Ideas - Can you ever truly return home again?

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

At age 11, writer Andrew Lam fled Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon. Nearly 45 years later, he returned to a radically different city. He believes "you will be cursed with longing" if you continue to search for the feeling of home you had in the past.At a time when more people have been forcibly displaced from their homes than at any other time in history, IDEAS explores what it means to return home years — or decades — later. *This is the first episode in our five-part series, The Idea of Home, which originally aired on June 13, 2022.

This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Kamal As Sulai, dreams of returning to his family home in Yemen. It's a tiny house and white walls, up a hill, in a part of Aden called Mukala. I haven't actually literally laid eyes on it since the 1990s,

but I've seen lots of pictures. And one of my fantasies is to put on my home and garden television hat and redecorate the place and bring it up to coat. My dad built it in the 1950s, and it has been in our family ever since. So it's the only continuous residence or home or place that has been in the family, in a family that moved around the world a lot. Since he left Yemen in the 1980s, Kamal's homeland has been battered by war, by famine,

and now by the COVID-19 pandemic. And I kind of dream of a place and a time that obviously do not exist anymore. And a family that has been ravaged by war, by death, both my parents are gone. as are four of my siblings. So I'm just, in a way, I'm trying to, through this house, which is the only part in Yemen that still belongs to us, everything else was taken away from us, everything else was confiscated. And so it's the last remaining connection to my father

and my grandfather, his father, and by default to my mother. There's nothing else in Aden that belongs to us anymore. Once they're lost, homelands can take on a mythic quality. Vietnam was a place that had disappeared. It was impossible to reach, especially during the Cold War. People fled from it, but no one ever returned. And so in a way, Vietnam became sort of like a paradise lost for many of us. Those lost homelands become more of an idea or a story than a real place.

It's a camelot, it's a lost age in a way. It's an old adage. You can't go home again. But what happens when you try? So I emailed chief and counsel out of nowhere and said, hey, I'm a former foster kid that got adopted. Can I come and do, like, some climate change research? And they said yes.

This is the first installment in our five-part series called The Idea of Home. And we begin with a homecoming. We're calling this episode return. There is a certain story that we tell about immigration, is that people flee mostly third world countries in search for a better world. and once they get to that better world, that's it, they've made it. My name is Kamal Asulaili.

I'm a professor and director of School of Journalism writing in media at UBC in Vancouver, and I'm the author of Return, while we go back to where we come from. By thinking of going back to where you came from, first of all, you're sort of undermining that allegiance or undermining conception of that allegiance. So where do you belong?

Why is Canada, for example, not enough for you? Why aren't you completely integrated as a Canadian? And the fact is that those who return kind of challenge all these, in my opinion, myopic views on identity. They're in effect saying, listen, we have multiple belongings. We could love Canada, but we could also continue to love our homeland. Why should we sever our ties from the homeland? And that tie could be expressed, you know, culturally through food and through performances or whatever, but can also be expressed through return, through going back, whether periodically,

or temporarily or for good. Chapter 1, Origins The reason a person leaves home has a profound effect on what it means to return, and before Kamala Soleil longed to return to Yemen, he longed to leave. I actually left Yemen twice. I left Yemen when I was a child with my family. So I was three years old, so I had absolutely no control over that. My dad was in the British Army, Aiden as a British colony. And then he got demopt in 1945 after serving in the Second World War. And he started a business of renovating, rundown, dilapidated sort of homes and renovating them and either renting or selling them. But because of that, he did a lot of work with the British. And when the independence move, that culminated with the toppling of British rule over the protected of Aden in 1967,

he was seen as a collaborator with the British, and all of his properties were confiscated, and he was given three days to leave the country. So Kamal and his siblings grew up in Egypt. In 1986, the family returned to Yemen, not to Aden, but to the capital, Sana'a. Yemen in the 1980s had just started to open up to the outside world, world, it was like moving back in time as well as moving eastward. It was a really difficult life as an openly gay man, as someone who really felt that mentally and intellectually and spiritually, I was much more drawn to the West. I was much more drawn to the gay liberation

