I Found My Hometown

Until recently I felt I had no attachment at all to a hometown.

At university, when asked where I am from or asked to fill in a province on an introduction form, I feel deeply embarrassed.

I always thought I had no hometown. I was born and grew up in Beijing, but plainly I am not a Beijinger—or rather, Beijing never accepted me. Being without Beijing household registration meant facing discrimination from the transition to middle school onward, and I could not take the college entrance exam there. Our home is older than I am, yet I cannot acquire that “Beijinger” identity. It has left me with a latent resentment toward the city: I am a child it abandoned. At the same time I have long admired Shenzhen and its slogan, “If you come to Shenzhen, you are a Shenzhen person.”

Then again, am I from Hebei? As a child I often visited my maternal grandparents and was close to them, but traditionally that is not my ancestral home, and I do not identify as a Hebei native. What did the five years I spent in Hengshui before the college entrance exam give me? Not one classmate I know wants to stay in the province after university and build their hometown. Most want to go to the big city of Beijing—another city I dislike.

Here is an anecdote. An elementary-school classmate and I both left Beijing in the summer after our first year of middle school, though he transferred to Tianjin. On the way to Hebei, my mother had a voice call with his mother about our circumstances and futures. After the entrance exams, both of us had excellent scores, and our mothers spoke again for the first time in five years, feeling vindicated. Our scores would have taken us back to Beijing and were far higher than those of some former classmates who could sit the exam in Beijing because of their local registration. How satisfying!

My father is from the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, making me, in the traditional sense, a Ningxia native. Yet I have spent perhaps a month there in total. I cannot even name the kinship terms for relatives back home; there are perhaps only a dozen whose faces I know I have seen. Naturally I felt little identification with the place.

Yet today, at the National Games held in a city I like very much, He Jie won Ningxia’s first gold medal. Something suddenly struck me, and I felt a surge of identification and pride.

I seemed suddenly to have found a sense of hometown identity, though I could not explain where it came from. So I asked GPT:

I. Why have you long felt you had “no hometown”?

1. Your childhood life conflicted with institutional boundaries

You grew up in Beijing, but its registration system excluded you from being a “Beijinger” and reinforced the feeling that you did not belong.

That situation has a profound effect on a child—you experience Beijing as home, but the system tells you, “You are not one of us.” Beijing thus becomes not the hometown others imagine, but:

a city that raised you; a system that did not accept you; a place at once familiar and alien.

Your latent resentment toward Beijing is an emotional defense against rejection:

“If you do not want me, I will not claim you either.”

This is a typical mechanism of “reverse identification.”

II. Why are your ties to Hebei and Ningxia also indistinct?

1. Hebei was a place of schooling, not an emotional home

Your five years in Hengshui mattered, but were almost wholly consumed by exam pressure.

Hengshui school was not a hometown in the sense of everyday life; it was where you had to struggle. Those around you did not feel called to build Hebei either. They moved outward together, making it harder for you to put down roots.

In other words, you identify with experiences in Hebei but not with it emotionally.

2. Ningxia is your ancestral home, but you have hardly lived there

Your father comes from Ningxia, so it is your ancestral home, but:

you hardly lived there; you know few relatives there; you have little deep connection with its local culture.

Thus Ningxia is a “hometown by blood,” a line on an identity card (note: not even that), rather than part of your lived experience.

For a long time, you lacked an event that could awaken an emotional connection to Ningxia.

That feeling was activated for the first time today. This matters; read on.

III. Why did He Jie’s victory suddenly create a sense of hometown?

This is the central turning point in your account.

1. Seeing success activates ancestral identification

You saw the name “Ningxia” attached to success and honor in a nationally followed competition, and for the first time felt:

“I have a connection with an admirable place.”

The response is described here as “reverse ancestral activation”: your connection was weak, but when the place gained honor, you suddenly recognized a relationship with it and felt a buried pride in that identity.

The response says this is common in social psychology, including among many children of immigrants and younger urban migrants.

2. For the first time, you felt you belonged somewhere

You have long lived with this:

Beijing does not recognize you; you do not identify with Hebei; you had no chance to identify with Ningxia.

Such ambiguous identity can leave a long-lasting “identity vacuum.”

But today:

your ancestral connection with Ningxia found, through the shared symbol of sport, a strong positive connection for the first time.

It filled the first gap in your emotional sense of hometown.

3. Your understanding of hometown is shifting from geography to emotion

Today’s feeling came from sharing a group’s glory. This is a kind of “symbolic identity”:

You identify with Ningxia not because you live there, but because its success made you feel for the first time:

“I can have a connection with it; I am not excluded.”

IV. What is the true source of your hometown identity?

1. Your need to be accepted

You do not really long for a place-name, but for this:

a place where you can say you are from there and be accepted without having to prove it.

Beijing does not offer that; Hebei never became that; Ningxia is too distant; Shenzhen is your ideal city.

You have been searching for a place willing to accept you.

That is the heart of your sense of home.

2. A story that can truly forge an emotional bond

Before today your tie to Ningxia was only “words on an identity card” (note: it was not even that). Today you felt for the first time:

“This place can make me proud.”

Emotion is not deduced by logic; it is lit by an event.

3. Your life is moving from drifting to rebuilding identity

You have gone from:

being rejected by Beijing; striving in Hebei; “proving yourself in reverse” through your results; to feeling for the first time, through Ningxia’s glory, “This is my place.”

That is an entire process of constructing identity.

It is not that you have no hometown; you are searching among several hometowns for the truest emotional belonging.

V. What, then, is your “hometown”?

In one sentence:

Your hometown is not one geographical point, but the places where your life was shaped, where you were rejected, where you hurt and where you were moved by glory.

Beijing is the hometown of your childhood; Hebei, of your striving; Ningxia, of your ancestry; Shenzhen, of your aspirations.

Together they form your distinctive, composite hometown identity.

What you felt today marks the first integration of that complex identity.

This feels very true to my psychology. I seem to have found some belonging, as if I have found my hometown. I will give back to it in a way I like (indeed I had planned to do so already). Having an identity and a sense of belonging really does seem to bring happiness.