{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-story-js","path":"/story/a-place-to-call-c/","result":{"pageContext":{"data":{"id":"-de53c9bc-66fa-5c6f-bf00-9a4ef91733f7","authorFirstName":"Calvin","storyTitle":"A Place to Call Home","photo":{"asset":{"url":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/nr9digz2/production/7a32b762bb1b65efbae2e059621eda0ea6007263-7008x4672.jpg"}},"audio":{"asset":{"url":"https://cdn.sanity.io/files/nr9digz2/production/6463fc0c30e36cdb395c2f9ddf7c9048a23b759b.m4a"}},"secondLanguageAudio":null,"school":{"name":"Taipei American School","city":"Taipei","location":"Taiwan"},"tags":["Community","Migration"],"_rawText":[{"_key":"aeb23c5b0c55","_type":"block","children":[{"_key":"6183833a47e90","_type":"span","marks":[],"text":"I woke up, it was harder to get up this time. The air mattress had halfway deflated in my sleep. I sat on the edge of it and put my feet on the cool tile, there was no carpet anymore. That had been packed up. Like the rest of my things. I looked at the bare beige wall. There were no posters, not even dust. Everything had been wiped down. It smelled like a hospital. I got up to get dressed. I didn’t have a closet full of clothes anymore. My life was packed into a suitcase.\n\nMy dad was born and raised in the Military, and so was I. As a child, I went to four different elementary schools, and that didn’t change as I got older. I went to two middle schools and two high schools. I always thought that home was where I was currently living. Some said it was where the heart is, or where your family is. Others said it was the place you liked most. I never had my answer to this question, like many ideas you have at a young age.\n\nI didn’t have my answer to this question until I was in high school. Coming back to the United States after living in Taiwan for my first year. I got to see what it was like to live the “normal” American teen life. I got to drive around in a car with no adults, blasting whatever music I wanted. I went to drive-throughs at ridiculous hours of the night. I did almost whatever I wanted to.\n\nOne night, we met up with some of my cousin’ friends. Since I was from Taiwan, they wanted to know a little bit about it. “Hey, what’s it like living in Thailand?” I explained to them they were different countries. They asked, “Do you speak Chinese?”, “I do not” I replied. I talked about how my dad was in the military and I have lived all over the world.\n\nThat is when they asked the dreaded question: “Where are you from?” My default answer was just to say California because that is where I had lived the longest, so I replied “California.” In the most nonchalant way I could. The rest of the night was fine and I didn’t start thinking about it until I was laying in my bed that night. My mind started to wander. I started thinking about what that question meant to me. I did not know. All the people I had grown up with always had a simple easy answer to that, and so did my relatives. Why could I not find an answer to it? The more I thought about this question the more it confused me.\n\nI realized that I didn’t have to have an answer to this question. The experiences and the places that I have lived made me who I am. I am not a person who has a summer home they go back to or a place they were raised. Sadly, I won’t get to live in one home my entire life, but I would never trade experiences for it. It has made me who I am, and I am not the only one who has these experiences either. Growing up never living somewhere for more than three years, I have got to meet people with similar backgrounds. I wasn’t the only one who had ever experienced this. I realized that most of my close friends had this experience too.\n\nThis has taught me one main thing. I do not need to force myself to be from one place, and I did not have to call somewhere home. Maybe I didn’t have a place to say where I am from right now. Maybe it is something that is coming, and I am okay with that.\n"}],"markDefs":[],"style":"normal"}]}}},"staticQueryHashes":["3309388390","890781507"]}