movement. This is the kind of life I wanted for myself. And it was impossible to have that life anywhere in the Middle East, but particularly difficult in a place like Yemen. And I knew that My only way out of that would be education. And I knew I couldn't go back to Yemen. Like, I knew that's not a possibility. Andrew Lamb had a very different relationship with his homeland. I was still in a world in which magic still existed. You know, it's a place where you think you see fairies in the garden,

where your mother talked to the spirits at night at the altar. I think in some way, children especially, who understands that the world is made of all these spirits and magic, especially feeling robbed when they're cast out. My name is Andrew Lamb. I'm a Vietnamese-American author. I've written three books, and I left Vietnam as a refugee at the age of 11. Currently living part-time in Vietnam, researching and writing for my next couple books. I think people who are looking at Vietnam from the historical point of view tend to think of that country as a war, but people who live even during the time of war, like my family, have always been steep in the kind of profound sense of place. When children are born in Vietnam, we bury the

umbilical cord into the ground as a way to register children spiritually with the land. So your umbilical court is buried in Vietnam somewhere? Well, my mom put it in an earthen jar and put it in the garden not very far from where my condo is now, although I'd never visited. And so the bond is both literal and spiritual for many of us. And for Vietnamese who don't have until modern history, a history of diaspora, unlike, say, the Jews or the Chinese or the Indians who have sent their people overseas for generations. Vietnamese, especially were sedentary people who were landbound. Our colloquial word for country is duck nu,

which means land and water. And the combination of the two words means country. Why that is, it's very simple. When you put water and land together, you get mud. And where do you find mud? It is in the rice field. And you can still find, as you drive to the, rural here, a lot of graves that are buried in the backyard are amid rice paddies because you live

and die by the land. So in a way, you know, to be forced out and forced to remake yourselves elsewhere, it really is a sort of spiritual amputation. I just felt like not in the right place. I didn't really feel like the place that I've belonged. Growing up in British Columbia, Ashley Bach felt disconnected from the land around her. It's beautiful there, like the mountains and the oceans and the Fraser River, but it didn't feel right. It felt familiar, but it didn't feel like the place that I was supposed to be. It's a side effect, I think, or maybe not even a side effect. It's like an outcome of being in the child welfare system as an indigenous person.

The current child welfare system is pretty much an extension of residential schools in the 60s scoop. It's been designed to apprehend indigenous kids and remove them from their communities and their families and their cultures as well as their territories. So, I mean, I guess it was unfortunately quite successful for me. My name is Ashley Bach. The name that I was born with, though, is Ashley John, Marietta, Wesley Wong. I'm a member of Michigong-Gamong-Ojibway Nation, a something like Northwestern Ontario, North of Sioux Lookout. Ashley was taken into foster care at birth,

in a hospital in Vancouver, 3,000 kilometers away from her home First Nation. It's the latest chapter in a long story that began when her biological grandmother was sent to residential school. I certainly had an impact on my bio-mom and her life story, too, like, she was definitely in care, definitely struggled with like addictions and other issues in her life and then had me and that I was apprehended into care immediately. I mean, I don't want to say it's a good example, but it's a really,

I guess it's a strong example of how intergenerational trauma and like the impacts of residential school have come down through generations. At age five, Ashley was adopted by a white family in Langley, British Columbia. So, so while you were growing up there, I mean, How much did you think about or how much did you know what your home First Nation was like? I actually didn't know the name of my First Nation until I was in high school. So I was 16 and my parents had signed me up for the UBC summer science camp for indigenous kids. And not everyone, but most of the kids there knew their families. They knew their communities.

A lot of them were from their res. And then I walked in and we did this like circle when we first got there, which is normal to do. And everyone went around and shared who they were, what their favorite fruit was, and where they were from. And I couldn't tell people where it was from. And I was so ashamed of myself. Ashley knew that her adoptive family had an information booklet about her background. I snuck into my adoptive parents' bedroom. stole it out of their desk.

