Hometown

Yesterday, I picked up my concert flute, which I hadn't used for a long time, to play a Japanese melody called "The Original Scenery of Hometown." As usual, I wanted to dissolve my sentiments into the music. I couldn't help but think of my hometown, though I still couldn't identify exactly where it was.

"Hometown" is always a confusing word to me. To my parents, it usually means the rural village where we lived before. However, I don't have much of an impression of those days because I moved to an urban area at the age of four. I usually consider the neighborhood I lived in within that urban area to be my hometown. It is the place where I can recall many stories from my childhood. It is where our family's previous store was located, where my junior high school was, and where my former neighbors—including my parents-in-law—used to live or currently still living.

A couple of months ago, I visited there with my family. A distinct change was that the empty space between my old apartment building and my in-laws' building has now become a car park. I missed the old days a little bit, when seniors could sit under the trees chatting with friends, and children, including me and my brother-in-law, could play various games.

For a very long time, when we talked about hometowns, we meant my mother's maiden hometown—the village she lived in before marriage. In the past, my granny lived alone in that village. Every school holiday, I would spend two to three weeks there. I liked living in the countryside, where you could see blue skies, white clouds, green trees, ponds, insects and animals just by walking out of your home. Granny raised a tortoise, and I often fed it carrots and porks. She also had a longan tree, which was said to have been planted by my granddad's parents. I envied the children living in the countryside because they could connect with nature easily. Meanwhile, I could only sit lonely on the balcony and it was the only place I could feel a little of the natural world.

Xi'an is another city that I was once attached to. However, the Xi'an I really liked belongs to the past, which has been gone for a very long time—for twenty years now.