Home and hometown are where your heart is. Being away from home or hometown will evoke your feeling of nostalgia. Nostalgia is the pleasant or sad affection that corresponding particularly to home and hometown. Home is an intimate and secure place where you live with your most loved people and with your most precious experience. Hometown, in my opinion, is a larger scale version of home. Home and hometown are special places where we have personal intimate experiences; especially intimate relationships with people over there. Though people may not share the same experience, they always uniformly become very attached to their home and hometown.
People always confuse house with home. Home, in most people’s minds, is a house or an apartment where we live and sleep. Whereas, house, from my perspective, is a carrier for people’s experience of home. House is a space, which, according to Tuan, is marked off and protects people against outsiders. Nevertheless, when people inject experience and sensation into a house, it is no longer a space. Moreover, home, in Dovey’s theory, can be a room inside a house, a house within a neighborhood, a neighborhood within a city, and a city within a nation. Home is dynamic and experience oriented. In contrast, house is more realistic and static. From my point of view, it is experience that dynamizes home. Tuan’s famous theory of experience constructing home is surly true. In the introduction of Tuan’s book “Space and Place”, he claims that spaces are open and like territories for human beings and other animals, however, places embody felt values and meanings. I agree that it is experience that helps construct and maintain a place. Unconsciously, deep in our heart, there exist the most intimate experiences with a place. Such intimate experiences cannot often be expressed by words. However, these experiences are important because these experiences lead us to the sense of home. In another word, routine behavior and experience in a house lead to the familiarity of the environment of house and thus we gradually can ‘feel’ the environment. Consequently, these experiences grant value to the space and construct it into a meaningful place. In “Home and Homelessness”, Dovey explains that even when we turn off the lights, we unconsciously know the spatial structure of the house. At home, we feel absolutely relaxing because the environment of the house is deeply rooted in our conscious and we do not even need to think to adapt it.
From my point of view, how a house becomes a home more depends on people in the home. According to Tuan, home is private and secure. It is the particular place where you want to stay when you are vulnerable, where you want to rest when you are exhausted after revelry, and where you want to live happily long after with the one you love. Often, we call people sharing the same home ‘family’. Family is the most common but as well as the most unique relationship between people. It is common because everyone has a family, big or small. However, this family is distinct from others’. For me, my home consists of the closest people to me in the world - my parents and me. My affinity to my home and family always reminds me the sense of home. For example, in the summer break, many times my friends asked me, “Let’s have dinner together tonight!” I had to apologize to them, “I’m sorry, I really want to, but my mom have made dinner for me.” Even though my mom always told me that I could play with my friends but had to come back earlier, I often returned home as soon as possible to have dinner with her. As I grew up, my affinity to home grew as well because I began to understand my parents’ love and began to care about my family. It is my bond with people at home getting closer that intensifies my sense of home. Therefore, as Tuan comes up with the play that suggests home is how one human being “nest” in another. I undoubtedly agree with this point of view.
However, on the other hand, Lahiri, who lived in Rhode Island during her childhood and adolescence, has had bittersweet experiences there. In an interview about home, she said that she did not feel at home in the house they had been living for years when she was young. Because her parents, the adults who owned the house, did not think of the house as their home. In “Rhode Island”, Lahiri specifically depicted their life at “Rhode Island”, which was very burdensome. Stories about home should always warm one’s heart. However, when Lahiri was young, she and her family’s lives were not as good as expected. According to her memoir ‘Rhode Island’,She was always lonely at that time, and her mom was mistreated at school. Home should be a place, which protect you when you are susceptible. However, if you feel insecure at one place, you will never regard the place as home.
Home is not only a place that shelters us but also a place where we can feel even thousands miles away. Longing for home evokes a special affection: nostalgia. Being students who study abroad, we are missing our home everyday. We usually do video chat with our parents, we go to Chinese restaurant together, and we often talk about our hometown. Though far away from our home and hometown, we still have strong bond with where our hearts are. Nostalgia is a particular feeling that can only be inspired by feelings cohering with home and hometown when you are far away.
Hometown, from my point of view, is a larger home that shared by a group of people who were born and raised in the place. Hometown is also a place build on intimate relationships. “It may be plain, lacking in architectural distinction and historical glamor, yet we resent an outsider’s criticism of it.” Tuan’s description in the chapter “Intimate Experiences of Place” completely represents my heartfelt voice. My only hometown is Nanjing. I was born and raised there for my entire life before college. My friend and I often complain about Nanjing’s bad traffic condition, the polluted environment, and the corrupt governors. While when someone who does not belong to Nanjing says anything negative of Nanjing, we will immediately defend our hometown and disregard his or her words.
People from the same place seem to have an inborn intimacy. When you are away from hometown but meet someone saying the same language, dialects or having the same accents, you may feel natural closeness between each other. You two may be total a stranger to each other; however,because you both have the same bond to a particular place, naturally, it is easier to become connected to each other. According to Tuan, language is a vital force in human-cultural geography. In China, each province, even each city has its unique dialect. The dialect is a representation of the culture of a place. When people chatting with each other with dialect that belongs to and is understood only by a small group of people, others, who do not belong to the place, will automatically become excluded by this community. Dialect, defining a person’s origin and root, is a character of a place and also depict a person’s identity.
Home and hometown are the most intimate and secure places for a person. Merely a house cannot represent a home. Home is the place where we share with the closest family. Being away from home or hometown will evoke your feeling of nostalgia. No matter close to or far away, we defend our home and hometown whenever there is outsider who intends to defame it. Home is the warmest place in the world that shelters and protects us.
Works Cited:
Dovey, Kimberly. “Home and Homelessness: Introduction” Human Behavior and Environment: Advances in Theory and Research. By Altman, Irwin and Carol M. Werner eds.New York: Plenum Press, 1977. Print.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. "Rhode Island." State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. By Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. New York, NY: Ecco, 2008. 101+. Print.
Tuan, Yifu. "Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative Descriptive Approach." Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 81. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 684-96. Print.
Tuan, Yi-fu. "Intimate Experience of Place." Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1977. 136-48. Print.
Tuan, Yi-fu. "Introduction." Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1977. 3-7. Print.