The Thousand Griefs of a Left-Behind Place
Castles in the Sky #22
Note from Charlie: With issue #25 coming up next, I have a few big changes planned, so please make sure and keep a heads up for emails from me in the next two weeks.
In 2023, this newsletter was renamed Castles in the Sky.
“All language is a longing for home.”
-Rumi
Nothing makes me miss home like that feeling when the crisp “newness” of a hotel room has worn off. On arrival, hotel rooms are immaculate: they smell fresh and everything is clean. Within a day, you’re in an uncanny valley where the room is as lived in as any other room, except it has nothing homey in it. Thoughts turn to places where the smells, sights, and people are familiar. I was in one such hotel room on a business trip when I drafted this newsletter.
The empty Tallahassee hotel room I was writing in sent my mind back to the empty hotel rooms across China I stayed in over ten years ago. Fresh out of college, I had found a great job in Beijing, meeting government officials, educating young people, and making good money. I flew high, but then I burned out. The same impatient sense of adventure that brought me to China put me at odds with my boss and we got into an argument when I was scheduled to take a vacation back to the US. At the end of the argument, I quit my job via text message and the vacation turned permanent. I ended up back in my childhood bedroom after three years as a deputy director at a rapidly growing company in China.
My Dad said to me, “in a funny way, going back to China is the easy thing for you now.” He was right. For three years I’d lived and worked in China. I had become someone in China, and I wanted to go back and be that person again. It was like I had a parallel life, still going on without me, and I needed to share it with people. I felt this urgency to communicate this to people as soon as I met them. But people’s interest and patience for that kind of thing runs short pretty quickly.
I was used to China: smelling burning plastic in the dry winter air, eating street noodles on the way home from work, and taking the subway everywhere. My Dad was right, it was more familiar to me than Houston. But, I didn’t go back. I stayed in my childhood bedroom even though it didn’t feel like home. I reacclimated to Houston: muscling through the suffocating humidity, eating breakfast tacos on the way work, and driving down a freeway to go anywhere.
I worked hard over the next few years to find a job, make friends, and get plugged in. Although, I did develop a reputation. When introducing me to new people, my friends would joke, “did you know he used to live in CHINA?!” I didn’t know what to talk about or how to introduce myself without talking about China.
At first, I just felt sorry for myself. But as I built a life again in Houston, my longing for China—for my other life—evolved into a tremendous sense of empathy for and curiosity toward others.
I distinctly remember a trip to the gas station about a year after I got back to Houston. I was on my way to work at the white-linen tablecloth steakhouse where I was a waiter. I was worried I’d be late and miss “wine class,” where we learned to upsell customers to more expensive wines. It was the afternoon and I was standing outside my car pumping gas. A truck pulled up and half a dozen day laborers began to step down from the bed of the truck.
The last man to get out was much older than the rest. He seemed to have worked with the others, but he looked much stiffer than the others and needed help stepping down from the truck. The men were speaking Spanish to one another but I don’t know anything else about them. I don’t know if they knew each other before that day.
The word “terroir” popped into my head from the previous day’s wine class. Wine enthusiasts use the word terroir to describe the unique characteristics of a wine. It encompasses the soil, climate, topography, winemaking techniques, and other factors that give a wine its distinct character. What is important about terroir is it emphasizes the effect of these factors over time. To talk of a wine’s terroir is to know that where grapes come from has a tremendous effect on what kind of wine they become.
I’ve met many men like those in the truck, and know that a good number of them leave their home country to come to the US and work. As soon as I saw the old man, I couldn’t stop thinking about his terroir. I wondered if he had family he left behind, if there were foods he wanted from home that he couldn’t find in Houston, if there were songs from his youth he half-remembered, if there were nicknames he was never called anymore, if there were any inside jokes he still smiled about despite not having shared them in decades.
The gas pump clicked and the noise brought me back to reality, letting me know I was done and could leave. But that old man and the way he got off the truck and the hundred questions it prompted changed me.