In there was my First Nation's name. And it's like in Ojibway. It was really long. Tried to Google, tried to Google this community. I definitely did not pronounce the name, right? Like I had no clue how to say it properly. And yeah, so that's how I figured out where I was from. Chapter 2.

Moment of Departure. What do you remember the most about the day you left Saigon? Well, it was April 28, 1975, and it was in the morning, very early, and we flew out of the airport here a few hours before they bombed the runway. I remember looking out of the airport. the window and I've flown in planes before but only domestically and it was the first time I flew out to see and it was very strange to see Vietnam recede into the horizon. Suddenly I realized that all the geography class I took, you know, drawing the borders of Vietnam were real

because here I am crossing that border for the first time and then, you know, slowly that country disappear from the horizon. What do you remember about the day that you left Yemen? I remember how devastated my mother was. I remember that very well. I remember feeling that I'm betraying my siblings in a way. I remember my dad thinking that I probably think I'm better than my siblings because I thought said I need to be better educated.

I need to get out of this place. But I knew, it was not just like, oh, I couldn't live here or life would be difficult here. I knew that I would be facing anything from imprisonment to death if I even acted on my desires or even expressed my desires. It's one of those moments where you just have to make, you know, it's a life of death decision. You could say, you know, fight or flight, but there is nothing to fight. You cannot change a culture that has been in place for thousands of years. and the only way was to go west, basically, and which is what I did by going to England

and then came to Canada in 1996. Was there anything of your old life that you brought with you? Yeah, during that time of panic, my dad was a high-ranking member of the South Vietnam Army, and so my mother was very fearful that if we left evidence of our relatives in the photo albums behind, these could be used to prosecute them under communist rule for being associated with a high-ranking member of the South. So she ordered me to burn all the photos in dozens of albums that went back for

a hundred years. And I just obeyed her and set a bonfire in the backyard. And what I took instead was my precious stamp collection because I was just obsessed with stamps, you know, stamps around the world. And so that survived. But momentals of three generations went up in flame. Every time I see my stamp collection now, I think I should have brought the photos. You still have the collection. Yeah. Because she was taken into foster care at birth, Ashley Bach doesn't have the same vivid memory of departure. But I didn't have an understanding that it wasn't normal.

didn't have that understanding until I went to university and everyone's moved into residence and we're all getting to know each other and everyone's like yeah well my older brother went to McGill and I'm like I have had over 40 foster siblings and the whole room just went like silent and I was like oh oh it said something wrong. Ashley, Kamal, and Andrew all went through a period of distancing themselves from their roots. For Andrew, that process began when his family settled in San Francisco. I was very much brought up in a very confusion, conservative household. And in my school, when I see my teacher as a child, I would fold my arms and bow.

But in this rowdy school, teachers weren't. expecting someone to bow every time they see them. How did they react? They didn't know what to make of it because everyone else is like, hey, Bob or something, and I'm here bowing to them. And then kids didn't know what to make of that either. So there were a lot of things like that that I needed to change and change very quickly. A big part of that transformation was about language.

My parents, being conservative, have always said, you cannot speak English in the house. Speak English outside the house, but practice Vietnamese in the house. But by the time that my father showed up a few months later, I had become sort of Americanized so quickly that I couldn't speak Vietnamese very well anymore. I think part of that is this self-imposed amnesia. And so I refuse to speak at all at home. In leaving the Middle East, I wanted to leave more than the region. I also wanted to leave the language and the culture behind. So I went out of my way to bury Arabic, to forget Arabic.

