Many times in America, I’ve felt a sense of alienation in my father. As much as he is rooted in his new country, speaking a language he’s worked diligently to unaccent, there is an underlying desire to be somewhere else. He projects his insecurities, isolation, and homesickness by lashing out at loved ones, acting curt to service industry workers, and constantly seeking a good bowl of mifen. 

 

But in Guiyang, my father comes alive. He laughs in ways that America has erased, a laughter that can only be brought about by home. He talks (perhaps too much) at social gatherings while cracking chestnuts from the local street vendors. There, the mifen costs 99 cents and tastes like nostalgia. The people on the streets grew up with him. Dad himself still navigates the streets like a local, even after years of reconstruction and pavement covered his childhood tracks. “迷路时，猴子会带你回家” [“If you get lost, the monkeys will lead you home.”], he used to say, and from those days on, I’d besiege him with pleas of “爸爸，咱们去追猴子!” [“Baba, let’s chase the monkeys!”]. 

 

Guiyang raised me too. Some of my most vivid memories are embedded in its tiled roads and ashy air. It’s a place where I learned courage from buying cups of yogurt downstairs, where I took my parents’ mother tongue as my own first language, where aunties treasured a daughter and 哥哥’s adventures smelled like home-cracked fireworks. At the end of a long day, there were always endless stairs to look forward to. We had no choice but to climb them—eight stories up to reach 大姑’s old apartment. 

 

But things have changed now. The stairs are pushed to a dark corner, rarely touched in lieu of newly installed elevators. I’m slow to pick up conversations in the local dialect, and I struggle to find my way back, even from my favorite mifen shop. As much as I want to belong here, I don’t recognize it anymore.

 

If I had lived here more consistently, I’m not sure that I would have noticed the minute day-by-day developments that collectively turned our rolling hills and irrigation lines into the same urban wasteland as Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing. True locals like my aunt have seen all the phases of Guiyang from agriculture to skyscrapers, and in a stubbornly loyal way, they’ll probably stick around to see decades more of change. The people there make up a generational community; they rarely leave. 

 

It makes me wonder how Dad can stand coming back, knowing that 1) the city progresses without him, and that 2) these people don’t have a yearning to broaden their perspective beyond their mountainous fortress. That’s how I feel about California. 

 

Guiyang feels foreign to Dad as much as Saratoga feels foreign to me, but he yearns for his hometown in a way that I refuse to mirror. It’s a stubborn attitude that boggles his mind and quite frankly hurts him a lot. He used to question his ability to raise happy, fulfilled children, and that in turn sent me down a rabbit hole trying to disprove his insecurities, only to come up empty-handed in cyclic conversations and an ever-dwindling desire to come back home. I don’t know how to tell him that Saratoga affords me few pleasant memories, most of which are shrouded by paralyzing stress and desensitized happiness. I don’t know how to admit that the worst sides of me come out here, that I regress into a hole of loathing, jealousy, and self-pity to the point where I genuinely wish for the worst in other people. These are traits I’ve worked to unlearn elsewhere, through the gracious example of role models and peers undergoing the same lessons. But the lingering negative thoughts are a constant reminder of a place that allowed its children to nurture such hideous ideologies.

 

My refusal to recognize my birthplace as home comes from a desire to reject the concept of home as a whole. It’s disillusioning, spending 18 years in a place that drew out the worst in me, feeling like something was off but never really realizing exactly what until leaving, then spending years after foraging for friends, cultures, and landmarks to belong in places I knew I would eventually leave. I’ve come to a point where I feel the most free being on the move. The freshness of setting up a home excites me more than following through with it long-term. 

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I do wonder how Dad’s memories of Guiyang got tucked into such a happy cabinet of memoirs. He likely had as many bad days there as I did in Saratoga, and he has far outgrown the place with his new scope of worldview. I think it’s mostly because he feels at peace there, loved. One of my favorite songs is Vienna by Billy Joel. While mostly a metaphor for embracing age, Billy has also said that it is subconsciously dedicated to his estranged father, who went back to his hometown of Vienna, Austria, to start a second family. The song is comforting and nostalgic, and when he sings "Vienna waits for you," I'd like to think that he and I both have yet to discover the allure of our fathers' birthplaces.

 

Today, Dad turns 65. He’s retiring later this year, after years of school in Lanzhou and Montreal, and years more of work on a fraction of a hard disk drive in San Jose. He still dreams of going home to Guiyang, a place where he has lost his citizenship and friends. I’m humbled by his stubborn loyalty, and inspired to reconsider the negativity I harbor against my own hometown. Following the monkeys symbolizes going home for Dad. I’m not ready to go home yet, but I’d chase them to take me to him, to the father that raised me to laugh unapologetically, to a place where he feels comfortable being his fullest self again. In his safe space—this humble glimpse into his timeless euphoria—I feel safe too, and also at home.

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爸爸，贵阳等着你。[“Baba, Guiyang waits for you.”]