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Revisiting Canada After 20 Years

It is a chill February afternoon. The sun is bright in the winter, blue sky. The arms of trees are long like fingers, reaching out for warmth. I am clutching the photo album to my chest and my anxiety starts to rise, manifesting like little grasshoppers stuck in my shoes. This could go either way.


Nothing looks familiar until we enter my street, Creekwood Trail, a small strip of houses in a gorgeous suburb in Oakville, Ontario that served as my home for two years. On the outside, the house looks exactly the same. There is the front garden, that used to be filled with orange and yellow flowers, a rose bed I fell into when we were first moving in (my mother cleaning up the wounds from the thorns), the sidewalk I learned to ride a bike and subsequently skid my knee on.


first day of first grade
first day of first grade

I look at the house that held my life for senior kindergarten and first grade. The house that we got our Jack Russell Terrier, Jackie, and where our family dog, Hui, who my parents had adopted in Maui, passed away. The house I made blanket forts in to read Junie B. Jones books in and were I made shadow puppets on the basement wall during the Great North American Blackout of 2003. The house my mother existed in.


My husband parks the car against the curb in front of a bright house next door to my childhood home. My childhood best friend who is by my side in every photo of me back then is waiting inside with her parents, boyfriend, and a sweet Golden-doodle. Her parents still live there. I step outside of the car, clutching the photo album, and put my feet on the sidewalk.


We sit in the kitchen: my childhood best friend, Lauren and her family, and me, my husband, and my two friends. The afternoon sun beginning to set, dipping Lauren and I in sunlight: the spotlight on us. What unfolded in that room, 450 miles away from where I currently live, was one of the most healing experiences I’ve had since starting on this journey for home.


We passed through the photo album my mother had made, filled with memories of hamsters, ice skating, walks in Bayshire Park, and in almost every photo I am in, there is Lauren beside me. As we talk through the past, our memories connect. They help me fill in the gaps, but most importantly, they made my time in Canada feel real.


Moving around every two years made me grow detached – to people, places, and memories. I often recalled Canada as the “quintessential” childhood: I lived in a house, in a neighborhood where there were other kids my age, walked to school and got to play outside after, and it is the last place my family as I knew it was together. It often feels like a dream — in fact, most of my childhood does. I’m constantly questioning myself, Did that really happen?


It did. Sitting around that table reminded me that my five-year old self existed. There are people who remember me, pieces of my life, my mother. She lives on in other people’s memory, not just mine.

Oakville, 2004
Oakville, 2004
Oakville, 2024
Oakville, 2024

Canada held the what if, a symbol of what my life could have looked like if we didn’t move away. The memories flutter around like prism of colors: laying in freshly dried laundry with Hui, my mother reading me bedtime stories and telling me the story of my birth, playing in the backyard, barefoot in the grass. Always surrounded by friends. I belonged.


I still yearn for Canada, for what it holds. I wonder if this is where my longing began. My longing for a childhood drenched in sweat and ice cream trucks. My longing for home. After Canada, we moved to South Korea where my parent’s marriage and my mother’s alcoholism started to fall apart.


I will always feel at home in Oakville. There is a piece of me that is forever tied to that home, to Lauren, to the version of myself that lived there. I am that little girl and if she could see who I’ve become today, I think we would embrace each other. Just as Lauren and I did, and looked at each other and said, “I missed you. Look how much you’ve grown.”



 
 
 

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