place; home; self identity
Space is all around us. However, what does space mean and how does it relate to human beings? To answer the question, Tuan points out that “‘space’ is more abstract than ‘place’. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value”(6). In another word, when people live and engage with space, it becomes place that means something to us. Specifically, I believe that home is the most essential concept for us to think about since one spent most of the childhood in the “place” which one would call it “home” because I believe, the place which defines each individual and with which each of us identifies oneself.
But, what is home and why should we care? At first glance, common sense tells us that home is a place to live and to satisfy basic human needs such as eating and sleeping. However, to me, home is more than the physical structure of a house with furnitures and appliances. It contains connections among family members in a household, inter-personal relationship in a community, and culture and language in a town. A home has the power to define one’s identity when an individual spends most of childhood growing up in that home.
But, what is home and why should we care? At first glance, common sense tells us that home is a place to live and to satisfy basic human needs such as eating and sleeping. However, to me, home is more than the physical structure of a house with furnitures and appliances. It contains connections among family members in a household, inter-personal relationship in a community, and culture and language in a town. A home has the power to define one’s identity when an individual spends most of childhood growing up in that home.
The power that home has on a person can be the uneasiness caused by movement from home to another place. In another word, since a person’s identity is strongly conducted to his or her home, one will expression different emotions and behave differently after moving. To illustrate, let us consider Lahiri’s short story Rhode Island: “After we moved into that house, something changed; whether it was my growing older or the place itself, I was aware that the world immediately outside our door, with its red- flagged mailboxes and children’s bicycles left over night on well-seeded grass, was alien to my parents”(101). The story took place in Rhode Island where she moved from Kingston to another town one mile away when she was eight, and felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar in the new place because the “laid back, intellectual feel” that she grew up with in Kingston has defined part of her characters in a certain way different in the new place. |
Still, you would probably think that traveling allows people to explore exciting new places which may bring changes to one’s identity. So does Manzo who, in her research For Better or Worse: Exploring Multiple Dimensions of Place Meanings confirms this thought with her conclusion that goes: “For some [people], the metaphor of home aptly fits their experience of connection, stability and belonging. For others, the metaphor of journeying may be more useful” (Manzo 83). Although it seems like not every single individual feels connected only to home, the feeling of connection to a place is not necessarily equivalent to identifying any places as home which can define this person. Adding to Manzo’s conclusion, I would point out that people who have traveled around must have a stronger understanding of how home defines themselves. Different from Lahiri’s movement of only one mile from home to a new place, moving to another state or even to another country means that an individual is surrounded by a different or even totally different culture environment. Since sometimes, a new place defines a person very differently, he or she may more often spontaneously display characteristics that home has defined to the public. Doing so generates a stronger and more connected feeling to home and reinforces one’s recognition of his or her identity defined by home.
A case in point is my study abroad experience in Atlanta. I was born and raised in a Cantonese society in China, I have never doubted my Cantonese identity and where my home is. After high school, I have been studying at Emory University in Atlanta since a year ago, a place with a totally different culture and language from home. As I made new friends and got to know new “places” in the new environment, I have become more “Koreanized” because I enjoyed and felt comfortable with speaking Korean, eating Korean food, and talking about Korean pop culture with Korean friends at Emory. As a result, people around me started to refer me as a Korean and “assumed” that it was my “new identity”. However, the truth has been that I have never felt so confident and proud of my identity as a Cantonese though I accepted and mingled with another culture. What people around me had overlooked was that when I was hanging out within the Korean community, I constantly talked about my home and how it embraces a culture and identity different form the Korean one. Indeed, I felt comfortable in the new place, but it did not take my Cantonese identity away. For instance, when I was sick, Cantonese special herbal soup and “patient food” immediately came to my mind. It was a spontaneous process that was hard to be changed.
Talking about sickness and healing, current society seems to assume that home is the warmest and the most healing place. Price agrees with this assumption by claiming that: “homes…and houses…provide refuge from the outside world at times in life (infancy, illness, old age) when we are particularly fragile” (126). From this perspective, it seems that home always impacts and defines a person positively. In contrast, home, in a way can define a person negatively yet powerfully.
I recently read a book called Escape from Camp 14, the reality presented is totally contradictory to what Price as well as many readers believe. The main character of the story is Dong-hyuk Shin, who was born in Kaechon Internment Camp, also known as Camp 14, located in South Pyongan Province, North Korea. “Shin was born a slave and raised behind a high-voltage barbed-wire fence. He was educated in a camp school…Because his blood was tainted by the perceived crimes of his father’s brothers, he lived below the law” (Harden 7). As he escaped from the camp and North Korea to South Korea, Shin told the world the reality of his home. Shin’s first memory in his life was execution; his parents’ marriage was arranged by the camp guards after which they lived separately; he barely received a proper meal and he once betrayed his mother and brother for a meal of rice; he often got beaten by the teachers in the camp school and he had seen his fellow classmates got beaten to death. More sadly, he did not know anything about the outside world, including the former leader of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, and the fact that people outside of camp could choose whatever they like to wear and could have proper food (though the condition in North Korea was still backwards), not to mention the existence of China or the United States. While he was born with fear, hunger, pain, mistrust, hatred and so on, it was not until his escape from Camp 14 did he realize that there could be love and intimacy among people in the society.
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Despite the fact that Shin grew up in an inhumane hell-like place, his story defends my argument that home defines one’s identity. Whenever people ask him where his home is, his answer has always been “Camp 14” because it is the place that defines his characters and attaches him with the identity of slave. His distrust in anyone has been deeply rooted in his blood given that even when Harden, the author of the book interviewed him in South Korea, Shin still show mistrust and lack of eye contacts. He later confessed that it had been hard for him to talk to people with confidence and trust because of the way he was raised and taught. Shin’s story totally refutes Price’s claim that home is a place that provides refuge. On the other hand, his story more strongly confirms my argument that each individual is defined by his or her home.
To sum up, from Lahiri’s one-mile removal from home to my experience of studying abroad on the other side of Earth, it is without doubt has home defines characteristics and identity of a person, which carry on with him or her even when one moves to another place, regardless of distance. In addition, Shin’s case proves that home is so powerful that it can influence a person negatively, yet Shin does not reject North Korea as his home. Thus, an individual’s identity is strongly defined by home and, can be hardly changed by moving to a new place that may further reinforce one’s identification with home.
Works Cited
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- Harden, Blaine. Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. London: Mantle, 2012. Print.
- Lahiri, Jhumpa. "Rhode Island." Identity: A Reader for Writers. Ed. John Scenters. 1st ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2013. 101. Print.
- Manzo, Lynne C. "For Better or Worse: Exploring Multiple Dimensions of Place Meaning." Journal of Environmental Psychology 25.1 (2005): 83. Science Direct. Web. 26 Sept. 2014. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027249440500006X#>.
- Price, Patricia L. "Chapter 13 Place." Ed. Richard H. Schein, Jamie Winders, and Nuala Christina Johnson. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography. 1st ed. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. 126. Print.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu. "Chapter 1 Introduction." Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2002. 6. Print.