Written After Homelessness

Note: This post is translated by AI. If you find any unnatural phrasing or errors, please feel free to contact me via email or other channels. Your feedback is appreciated!

What is a home to you?

After canceling the rental in Taipei last month, I became homeless. I really want to say romantically that from today on, the world is my home, I live on Earth, and I will roam the world!

But reality is not that romantic, I actually want a home.

I am now in Australia, living in a house next to a factory. Does this count as having a home? Or could the house I originally rented in Taipei be counted as a home?

Does a place to live count as a home? I don't think so.

After my parents divorced, I moved around many places, dad's friend's house, a Buddhist temple on the mountain, grandpa and grandma's house, grandma and uncle and aunt's house, and then several houses rented with different groups of friends.

The only time I felt like home was when living with grandma, uncle and aunt. Every day when I woke up, grandma would make breakfast for me, and ask me if I was full when she had nothing to do. After school, aunt would watch TV with grandma in the living room, and we would eat dinner while watching "Stylish Man - The Chef". On holidays, I could pester uncle to take me out to play, or play online games at home together.

However, this scene probably only lasted until my first year of high school. My grandma passed away then. Since then, no one cooked at home. Uncle and aunt bought their own meals. I also joined the dance club, and always went home after eating with friends after practice, staying in my room as soon as I got home.

Thinking about it now, the prerequisite for a "home" to be established is the scene of "family members eating together at home".

But what counts as family? The traditional definition of "family" generally refers to parents and some relatives living together, which I think is a shackle for many Taiwanese.

Because many people are not treated well by their parents and relatives. Many people seem to think that just giving birth to a child and providing food and clothing until they grow up is enough. Parenting methods also often stay at "raising children to provide for old age" or treating children as extensions of parents' will.

To put it nicely, it is "for your own good", but actually it is just wanting to control the child's life, implying distrust of the child's ability and eternal inequality of power status.

When children grow up, absorb a lot of knowledge, and their life experience becomes rich, I don't think parents and elders will always be more correct than children. Therefore, children do not need to always obey their parents. This does not mean disrespecting parents, but parents must first respect that their children can make decisions that are good for themselves.

Of course, there are parents and relatives who get along very well, it's just that I think family is not limited to or always people with blood or marriage relations.

What if we think of "family" as "people in the house" or "people living together"?

I have lived with five groups of people since university.

Unfortunately, I feel that so many experiences were not ideal for me. There was a lot of friction when living together. Actually, shared rental requires running-in, but I think my desire for "home" was too strong, while for them, it was just a short-term rental for the convenience of studying or working, and they didn't need to put so much thought into it. This caused a lot of burden on each other, and also made me feel unbalanced about our friendship. I even blocked all members of one group. Thinking about it now, it was a bit too impulsive, but maybe it also means that the fate has ended.

Thinking about this period of shared rental, I also often didn't stay at home. After all, shared rental has less personal space and occasional friction, so I would go to cafes. The cafes I went to most often were Love;Cafe, Kafka by the Sea, and Early Autumn Cafe. But Love;Cafe didn't survive the pandemic, and Kafka by the Sea closed after urban renewal. Now only Early Autumn is still open.

To be honest, the time at Love;Cafe gave me a brief feeling of "home". I spent about three years hanging out there whenever I had nothing to do. As soon as I walked in, the proprietress would say "You are here", and then order a vanilla latte for me. At first, there was a best friend stationed there. I often went to find him, and after going for a long time, I slowly met many new friends there.

Those three years coincided with university graduation, moving out of relatives' house to share a rental with friends, and changing careers to software engineer. Staying there allowed me to face these changes more calmly, like a haven for me.

Getting along with friends who could only be met there also made me realize for the first time that "meeting doesn't require knowing each other before". Now in the two years since Love; closed, I haven't met most people again.

After ending these few shared rentals, I lived alone. Although I longed for the "scene of family members eating together" in my heart, I also wanted to try to see if I could build a "home" by myself.

The result was that I felt very lonely, but I wasn't lonely for too long, because half a year after living alone, I happened to meet my ex-girlfriend. She came over almost every day after work, and we were soon in a state of almost cohabitation. I felt really happy during that time, but unfortunately there were many parts of our values that could not be reconciled. My plan to work in Japan, which had been brewing for a long time, also just started, so our relationship ended in less than a year.

I will come to Australia before going to Japan. Besides the parts mentioned in Leaving Taiwan for Two Years: Heading to Australia and Japan, another reason is the end of the relationship with her. I couldn't wait for the Japanese visa to come down, I wanted to go out and see first.

And in that half year of living alone, I felt that I became more and more silent, and spent too much money filling my loneliness. I bought a lot of anime merchandise and novels, and also chased stars crazily. I think I really liked those things, but the frequency and intensity at that time were higher than I expected. I think I wasn't fully enjoying it, but filling some emptiness.

After clearing out the rental place, I took stock of all "my" items in the world. Since I needed to leave them at a friend's house, I threw away a lot of things and only kept those that were truly important. The things I kept mainly fall into these categories:

1. Clothing
2. Novels, mainly Brandon Sanderson and Kotaro Isaka, plus a set of Elegant Yokai Apartment Life and other works.
3. Anime merchandise
4. Star-chasing merchandise, mainly Airi Suzuki, milet and Ado.
5. Memory items, such as yearbooks, past diaries, postcards.
6. Some electronic equipment

I have traveled and lived in Japan for a month and a half, and currently lived in Australia for a month. It's not inconvenient without these items, after all, most daily necessities can still be bought, but a room without these really makes me feel it's just a place to live.

Writing here, actually I am still very vague about the concept of "home", but besides the prerequisite of "family members eating together at home", perhaps "items with my or other family members' personal style" should be added.

And currently my idea of "family" is "people willing to create a sense of belonging together". I also felt a similar feeling in many works, such as "Tokyo Godfathers", "Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid" and "Spy x Family". That kind of atmosphere is what I yearn for.

I quite like a comment left by a senior in the previous article "Probably no country is heaven, but there will always be a country that gives people a feeling of home". Now I am in Australia, and will go to Japan next year. I hope to meet a place that gives me a feeling of home, or find people who can create a sense of belonging together, just like Cikapasi, the Ainu orphan in Golden Kamuy, who stayed after meeting people willing to accept him in Karafuto after traveling with Tanigaki and Inkarmat.

Finally sharing a little anecdote. The day before finishing the article, a Taiwanese here was leaving. He had a Japanese friend who wanted to see him again, so a group of us went for a barbecue. Only then did we know that the Japanese girl also originally planned to come for a working holiday, but she met a Brazilian boyfriend, so it became two people planning to find a way to stay here.

Thanks to Joe, Hsuan, Ning, Ke, Jung, min, YA-Xuan and Hanyuan for reading the draft of the article and giving feedback.