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leaving home by Yee-Fan Sun | 1 2 3
continued from page 1

I’ve always been a firm believer in travel, of course, but the thing with travel is that it’s pretty low-commitment, even when you do it properly, not as a tourist, but as an adventurer. You buy your roundtrip plane ticket, pick up a guidebook and a good map, get a taste of a place, all the while knowing that even if by some chance, you end up not loving wherever it is you’ve decided to sample, it’s all good: in two weeks, three weeks, heck, even a luxuriously lengthy eight weeks or more, you’ll be back home, eventually, where you belong. Home’s a security blanket; it’s the reassuring thought that gets you through the occasional stress of serious travel, that lets you get lost, for an afternoon, in a strange city, without any fear of losing your place in the world.  

Leaving home, you have no such safety net. That first time you buy a one-way plane ticket, or pack up the entire contents of your life into the back of your car, and make the move to a brand new city without a set “leave-by” date stamped firmly in your mind, you’re making a leap into the unknown, with no guarantees that anything will work out. It’s a scary jump, and frequently frustrating, particularly when traditionally, you’re the sort of control freak who likes to know exactly what she’s doing and where she’s heading and how she’s getting there, every little step of the way. In my case, that leap came after a push of sorts: my then-boyfriend, now husband, had moved cross-country to Arizona for grad school, and after six months of attempting the long-distance thing, I weighed my options. Live in a place I adored far away from a boy I missed every minute of the day, or say goodbye to the city I’d planned to call home for the rest of my life, to be with the boy whose presence made me feel most completely, totally at home. In the end, it was no contest: I called the moving company, shipped out my car, and bought that one-way ticket to Tucson.

It’s been four and a half years, and only in the last year or so have I stopped feeling like I’m in exile, in this dusty Southwestern town whose strange desert landscape made me feel like I’d landed on a scorched alien planet when I first left home to come here. In the beginning, I hated it. Hated the heat – dry-heat be damned, summer was still unbearable; hated the endless strip malls; hated how small-town the city felt, despite it’s not un-sizable population. There were no good bookstores, that I could find, anyway, nowhere to stroll and people-watch, and not a single place in town to get halfway-decent Chinese food. I missed my friends, my family, my life. At parties, I’d meet well-meaning folks who’d ask me the inevitable “So how are you liking Tucson?” and the best I could muster up would be a weak “Oh, it’s nice and cheap, I guess.”

skedaddle on for more

---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home.