22. Stories of home

In the early days of this millennium, I graduated university in England and set out for a new life in China. Here, I share the quiet stories of my journey, a chronicle of discovery and displacement, woven into the fabric of a land vast and unfathomable.

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Light pooled through the classroom windows, settling in geometric shapes along the rows of desks. The students were waiting, their books open, pencils poised, the hush of expectation settling like dust. After our sojourn to Zhuhai, routine had reasserted itself with a quiet insistence. The ceiling fan droned overhead, barely enough to stir the heavy warmth of the Guangzhou morning.

The day’s lesson was on hometowns. A simple enough topic, one that ought to have allowed them to talk about something close to their hearts. The students, eager as ever, tapped electronic dictionaries, searching for the right words.

“My hometown is very beautiful.”

It was a phrase that emerged again and again, echoed like a refrain. Sincere, but stunted. A thought only half-formed. I pressed them gently, coaxing out more. “What makes it beautiful?” I asked. “Is it the mountains? The river? The people?”

They hesitated. Words did not come easily. Their vocabulary was a narrow pathway when the moment asked for an open road. They reached for adjectives - “big,” “small,” “clean,” “good” - each one a frail approximation of what they truly meant. Some scribbled notes in the margins of their textbooks, shaping their sentences as if stacking bricks, one by one, a structure of meaning slowly taking form.

As we went around the room, I began to realise something: very few of them were from here. Guangzhou was a city of migrants, and my classroom was a reflection of that. They came from the far corners of China, from places I had never been but suddenly longed to see through their eyes.

A boy from Harbin, where the winters were so bitter that the air bit the skin. A girl from Urumqi, her accent carrying the clipped syllables of the northwest. A soft-spoken student from Yunnan, whose home, she told me, was near the rice terraces, where the hills folded into each other like waves. Their descriptions were tentative but earnest, drawn from memory more than language.

Only a few students were from Guangdong itself, and they were easy to spot - not by their faces, but by their Mandarin. The difference was subtle, but unmistakable. They struggled with the “sh” sounds, a telltale trait of Cantonese speakers learning Mandarin.

Hearing them, I thought about the city beyond the classroom walls. Guangzhou, the home of Cantonese, and yet out in its streets, I barely heard it spoken. It lingered in the older districts, among the elderly, in the crumbling teahouses and shadowed alleyways where time had yet to reach with its standardising hand. But for the younger generation, Mandarin dominated. The tide had shifted.

I wondered what it must have felt like to watch one’s language recede. Not by force, not by decree, but by the slow drift of convenience and modernity. A soft erasure. And yet, even as Mandarin tightened its grip, the city remained a place of movement, of shifting identities. It was a city of migrants, and the only difference between them and me was that I was visible.

As we talked, the lesson shifted. The more they described their hometowns, the more they revealed about themselves. Home, for them, was not just a place on a map but a sensation: an old street market, the sound of a dialect spoken with familiarity, the scent of a mother’s cooking in the evenings. Some missed the quiet of the countryside, the slowness of village life, the sky unstained by the neon glare of the city. Others had already learned to love Guangzhou, its ceaseless energy, its streets alive at all hours.

One girl told us about the camphor trees near her house, how their leaves turned translucent in the rain. Another remembered the roar of cicadas in the summer heat, louder than traffic, louder than thought. A boy described the coal smoke from his grandparents’ stove, rising in blue wisps each winter morning, and how its scent clung to the old coats in the hallway.

And then, unexpectedly, the discussion turned. One of them asked me, “Do you miss your home?”

I paused. The question was simple, but I found I didn’t have a simple answer. The students watched me, waiting.

I told them that yes, I missed England sometimes. The cool air, the damp mornings, the way the light hung long in the summer evenings. But home felt different now. The longer I stayed here, the more I felt a strange sense of belonging - not to one place, but to living itself. To the feeling of being between worlds.

And in that, we found common ground. We were all, in some way, away from home. We were all adapting, reshaping our lives to fit into the spaces we had chosen, or that had chosen us. They nodded, some in understanding, others still turning the thought over in their minds.

A boy near the front raised his hand hesitantly. “Teacher, do you dream about your home?”

The question caught me off guard. I considered it. “Not often,” I admitted. “But when I do, it feels strange. Familiar, but distant. As if I’m visiting a place I know well, but that no longer calls to me in quite the same way.”

A murmur rippled through the room. One of the students translated it into Mandarin for those who didn’t quite grasp my answer. I turned the question back on them. “And you? Do you dream of your hometowns?”

A few nodded. Some described their dreams: a grandmother’s house, a childhood street, a mountain path they walked to school. Others said they did not dream of home at all - or if they did, it was not the home they remembered, but a version of it blurred by time and distance.

There was something fragile about the way they spoke. As if naming these places aloud might make them vanish. Or worse, might make them real again, with all the ache that entails.

The lesson moved on. More words were learned. New phrases took shape. But something lingered in the air, unspoken but understood. The weight of home, the stretch of distance, the way we carried it all within us, wherever we went.

As class ended, they filed out into the corridor, their voices rising in a dozen different accents, different stories. For a moment, I stood in the emptied classroom, listening to the echo of their words. Outside, Guangzhou continued. Restless, shifting, gathering people into its vast, indifferent embrace.

I thought about my students, their stories still unfolding, their roots stretching backwards to distant provinces, yet finding a way to anchor themselves in this new place. I, too, was part of this movement. Not entirely here, not entirely elsewhere. Still learning to settle, still learning to name what I had left behind.

Home was not a destination, and not quite a memory. It was something built and rebuilt, in quiet classrooms and crowded markets, in moments of recognition between strangers. And here, among these students, I had begun to glimpse the shape of it again.

A Moment of Gratitude

If the words of Ill Grandeur have resonated with you, consider buying me a cup of tea. In China, tea is more than just a drink - it is a symbol of connection, warmth, and reflection. A one-off tea is a way of sharing in the journey, supporting the story, and keeping the spirit of discovery alive. Every cup helps bring the next chapter to life.