I began to think of how everyone might have a parallel life, or even parallel lives, to the one that they have when I meet them. I began to see how much bigger some people’s stories are than mine. A train of thought that began as a private longing for another place and the life that came with it had become a lens through which I saw the world and the multitudes each person’s past contained.
My grandfather got Alzheimer’s before he died. He and my grandmother lived in a nice neighborhood on one side of town. He would still ask to be driven around his old neighborhood almost every day. The old neighborhood was in decline and had little to offer visitors. When we went, almost everything had changed, but there were still houses he recognized and streets he could name. Everything he remembered triggered a dozen other memories. Some were happy. Some were sad. They all had a powerful effect on him. We were driving through his terroir.
Most people know this feeling–even if they can’t verbalize it. That’s why hotel rooms don’t hold their charm for long. Because they’re devoid of all the things that let us become who we are. And that’s why it’s often hard to leave a place, because each thing you leave behind is an acute loss, even if it’s not felt upon departure. We may come to know someone and understand their terroir, but we might never understand all of the acute losses they suffered leaving it behind.
I relish the life I have now. It is full beyond what I could have imagined sleeping in my childhood bedroom after crash-landing there a decade ago. But I still miss my other, parallel life in China. A big part of why my life now is full is because when I reflected on how much I longed for somewhere else, I realized that this is a universal condition. Everyone longs for somewhere they want to be more than where they are now.
But instead of wallowing in that feeling, I began to wonder how other people felt it. My own loneliness evolved into empathy. Before this, I thought of empathy as taking on someone’s feelings or visualizing their life. But I’ve come to think that it is also like driving my grandfather around his old neighborhood, listening to him name places. It is the special kind of love where you can sit with someone as they honor the thousand griefs of a left-behind place.
And when this love is exchanged, something special happens. When one person shows someone that special kind of love and makes space for the other to remember the things they left behind, they might both realize that the place they’re in is pretty great, too.
Writing Updates
I have some big news in the next two weeks! A lot of it came from writing my first Annual Review, which you can check out below. I had a blast writing it and distilled the biggest lessons I've learned over the last year of fatherhood and writing.
To write my Annual Review, I did a ton of brainstorming and research, which I’d like to share in a “Behind the Scenes” essay. There are two major parts:
First, turned part of my written brainstorming into a one-act play. I had three motivations for writing an Annual Review, so I shaped them into characters on an “Annual Review Committee” who are debating what the point of the Annual Review is and what should be included.
Second, I list my favorite Annual Reviews that I read from 2022, explain what I liked about them, and outline what I hope to borrow from them for my Annual Review next year.
Thoughts and Threads
Life updates, inspiration, and other things that I find interesting and inspiring.
I was listening to this song when I was riffing on what to write about for this essay, and it heavily informed the mood for this issue.
This is one of my favorite music videos of all time. I read somewhere that it is supposed to be the story of an Algerian immigrant to France returning home under less-than-ideal circumstances. It is also meant to explore masculinity, and how it can be fragile–but not in the bad way people usually mean. It is so beautifully shot and acted.
About a year after I saw the old man climb down from his truck at the gas station, there was an enormous crisis in the Middle East. In order to humanize the crisis, Save the Children released two commercial where they put a British girl in the imagined place of a girl who might be going through the crisis in Syria.
At the time, “one second a day” YouTube videos were super popular, so they used that format to great effect. (Warning: this is world-class storytelling packed inside of just three minutes, but it is also very disturbing and emotionally evocative.) It made me aware of what was happening on a visceral, emotional level that I had not experienced before.
Crowd Work
In standup comedy, crowd work is when the comic speaks directly with the audience. I want to hear from you! Heckles and cheers go here.
I am working on a lot of long-form fiction and essays right now, but I want to keep up this regular newsletter. I also know that I want to write “about” more things–stuff like explainers and commentary.
I would love it if you could drop some suggestions below on any non-biographical topics you would like me to explore in the newsletter.
Charlie, your recent post is so poignant! It’s fun to know your “terroir” and learn more about it in such reflective and thoughtful observations.
Oh Charlie-you made me tear up but in the best way. Thank you for sharing this. Your empathy has always been evident but it is so wonderful to hear it articulated so well.