The Archeology of Home
The thing that anchors me to my reality, especially in the kitchen, is not a memento, a prized appliance, or even an item of clothing. It’s a drawer jammed full of chopsticks: some plastic, some metal, mostly disposable wooden ones. It’s the one sign that has followed me around like a shadow, appearing in every home and flat I’ve ever lived in. That drawer materialises like an ex when you go no contact.
Every household has a version of the mystery drawer, the junk drawer, some call it. The place where you keep loose screws and matches, partially used batteries, and the trinkets from Christmas crackers. It often becomes a kind of Room of Requirement. There’s always a plaster when you need one, even though no one ever remembers putting one in there.
The jumble of chopsticks is its own mystery. I don’t really eat takeaway, and when I do, it’s a hamburger. I’m not ashamed to eat with chopsticks wherever I go in the world, but even I won’t attempt a double cheeseburger with a pair of disposable 젓가락. I don’t think anyone has done that successfully since the nineties, when it was briefly cool.
But this drawer full of chopsticks is always there. It just appears, like magic. I’ve come to think that home is something that happens when you feel happy outside, away from your belongings. I’m not saying burn everything and return to the woods; I like my Kindle and my rice cooker. I’m just saying home isn’t necessarily one place. It’s a feeling that follows you, and when you notice the familiar chopsticks drawer, you know you are safe. You know you can feed yourself, and others. Perhaps because my physical space shifted so often, the feeling of home has grown detached from walls and furniture and has become something I recognise in moments outside of those conventional boundaries.
As a child, my mother took us to a Chinese restaurant in a park, somewhere in Rooihuiskraal, I think. I remember that meal more vividly than I remember dinner last night. I stole the chopsticks. They weren’t wooden; they were plastic with faux lacquering, and I spent hours picking marbles out of an empty ice cream container with them. I’d sit on the floor in the garage where my mother taught art classes. Looking back at this combination of memory, perhaps this was the first time I experienced that sense of belonging and joy in a space that wasn’t “home”. The memory itself feels like a little pocket of home I can carry with me.
In my teens, my father introduced me to a restaurant near Moreleta Park. It smelled of birdseed and the tofu sat in tubs along the wall to the bathroom. The food was incredible. We once ordered deep-fried tofu; they had scrambled silken tofu, then fried it, and served it with a simple salt and pepper mix. I think about that tofu more than I think about anything else I’ve eaten. We went back often, sometimes for serious conversations, sometimes just for lunch. They never managed to recreate those tofu puffs. I doubt they were even that good. I think I was just happy to be eating with my dad. Something clicked that day. Another pocket of home for me to carry around. It was most definitely not the tofu or the dry white Graca that anchored that place in my memory; it was a connection. It was sharing. The restaurant was not home, but the experience has become a version of it.
In my twenties, I discovered Cyrildene. Magically, and through a Gumtree ad, I started working for a Taiwanese family as their full-time tutor. I also somehow attended parents evenings, dinners, embassay meetings and and and. Regarldess, as I moved through these spaces and versions of myself, I somehow brought them all home with me. Carrying home in my pockets and hands.
When my brother and I moved into our first flat in Joburg, we were thrilled to discover we lived within spitting distance of a Dragon City and a Chinese grocer. Life was beautiful. I remember having lunch with him on the rooftop car park; glass noodles and spring rolls. I felt so rich. I had everything a person could need. I had a home. I had money for food. And I had my brother. And just like that the rooftop, with its awful view of the car park, became a version of home. Once again, because of the simple joy found in connection, sustenance and shared space.
That home is gone. The one after it too. The many in between have also vanished. But I still have money for food. I have my siblings, my parents, my friends, my partner; and a drawer full of chopsticks. Home is not a place for me. It’s not about ownership or settling down. It’s in the things that come along when you have to go. And perhaps that sense of what home means to me, is exactly why moving abroad more than once has never felt daunting, scary or life altering. I knew that security could materialise even in the most unfamiliar places, and that I had home with me.
I packed my suitcase with books and not much else when I moved to Korea for the first time. I’ve always struggled with buying clothes. I am, in fact, wearing a pair of trousers I bought in 2019; they cost forty-nine thousand won. The rest of my outfit was bought by my partner the last time he was here, because he recognised I needed some things. I am not helpless, I just have a warped sense of appearance. I am working on it. Anyway, I had to leave some books at the airport. My friend Declan saved them. Bless.