So I effectively stopped speaking Arabic until I was spoken to in Arabic. I stopped reading anything in Arabic for a decade or more. I reached puberty a few months after I came to America and my voice broke. And then my older brother said, you know, mom and dad told you not. to speak English in the house, but you disobeyed and look what happened to you. You shattered your vocal cord and now you sound like a duck. That's so mean. And I, you know, and my parents never talked about the birds and the bees or anything like that. So then I just sort of completely believed my brother. So there was a sense of punishment. But then there is also this sense of

freedom because, you know, speaking Vietnamese and French didn't do a thing, but speaking English transformed me from inside out. I had a new voice. You know, I grew mustache and in a real way, it was a new magic that I learned, having lost the old magic. I identified English as a kind of my gateway language. I think I called it elsewhere, like English as a gay language. I figured that that would be the way to live freely as a gay man and also to live a much more intellectually curious life. Because if I mastered English, then I would be able to read more books, not have to wait for them to be translated into Arabic. So I studied English literature in England all the way to a PhD level. What happens, of course, that my Arabic atrophied over the years to the point where I'm not really comfortable speaking it in any sort of in-depth conversation or serious conversation.

I couldn't have this conversation with you right now. I don't know how like I would refer to having it in Arabic at all. Ashley Bach distanced herself in another way. Langley, BC was, when I was growing up, it was very, very, very white. And, like, I'm lucky that I'm, like, I'm tri-racial. So, like, I'm First Nations, white and also Cantonese. So I'm pretty pale, so I can blend in sometimes. But other times, I really, really can't.

How did you feel about being native at that time during that period? I didn't want to tell people. media representation of indigenous communities didn't help. The first time I saw my First Nation in the media was because there was the housing crisis and there were three communities mentioned. There was, I guess, like, B-roll, there they went and filmed. And in particular, they filmed in MISH.

And they showed, like, little shacks and, like, the poverty that was on reserve. And I remember thinking, oh, that's where I'm from. they didn't show the part where people are really connected to the land. And for families that weren't torn apart by child and family services, they're there and they have their connections and they, like, know each other and they got to stay together. I think it would have made me more interested in, like, reconnecting and visiting sooner, if I'd seen that more positive angle. Chapter 4. Reconnecting

For a long time, Kamal As Soleil didn't think about returning to Yemen. I can tell you that even maybe 10 years ago, it would have never even crossed my mind. When a former partner asked him where he wanted to be buried, his answer was immediate. Toronto, it was a clear answer. I didn't even hesitate because at the time, I really thought that my place in the world was Toronto. always thought I was part of the Canadian mainstream in a way. I've always felt more Canadian than most Canadians. I'm someone who's never once missed a federal or a provincial or a local election. But there was a missed, something went awry somehow. And particularly it became much more pronounced in 2015 when Donald Trump ran for the Republican Party's nomination and then

Brexit happened in the UK. And from that moment, like 2015, 2015, 2016, I started to feel more and more like, oh, they really don't like immigrants anymore. They don't like Muslims. They don't like people who have darker skins. By day, I mean kind of a mainstream political establishments of Western European countries. And I kind of started to long to go to a place where I'm just, I don't want to say part of the mainstream, but where I'm just, I look like everyone else. I was kind of tired, tired from standing out as a darker-skinned person. I was among the first few Vietnamese-Americans to go back because the Cold War ended in 89

and few people wanted to come back because they didn't know what the situation was like. But my new service, which I worked for in San Francisco, sent me to Vietnam to write about what's happening to Vietnam after the Cold War ended. My parents were completely against it. felt like if I have gone, I will be arrested for being connected to my father, who was a general during the war. He felt that they can use someone like me as propaganda, like the writer Andrew Lamb, whose son of a general, now is back writing about Vietnam. And so things are getting better. Things are, okay, so there should be no vehemence between the diaspora and Vietnam. And I felt

like I am an American journalist. I can just go anywhere I want, even back to my own homeland. When she attended McGill University, Ashley Bock started thinking more about the meaning of home and realized B.C. wasn't necessarily the place to which she wanted to return. My adoptive family did really care for me. I mean, we had lots of ups and downs, especially when I was a teenager. And I realized, like, I didn't really want to go back to Lange, B.C. And as she met more indigenous people, her did. desire to reconnect with her origins grew.

My peers sort of just very gently encouraged me. Would you call it like curiosity, nostalgia, searching? Like, how would you describe what drove you? Curiosity for sure. I mean, I'm just like an inherently curious person. I think that's why I have like a Bachelor of Science. Obviously. Yeah, that's why I studied environmental science and stuff.

