of the space that both of us have become so familiar with, and that I know will one day be inhabited by others, perhaps even another family with its own loud-voiced little wonder. I gaze at K’s first tricycle in its usual corner of the room, likely abandoned by the distractible one in mid-pedal, and imagine how different this space will be when both vehicle and person no longer making their noisy loops on the parquet flooring. I take in the view of the floral sun hats we conveniently toss atop the wooden carving of the couple frozen in a kiss, and wonder over how naked they’ll look without the adornments, how much the hats now look to me a part of the sculpture that had come along with the furnishings. And I peer into the girl’s darkened bedroom where she sleeps sprawled on the bed in her usual haphazard fashion, and attempt to imprint onto my permanent memory the scene I’ve looked upon night after night that will no longer be once we go, because the bed won’t be the same, the room won’t be the same, and the little girl will eventually not fit under her favorite “whale blanket”.

Making a mountain out of mould(hills)? Perhaps. But memories are something I’ve never been good with, because they haunt me even when covered with the dust and cobwebs of the passing of time. Change, I’m good with, but not nostalgia. Take my home country to which I feel an umbilical connection to. Every time I visit and chance upon roads or places I’ve once routinely frequented, I get assaulted by a volley of flashbacks from an expired period in my life that resembles nothing of my present life, and which thus makes the emotions that well up in me all the more bittersweet. I figure the attachment I feel is because the sum total of the years I’ve spent in Singapore still exceeds those I’ve spent outside of it, and the outdated memories are the result of not having made any fresh memories of much significance there.

While I resolve to update the memory bank with the unfolding of the next phase of our lives there, for little K though it’ll be different, at least until the inevitable moment when her memories in Singapore outweighs the ones made in Beijing. I really don’t know if that will be a good or bad thing, oh the ambivalence. How can one actually file out of sight memories that make up a period of one’s life without being utterly disrespectful to the people and relationships in it?

But perhaps that’s just the problem I have, thinking we’ve to prioritize memories along a linear progression of time. Perhaps if we think of them as existing all at once in parallel universes, and just us who happen to be inhabiting a different space at the moment, then we don’t really have any need for the sadness of letting go.

And little K can remain rooted to My Beijing and all that she loves in it, even while she finds new people and places to love in her newly adopted home.