I arrived in Korea with no SIM card and no one waiting at the airport. I was, in fact, five hours away from my intended destination. I remember waiting for the bus. I swear the airport was scarier then. When the bus arrived in Changwon, or what I assumed was Changwon based on the muffled announcement, I got off. It wasn’t a stop, just a stretch of road. I had no way of contacting anyone, so I just stood there.
I wasn’t worried. What was the worst that could happen to a fairly large white man by the side of the road in Korea? Someone would spot me eventually. My boss’s wife eventually did. The bus driver had told her I’d got off early. She found me, loaded my suitcase into her car, and took me to my flat.
Within weeks there was the familiar chopstick drawer, which was a feat considering this flat had two drawers, and I was not able to order takeaway back then. I was afraid to do grocery shopping for two weeks. I lived off convenience store gimbap and chicken breasts. Oh, how I have grown.
The second time I moved to Korea, I decided to come back early, spend a week partying in Seoul, and then make my way down to Masan for my first week of work. I swear the flat came with a built-in chopstick drawer, because my boss kept repeating that she would take me shopping, and I kept assuring her that I knew where the HomePlus, Lotte, and Daiso were and that I could surely take the bus by myself to Emart; I had been here before. It was a homecoming, but not to a flat, to a feeling. Another piece of memory I could slip out and wear to ensure I never felt alone.
The concept of home as a place is something I have grappled with for most of my life, and not because I moved around a lot or because my parents got divorced (yawn). But because home has always been there; it’s everywhere I have gone. In open arms, beds made on couches and meals snuck in between shifts, in invitations to Christmas lunch, and oranges stuffed into plastic bags shoved into my hands. Home is in your friend's bathroom, your parent’s car and your favourite aisle in the grocery shop. My home is not a place, its not a feeling, it's a collection of memories shoved into a drawer that follows me around like my own personal Room of Requirements; and my only requirement is connection.
I have dreams of living somewhere, with my books and my partner, some ducks and no fence. But that isn’t going to stop me in my tracks; I won’t become part of the “I will never own a home” crowd. Because home is what happens when you are outside and you don’t mind. Home is where the chopstick drawer happens. it’s the space between your hand and your friend’s. Everyone wants to belong somewhere, but maybe it’s more important to belong to people. When I settle down with my poetry, partner and pond, I will carry the pieces of my home in my pocket, in my hands and in my mind. We all belong to each other.
I wrote this poem when I returned to Korea in 2023, and I thought it would go well here, its where the name for this blog came from, and I guess the idea for this essay.
Are you hungry?
there are parts of me that are good
just because you drag one foot to reach your home doesn’t mean you are not moving.
like how my hands can peel a tangerine for anyone who asks.
or how there is always space in my arms for the things my friends can’t carry anymore.
the things I pull towards myself like so many scraps to turn them into letters. notes on longevity that I’ve never shared but I’ll feed until you are hungry.
i have never been camping without wanting to be home but I think that home is what happens when you are outside but don’t mind.
there are parts of me, round as a planet. but mine.
and you quickly realize that fishing isn’t about food but about killing. rewards are only valued because someone else can’t have them.
and so they become fruit grown in the backyard, - never good but better because the neighbors don’t have them.
i can open that jar for you, of course. would you like me to meet you at the bus stop? no its fine, i can use the cane so walking isn’t a chore. the truth is the chore has been hearing only that tapping so i think if you walk with me it would drown it out.
there are parts of my back I’ve never seen. you have. because i convinced myself you would see something there that you could use.
maybe you can rest there when i sit. or maybe i can bend down to gather your laundry, tensing my back to support my legs but doing the thing you hate with parts of me i hope you love makes me useful.
when you crack your knuckles to indicate your excitement the sound travels through the death in me to remind me you are here. so noisy. like stars we scream but everyone sees just beauty.
there are parts on my body full of little brown hairs curling towards me because like a cat they don’t see the whole but just the parts to use. to nurture.
i can make you dinner, are you hungry?
when my body keeps moving after I’ve stopped i am aware. there is punishment only for the involuntary. what is bad to one is honorable when you apply sweat.
do you want dinner?