It’s been well over a month since I last posted an entry in my online journal, so this post is meant to catch any erstwhile readers up with our little family saga as we continue to shelter with my parents in Acton, Massachusetts. I’m also interested in exploring the theme of home and belonging in this current time, when so many people have been displaced from their homes and even from their homelands.
We are fortunate in many regards, including the ability to shelter in a comfortable environment that also happens to be the place where I grew up. In other words, I am in my hometown. “Hometown” is a funny word—what does it mean, exactly? In Chinese, the term 老家 laojia or “old home” comes close. This term indicates a place of origin, though often it means the place where one’s parents came from, not necessarily one’s own place of origin. In American culture, hometown usually refers to the place one spent one’s childhood and “came of age” into young adulthood. I lived in Acton from around the ages of 5 to 17, when I headed off to Dartmouth College in Hanover NH in the region of New England, which I think of as my homeland. I’m an American of course, but deep down I’m a New Englander—that kind of sentiment.
So this piece is going to be a bit rambling, as my posts usually are, but I want to connect recent events to this sense of belonging and what one considers one’s home to be. For me this is an interesting question, since I’ve spent much of my adult life living and working outside of the USA in other countries, including five years in Australia and around fifteen years in China. I’ve spent more of my adult life living and working in Shanghai than any other city, and I also research, write books, and make films about Shanghai. My wife and her family are from Shanghai and my daughters have spent almost all their lives there and consider Shanghai their home. So in many ways, Shanghai is my adopted home. And yet (and this goes more generally for China as well), I’ve always felt and been made to feel like an alien in Shanghai, since I cannot claim any real citizenship or a true sense of belonging there.
On the other hand, how can I claim Acton as my home? I haven’t lived here since 1987. In fact, the ten weeks that I’ve spent here since we arrived here at the beginning of March constitutes the longest amount of time I’ve been in Acton since I was 17 years old. Nevertheless, my parents have continued to live here almost continuously since then, and each year we come here to visit and spend some time, usually in summers, but sometimes in winters. I still have friends here or nearby in the state of Massachusetts with whom I went to high school. It certainly feels like a homecoming whenever I return to Acton. I have countless memories of growing up here, and I know the roads and byways of Acton and the surrounding towns well enough to navigate without a map. I feel grounded whenever I’m here. It certainly helps that my parents have lived here all these years, as I’m not sure how I’d feel about Acton if they didn’t. But I do claim a residence here. So in all these senses, it sure feels like home.
And yet, it isn’t. Actually, we are displaced refugees, sheltering in my parents’ home. My daughters feel this much more strongly than I do, since they only spend a few weeks every summer here, or a few days over winters. They don’t have friends here, really. They don’t have any memories of going to school here or being part of the local society. They have attended summer camp here for quite a few years, so there is that, but otherwise all their emotional connections are with Shanghai, even though they are American citizens. Perhaps home is where Mom dwells?
I grew up here in Acton with my mother and sister, and we were very fortunate to have my step-dad enter the picture in the late 1970s. What brought us to Acton in the first place? Well, in the early 1970s, when my mother was a single mom taking care of two small children, she moved here for a few good reasons. First, her eldest brother was living in the area. He and his family chose the neighboring town of Littleton, where they settled in a nice small house on the edge of Lake Matawanakee, otherwise known as Forge Pond. Before they moved in, we lived there for a spell over the summer, so some of my earliest memories are of learning to swim in the pond. Over the years of my childhood, we visited our uncle and aunt’s home frequently. We went swimming in the pond in summer, and skating on it in winter. I stayed there many times over the years, so in a way it was a second home for me as well.
Getting back to the reasons why we moved to Acton: My mother took a job with Digital Equipment Corporation, otherwise known as DEC, which had its headquarters in an old mill in the neighboring town of Maynard. Acton was and is still known for having a good school system and affordable housing, so we moved to this town. Eventually, long story short, we settled with my step-father in an old Victorian house on Windsor Ave., and that is where I spent most of my formative years. They remained in that home long after I left in 1987, and eventually they found another home in another part of town, where we are now sheltering.
I’m grateful for my childhood in Acton Mass. It was a lovely town in which to spend one’s childhood, with plenty of places to roam and play outdoors. There are rivers and ponds and brooks galore, and fields and forests in which to wander and dream. Acton is a collection of small villages. We lived in West Acton. Now we are in North Acton. From my perspective, having lived in Shanghai all these years, not much changes in Acton over the years and decades. It seems like a town frozen in time.
Time is obviously a big theme of our current condition. Some may feel that time has slowed down since we were all forced to quarantine in March (for my family, this happened starting in late January). At least, getting out of our typical routines has forced us to reconsider the passage of time and our place in the flow of time. For me, being in Acton the past two and a half months has certainly slowed down the pace and rhythms of my harried life in China.
When not busy with my own work or taking care of my family, I’ve taken advantage of my time here to rediscover Acton and its environs. For this purpose, I have a boon companion: John Hanson Mitchell, a local writer who was living in Littleton in the 1970s and wrote a gem of a book about this area, called Ceremonial Time. A Facebook friend alerted me to this book recently, and I read it over the past few weeks along with some other books on natural history, forests, and trees. Basically, I’ve turned into a Druid, spending much of my spare time wandering through the forests and following trails in local conservation lands.
Mitchell tells the story of this particular part of New England from the perspective of the longue duree. He begins by recounting how the glaciers receded 15,000 years ago, leaving the rich and varied landscape we see here today with its drumlins, ponds, rivers and streams. Then came the paleo hunters, tracking caribou, wooly mammoth and mastodon herds. Over thousands of years, the native Americans became forest dwellers, living a rich life, growing and planting and stewarding the land, taking only what they needed, and living in temporary dwellings and shelters as they moved from place to place.
Mitchell tells the story partly through the voices of living people, who are connected through blood and culture to those forest dwellers. These original inhabitants were displaced through disease and through violence by the English who settled here beginning in the 1600s. Back then, Acton didn’t exist, but a small village arose not far from where we live, which was connected to the larger settlement of Concord by a road. Over time, the new settlers took over the land and built more permanent, sturdy homes, and then completely reconfigured the landscape for their own purposes, converting forests and meadows into farmland and pastureland. Later, they built the stone walls that criss-cross the landscape of New England and can still be found in the forests today.
While reading Mitchell’s account of the natural and human history of his patch of land, I came to the realization that this was my land too. The stretch of land he documents, known as Scratch Flat, happens to be located right in between my home in Acton and my uncle and aunt’s home in Littleton. I must have passed through it countless times in my childhood, whether by car or by bicycle, and I never noticed the waterway that runs through it, known as Beaver Brook.
Looking out on Beaver Brook in Littleton
Lately, I’ve visited there several times along with my family, and we’ve walked around the forest and marshland. It’s a lovely place, still relatively undisturbed today, even though many developments now surround it. Back when Mitchell was living there and writing in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was already on its way to becoming a development zone for industries, including the computer industry, which brought my family here in the first place. Actually, that industry was responsible for creating my family, since my parents met at DEC in the late 1970s. Many of my closest childhood friends also had parents who worked for the hi-tech industry. And all this is still true of Acton today.
Reading Mitchell’s book and wandering through the forests and fields of Acton, Littleton, and other neighboring towns with or without my family members in tow has given me a much deeper appreciation and understanding of the long history of this place, and how much has actually changed under the surface. Even though this is not my home, and probably never will be again, I feel more at home here in Acton than ever before. Funny how that works.