Visiting "home": the trip back
The annual or once-every-few-years trip back is its own genre of experience: logistically absurd, emotionally loaded, and completely unlike a holiday.
The suitcases
Going: chocolates, cosmetics, vitamins, electronics, and specific brands requested by name months in advance. Coming back: pickles, spices, sweets, clothes stitched to measure, and a quantity of dry snacks that will not fit. The weight limit is the central engineering problem of the trip.
The circuit
- Every relative must be visited, and the order matters. Skipping someone is remembered for years.
- You will be fed at every stop, regardless of what you ate at the last one. See food as affection.
- You are assumed to be rich. Currency conversion makes any diaspora salary sound enormous, and explaining rent abroad rarely lands.
- Gifts flow both ways and the accounting is invisible but real.
The strange part
Being treated as a guest in the place you're supposedly from. Given the best room, not allowed to help in the kitchen, addressed slightly formally — and simultaneously teased for your accent, your inability to handle the heat, and your caution about the water.
And the place has moved on. Parents transmitted the country as it was when they left; the actual city has new roads, new money, new problems, and cousins with lives that owe nothing to your family's narrative about home.
Build in two or three days with nothing scheduled — the circuit expands to fill all available time and you'll return exhausted. And record the elders: get grandparents talking on video about their childhood, the migration, the village. Nobody regrets doing it; a great many people regret not having.
Last updated: 2026-08-11
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