And that interest in environmental science is what ultimately brought her to her home First nation for the first time. I had applied for an internship position at the Climate Change to Adaptation Research Group at McGill. I got the position and it was like my dream position. I was like, oh my gosh, like this is, this is it. I'd assumed that they were going to pair me up with like a master's student or a PhD student just asked me to type in data or something all summer. But they had extra funding and they said, hey, we have $5,000. Would you want to work with your first nation? To which I said, heck yes, I want to, did not tell them that I'd never been there, like, in my adult life. I had never been there.

I didn't tell them I was adopted. Didn't tell them I was a foster kid. I just said, yes. You're listening to ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada across North America on serious. in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers.

Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a.

Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsvers.cavers.ca to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough.

Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca.a. You're listening to Return. Returning home means contending with the distance between the place in your mind and the place on the ground, especially if it's a home you've never actually seen before. Chapter 5. Culture Shock As Ashley Bach drove through the landscape of northwestern Ontario

on her way to visit Mishki Gogamang, First Nation for the first time, something felt strange. I grew up in British Columbia, so I was used to like mountains and the rivers and the ocean and all these beautiful tall trees. Sometimes the forest floor is like almost looks red from the deacon. trees and stuff in British Columbia and all the ferns. And so North Western Ontario is really different. In my little BC mind, it's very flat. There were lots of little lakes. The trees were really short and it felt so, so different. And I was like, oh, no, this is not home. Oh, no, why?

Like, it didn't feel innately correct for me to be there. Like, it didn't feel like somewhere that I know how to like survive if I needed to. It didn't feel like somewhere that I recognized like the plant and animal species. So it felt foreign to you. Yeah, I did. Her arrival in Mishki Gogamang was chaotic. On the drive there, she lost cell service. I got there like 7 or 8 p.m. And it was starting to get dark out. And no one was at the band office. I decided that I was going to try to drive north. And that's what this, one of the biggest thunderstorms I've ever been in and my life hit. Oh, no. I made it to the community's graveyard and had to pull over. That's when I managed to get a cell signal again. Luckily, someone in Sue Lookout had given her an emergency contact.

And so I called her and I was like, I am so lost. No one's answering their phone. The band office is closed. I don't know where the teacher's housing is. She had me drive back down and met me at the band office and then brought me to the woman's safe house. I got in and went to brush my teeth. And the lady's like, wait, no, no, no, no, no. That area of the reserve is not like you do not drink the water advisory. And I didn't know. And so that's like my first experience. The irony, of course, is that as much as Vietnam now is becoming more and more accessible to me,

it is no longer the place where I fully feel like I belong. Nearly 45 years after he left as a refugee, Andrew Lamb moved back to Vietnam part-time. What is different about the Saigon you left as a child and the Saigon you live in now? A lot of things, I'm sure, but what's the biggest difference? The city that I left was a sleepy town, really, in 1975. The mega city that I live in now is very much a cosmopolitan society

who of young people have no memory of that war or anything like that. And the sheer size of it is enormous. I mean, what used to be rice field across the river is now a new city. It keeps expanding like an amoeba. So there's very little of the past. here. But the irony, of course, is that I live in a high-rise condo that overlooked the river, and I can still see the spot from which my father boarded the ship on April 30th, 1935, and sailed out to sea. It is now part of a high-rise condo as well.

When we spoke, Andrew still hadn't visited his childhood home. Because it's not there exactly anymore. The population grew so much and the house is broken down and rebuilt, so I'm told. I just don't know if it's worth standing in front of it anymore. I have such fond memory of my childhood that I think I rather preserve it in memory rather than seeing the reality of it now. Do you think that memory would be corrupted? Yeah, I feared that. Recently, a friend of mine who left Vietnam about the same age that I did and became my best friend in America. He came back and both of us went to a country club that we belonged to.

