Having lived in three countries in six years, four if you count Hong Kong twice, Sharon Lesley Le Roux finds herself in an ideal position to reflect on expat life and the true meaning of home
It’s the middle of October, and as I wake it’s a whole 3º outside. Daylight is still a few hours away. I flew out of Hong Kong two days ago, and am now thousands of miles away, in my attic bedroom/ study in our north of England home. Three months ago I left here, having decided to return to Hong Kong with my youngest daughter, Emily, after six years away.
This house is one of six roofs I’ve had over my head that I’ve called home in the last six years, in three countries, across three continents. Since we returned to Hong Kong, I’ve watched Emily settle brilliantly into Year 8 at Discovery Bay International School, as well as into DB life in general, all too conscious that this is her fifth school since she left Owls in Mui Wo at the age of six.
Sitting in my attic room, coffee made, the central heating kicking in, I almost feel a visitor in this space, even though it’s my space. This is still my home, but it’s not home home anymore. That, for the moment at least, is a rented flat close to DB Plaza. I’ve lived all over the world, and I realise, as an expat, I’m not sure anymore what the term “home” refers to. I feel I once knew what “home” was; it had a definable substance, something solid and real I could associate it with, as did Christmas, before I discovered there was no magic, no rotund bearded man bringing my presents.
I sip my coffee and I ask myself: what is “home”? Where is it? Is it just one place, or can it be several at any one time? Are its foundations firmly planted in one location, or is it pack-up-and-moveable? Is “home” even a place at all? Is it a feeling, the essence that belongings and decor and ambiance create inside a set of four walls, or is it rather a collection of experiences and emotions shared by the people who live there?
One thing I do know, we all need a home; somewhere to sleep at night, somewhere to keep our people and our stuff safe. In our search for somewhere to call home, we’ve all, at some point, entered a place which immediately felt “right”, that feeling of rightness almost ethereal in nature, going beyond what we can only see. Places have character, personality, atmospheres, auras, and they’ll welcome one person and turn another away. We move in, and begin adding to that “right” feeling the experiences of everyday living which turn into memories and, before we know it, this place we’ve labelled “home” is now a space where we not only feed our stomachs but our souls.
Lantau is, for me, one of those places. In 2003, visiting my long-time friend Carol, we walked from her home in DB via a Trappist monastery to a place called Mui Wo. It was Easter, the weather perfect for this Englishwoman, and as we came over the hilltops and began descending into Mui Wo, I fell in love. By the time we were down at sea level, walking the path around the bay, I was telling Carol I wanted to live in Mui Wo one day. Two and a half years – and a couple of visits later – on a Christmas break from a job I’d taken in South Korea, I met my to-be-husband at the China Bear. (Note: while Santa may not, the Universe delivers, so be careful what you wish for.) I moved to Hong Kong the following year and we progressed in our studies and careers, we raised children, and lived a Lantau life for the next 12 years.
I’ve called many places home in my life: flats; houses; Airbnbs; hotels; resorts; tented camps in national parks with elephants, and bears, outside; youth hostels galore across Europe; even a train once, while crossing the expanse of South Africa.
In the eighties, my home was a rural American house a train ride outside of Philadelphia, my room connected, via a shared bathroom, to the bedroom of the children I was nannying. In the early noughties, home was a dorm room on a South Korean university campus where I taught English. In 2018, we lived a short walk from beautiful Melkbosstrand beach in Cape Town. And, until moving back to Hong Kong in July of this year, home was this late-Victorian terrace house overlooking an oh-so-English park with a bronze WWII memorial angel at its gates. Before I bought and lived in my first home in Leeds – which gave me that “right” feel as soon as I walked through the door – home was a house a few short miles away from where I am now, where I lived with my mum. It was the house I grew up in, went to school from, and although it wasn’t said too often those days, it was the house where I was loved. They say home is where the heart is, and if “home” is something etched on one’s heart, then that particular home is etched very deeply.
As is the house in Mui Wo we called home for 12 years. I recently did the DB-Mui Wo walk with my husband, Chris, and on looking down into Silvermine Bay, I got the same exact feeling I did that first time, and every time since: this is my home. Something about the place pulls at me, like a child tugging at my sleeve and squeezing my hand; it’s a magnet pulling at the core of me. Sometimes we choose where home is, and sometimes it chooses us.
In this house in Yorkshire, even though it’s totally familiar, I feel unsettled, displaced. I’m here primarily to check that my older daughter, Gen, is doing OK. She didn’t leave for Hong Kong with us, she stayed for her university studies, her part-time job, her friends, the boy she loves. But her younger sister, Emily, is thousands of miles away in Hong Kong, along with her dad. Being an expat means you can’t be with all of your people all the time. My ageing dad is here, my brother is here, my cats are here. The transient nature of being an expat, with family and friends in different places around the world, means memories, even the good ones, are revisited at a price.
When I arrived yesterday, I opened the door to Emily’s old bedroom. I could see her so clearly there in my mind’s eye, but I also saw a room standing empty. We have symbiotic relationships with our spaces, and her bedroom – her space – felt almost lonely, an empty room filled with nothing but expectation and hope, and disappointment that it was me opening the door. This house now has too many rooms and too few people; it’s haunted by the spectres of the family we were here until a few short months ago.
I know Gen feels our absence, how could she not? She sees us here together, I’m sure, the Ghosts of Family Past. I want to put her in my suitcase and take her back home to Hong Kong when I go, but her life is here, in this house, creating new memories in it every day that don’t include us apart from in WhatsApp video calls, and our once-in-a-while guest appearances. So instead, I’ll transport her in my heart, trusting her to take care of my precious cargo; trusting that she’ll eat properly, get enough sleep, laugh plenty. As a parent, there’s no escaping Empty Nest Syndrome, it occurs even when it’s me who leaves.
So, what is “home”? Now as much as ever, it’s still the place where we put down roots – for however long we might be there. Back in the eighties, Paul Young sang that home was wherever he lay his hat. Today, I feel we expats are snails or tortoises, carrying “home” with us, except it’s less “caravan” now, more virtual reality. Like my SmarTone eSIM, home is more digital than it is physical. For me, forever the traveller, the concept of “home” is something moveable in nature; it’s mobile and transportable. It has real foundations: they’re not laid in bricks and cement, but in layers of memories and emotions and experiences of all my homes past and present, shared with all my people, past and present. It’s this home I carry, wherever I go.
As I ponder in this, my space, warmed by the room’s radiator, daylight is just showing behind the Velux window blinds. In hope, I speak to Alexa. She tells me it’s still only 3º outside and that I really shouldn’t get my hopes up about today’s “high”. My thoughts return to Lantau where I’ll be in a couple of weeks, that place where, thankfully, the temperature at this time of year is in the mid-tolate 20ºs. Lantau, where home is where the heat is.