The character for family, 家, is an unescapable facet of the Chinese language. It appears and reappears, a lexical archipelago across the pages of the dictionary, weaving its way into the words for 'everyone' and 'country,' as a quantifier for groups and companies, as a designation of an occupation. It is a concrete reflection of its attendant culture, where you are expected to take in and take care of your parents as you both age, and you address the people you are introduced to using the words for relatives.
But perhaps the most telling aspect of the linguistic ubiquity of family in Mandarin is in its synonymy with home: 家 can refer to either. Thus, when you say that you are coming home, the characters you use can be transliterated into English as returning to your family.
My travels to China have been a very real embodiment of both meanings. Not only am I seeing my extended family—my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins—for the first time in over a decade, but I am staying with my grandmother in the apartment in Jinan where I spent the beginning three years of my life: my first home, and my first family.
It is emptier now than it has ever been. With my grandfather currently in the hospital, my grandmother has been living by herself for the past two months. It is a situation far removed from when my family first moved in, in 1983. Back then, the unit stretched to accommodate both of my maternal grandparents, my mother, my aunt, and my uncle in a three room space. My mother, the oldest, was thirteen then, and slept in the kitchen to study for school without waking the rest of the house up.
By the time that I was born, in 1997, my aunt's husband built an additional room to the side, and I lived with my mother in one room, my grandparents lived in another, and my uncle took up the new space. My father was a doctoral student in Beijing at the time, and was three hours away by train. By then, no one slept in the kitchen.
And even now, in 2018, though my uncle has moved out and a sitting toilet has been installed, the unit has stayed roughly the same. It has weathered the past thirty-five years of sweltering summers and dry winters and human living remarkably well. I have spent a good portion of my first week back just staying inside the apartment, content with eating fresh lychees bought from the supermarket while reading and editing photos, still slightly disbelieving that I once lived here, all that time ago.
I am traveling to Qingdao next, another city in Shandong province, famous for its breweries from when it was occupied by the Germans and its namesake Tsingtao beer. It is roughly two-and-a-half hours away by train from where I am in Jinan, the provincial capital. Whether through fate or fortune, my friend Hunter is currently living there and teaching English, so I will be staying with him for a while: another home, and another family.