And it was a place of great joy of our childhood memory in Saigon during the war. So we both sort of say, let's go in and look at it. Unfortunately, it's been sort of abandoned in the state of dilapidation. But we went to the pool where we used to swim as children, and it's still there. And so we dip a toes in it and sort of in a way say hello, but also say goodbye to that childhood. For Ashley, visiting Mishki Gogamak was a bit of. about reconnecting with a lost childhood in another way, the childhood she might have had.

In part, it was me reconnecting, but also it was like a two-week crash course and all this traditional ecological knowledge that I should have been growing up with and experiencing myself. I also missed out on learning about the physical environment, plants and animals, the lakes and the rivers that are there. and that's like 27 years of experience that I've lost already and climate change is happening

really rapidly in the north. So that's stuff that I might not actually ever have the opportunity to learn or at least like learn firsthand. There's actually a couple of communities that do pretty much seems like summer camp for their kids who had been apprehended. And like it's certainly not like the solution. I personally would be it as more of a bandaid and a way to at least bring kids back home for a little bit while they're still young, but essentially they take the kids out on the land, bring in, of course, like their social worker or foster parent as well, possibly if they can, maybe biofamily members and also elders from the community and like knowledge keepers who can sort of share all this important stuff that you really should be learning when

you're a child. I mean, I thought that was really cool. I didn't have that opportunity and it didn't help that I was across the country too. On top of that, too, with regards to being Two-Spirit, I missed out on growing up with that understanding of gender. Two-Spirit is an indigenous term for a person who has both a masculine and effeminent spirit. Given the impacts of colonization, like, that might not necessarily have been something that I would have learned anyways, but I do think that it's something that I missed out on. And it's definitely shaped my life a lot, and I've only really thought about that more recently. too, about how I would have had a really different experience in, like, high school, for example,

if I had a better understanding that doing everything I could to be cute and girly and stuff and fit in that way was just not me and that I didn't have to do that or be like that. I also didn't know going in that a lot of people there would speak other Ojibaba as a first language or as a second language, but speak it at home. Chapter 6, Mother Tongue. How important do you think, I mean, language is crucial to understanding, literally, to understanding home? I think that language barrier had a major impact, like, for what I was hearing from people, and also just more broadly on, like, the general worldview that I had at the time.

I mean, it's still something that's a challenge for me today. I think maybe I'm doing a little bit better on, like, understanding worldview. but I think really being able to think and speak in Ojibwe would have made a world of a difference. Just as the sort of the young me, the 20-something me wanted to abandon Arabic, the 50-something me now wants to reclaim Arabic. At one point, and I really do believe,

blame YouTube for it. I accidentally came across some old Arabic music that I listened to as a child. And I started playing some of them and I started realizing that I don't understand some, especially if it's in classical Arabic, I don't understand what they're saying, or I know the words but I don't know what they mean anymore. I started taking sort of classes online, listening to watching Arabic movies on Netflix without turning on the subtitles, and built, you know, rebuilt my Arabic a little bit. But I rebuilt a really, an old-fashioned Arabic, the Arabic that I spoke to, and the movies I, the cultural artifacts that I chose to were all from my childhood. So my Arabic is stuck in a certain moment in time. When I come back, when I speak Vietnamese, people giggle because I use vocabulary words that belong to the diaspora, but not in Vietnam anymore.

And so some people would say, I have not heard this phrase for many, many years. My grandmother used to say this phrase. And I would giggle with them because my grandmother used to use that phrase too. And that's only a phrase I know because I learned Vietnamese for my grandmother. So when I went back to Cairo in 2019, my nephew and niece were absolutely brutal in how they made fun of it because it really sounded dated. It sounded like a kind of Arabic that Egyptians don't speak anymore. That is a problem I don't know how to fix because I just don't have access to the same access to contemporary Arabic culture. And what I do, the problem is I don't understand part of it.

like rap in Arabic is a very big phenomenon And I listen to those rap songs and I honestly don't know what they're talking about Would you have to contemplate going back without improving your Arabic? No, it would be a nightmare. I think I'm determined to put it back into the place it was in my late teens, so kind of a level of fluency. I have actually penned a couple columns for a local newspaper in Vietnamese, which is something I never expected myself. to do. And it's a very strange feeling because even though it's my mother tongue and I'm

supposed to be fluent in it, I still think in English and then I have to translate back into Vietnamese. It feels like I'm in the process of reclaiming something. Returning home is often about trying to reclaim family connections, both with the living and the dead. I think I maybe had high expectations that I was going to meet a bunch of my bio family. I just assumed that my bio family had talked about me or knew that I existed or remembered that I existed. And definitely should not have had those expectations. And when I think of other former foster kids and using care, as well as adoptees, returning home, I'm like, wow, someone really needs to be there to temper those expectations and make sure they're realistic so they don't get their hearts broken because I was, yeah, it was very complicated. Did your heart get broken?

I don't know if I'd say that my heart was broken, but I was certainly, like, I didn't receive that sort of, I don't know, I don't know what the feeling would be. I guess, like, relief or, like, connection that I was hoping. I found my biological grandma's obituary online, and it listed off a bunch of aunts and uncles as well as my bio-mom. I was like, oh, okay, cool. I'm going to, like, probably meet these people. So I went up and asked for if anyone knew my uncles, and they didn't want to talk.

about it. And I had no clue what happened. No one would tell me. They just said, oh, yeah, they used to be here. No, they're not. Later, Ashley found out one of her uncles had died by suicide. I would say that loss is, or dealing with loss or confronting loss, is part of the return narrative itself or part of the return journey. Honestly, I believe that when you go back, you have to integrate loss into the whole package of return and try to gain something different from that loss. After he was exiled from Aden in 1967,

Kamal As Soleil's father spent decades longing to return to his former home. His dream was always to go back to the homeland and to reclaim his place in it. But he wasn't able to go back and visit Aden until almost 30 years later, about which time he was dying of cancer and he didn't really get to enjoy the homeland. I know it sounds predetermined and fatalistic, but part of my own return journey or desire is to fulfill some of that on his behalf. Andrew Lamb's father never returned to Vietnam. In January 2021, he died of COVID-19.

Andrew spoke about his father in a moving interview with PRX's The World. When he passed away 10 years ago, I, you know, not being religious, but made a prayer to him and say, well, now you're free to come back. Now that you're longer bound by earth, you can come back and see your beloved homeland and go see whatever you needed to see. Chapter 8. Finding Home When you, at the very beginning of the conversation, said, you love. because it was a matter of life and death.

Where does that concern sit now, as you consider, the idea of going back to that place that could still be your life and death? Yeah, it's one of the biggest challenges for me is the ability to go back to a place like Aden as a gay man. It's funny because when I was in my 20s and that's when I left Yemen, my whole life was dictated by my sexuality.

It was the driving force of my life. I'm not saying I'm asexual, anything right now, but I'm just saying as you get older, your sexuality is not, it's not as prominent, although it's essentially prominent as an identity, but sexuality, it just doesn't take the prime sort of spot in my considerations. That is one of those equations I haven't been able to figure out, like how to return to a country or a place that has such a hostile relationship to homosexuality. Would you ever consider going back to Mish Kogamang long term?

I think so. I would. However, and this is where it gets really complicated. And I think a lot of other youth and care and adoptees have experienced this too. Like as much as I would like to go to Mish long term, the housing crisis there is, it's really bad. The community is like on and off the water advisories a lot. Like I'm pretty sure the government said that. the long-term drinking water advisory is gone, but like it's on and off short term now. So that infrastructure just isn't there. I don't have close enough family members to just like move into a house with three different generations living in it. So I mean I would like to,

but I feel like it's probably just not going to happen. Like more likely I'd probably live in like Thunder Bear or Sulica and like that's sort of the plan in the next couple years. So you have access but not living there. Yeah. Given the adage that you can never go back home and what you've been through yourself, I want to ask you something. Is it actually possible to truly go home after you've lost it? Well, the answer is no.

You can never go home again because we move away from it both through time and space. And even when you return someone like me who's now in Vietnam, the childhood, the happiness, that sense of insularity is all gone. I think in a weird way, the human condition is that you have to let go. We are curse with longing, but there is a spiritual maturity where you, you come to accept that you have moved away from that juncture. Do you think you've done that? Do you think you've moved past that longing? I feel that I have moved quite a bit away from that longing,

but I don't think you can ever disown it. There are moments here when the rain falls and certain music played. And I'm sitting in a coffee shop. And it felt like I've transported to the past because the feeling is just exactly like I was as a child. And it shocks me because you retain all those things in you know, and it can be evoked. And then that sense of place, that sense of time. We carry all this, I guess, multitudes within us.

So all these homes, the sense of homes are still inside. so does that mean that you've found a different kind of definition for home in Vietnam now perhaps I think I think for me the closest thing I can say is that for me home is where I tell my stories and so I can just be here or I can be in San Francisco I can be in Lisbon but I think I'm at home at all these places because I feel like I have certain mission, and that is to tell stories. And when I do express myself through language, then I feel I'm at home anywhere, really. I am really trying to figure out where home is.

When I was preparing for this interview, I actually looked back through my, like, Instagram and Facebook posts, and I found a couple of years ago, I think it was in 2018. I went to the Nishna Vyaviyoski Nation's youth gathering in Thunder Bay. and I don't think I ever really write things or say things like this, but in the post I'd written that, oh, this is like a place that feels like home and I had a picture of the, like they had a teepee out back behind the hotel. I had a picture of that. I had a picture of the city from when I was on the plane. And I mean, that is like niche territory. So I think maybe, maybe I'm starting to figure it out. What is home to me? I don't know. I can tell you what home isn't at the moment. So I don't think it's Vancouver necessarily, yet I'm still, I'm new here.

I'm still adjusting. I would say home to me is a warm place, so that excludes most of Canada right away. a warm place that welcomes me back for who I am and what I am. Does that place exist? I don't know. Is that place Aiden? Part of me hopes it is, but I don't know if it is. And now I'm just wondering if you've reached any clarity about where you want to be buried.

I would like my remains to be sent back to Yemen. And no matter where I am, like if that happens tomorrow as I'm crossing the streets, I would like to be buried close to my mother and father, which may not be Aiden, it would be Achesana. But if there's a way I can be buried in Aden, that's what I would like to be. I want my fun and resting place to be my homeland. I think the right answer to that is to say, I hope you live a very long life. Thank you. We'll see how this COVID thing plays out.

On Ideas, you're listening to Return. It is the first installment in our special series, The Idea of Home. The series is produced by Pauline Holdsworth. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer. producer is Nikola Lukshich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly. In our final episode, we'll explore the relationship between music and the idea of home. And we'll leave you

with a song that represents the longing to return home for many people, especially Kamal El-Sulani. I'm Nala Ayad. Thanks for listening. This is a song called Nassam Alain al-Hawah, which means just a kind of a breeze blew upon us. A nesem-a-le-Lan Hawa, it's like it came from the homeland. The breeze came from blue on us from the homeland. And it's from a movie in the late 60s called Bint al-Haris, or the Garzman daughter. Faye Ruz, who's a legend in the Arab world, and particularly the voice of Lebanon, plays the daughter. of the Guzman. The Guzman has to find work outside of his homeland and she goes and visits him and she sings this song.

It's like a breeze from the homeland has descended on us. Breeze, please take me back to the homeland. I've known this song since I was probably four or five years old because my father would play it at least whenever it would come on the radio he will stop everything and listen to it because it would remind him of Eden, the homeland from which he was exiled in 1967. And one of the most sort of telling lines in that song for him and much, much, much later for me

is that it's not that I would go back to the homeland and would know it, but that I would go back and my homeland would know me. I love the song, but I was never as fond of it because, or I tried to avoid it, because it always, reminds me of my father and his pain that he carried with him for decades. But now I kind of, in the last few years, I've been listening to it and finding the courage to listen to it.

I mean, it still makes me cry sometimes, and it still makes me really sad to hear it. But like my father, I stop everything. If it comes up on a YouTube playlist, I stop everything and listen to it.