Josie Liu's Blog

Jiajia’s jiang hu is the playground in the mall. An indoor public playground, this space is well equipped with soft equipments resembling books, fruits, soccer ball and vehicles. Jiajia loves that place, screaming happily while running around the circle of the playground every time she gets in there. But that place doesn’t belong to her. There are always about 30 children, aging from a few months to teens, playing there at any given time. Not hard to imagine, my tiny, little 21-month-old will have to watch for other kids landing right in front of her from a big jump, cut her path, or want to slide down the same slide.

She has to fight her way through if she wants to climb up that little mountain of fruits, or crawl the tunnel running through the big soccer ball. A lot of times, of course, she has to wait for others to finish their moves first. Watching, calculating, waiting, fighting, she does them all, very much like an adult competing in the real world.

It might be just a little cruel to interpret her happy hour playing as wading in jiang hu—the real world, but in many ways, children’s world of playing does resemble the complexity, relationships and conflicts of adults’ world. The play ground IS actually the real world for children playing there, only it is a world for children.

Luckily, in the end, jiajia won’t think it that way. She knows only satisfying her curiosity or fun-loving instinct. While her parents are already dealing with too many wrongs, deceptions and unfairness in their world, jiajia’s thoughtless dashing around in her jiang hu actually provides her parents, watching her from the side, a nice break from the ugly adult world, even just for half an hour. 

When I climbed into my car at around 2pm, on Wednesday, July 30, 2008, and drove toward I-26 via Huger Street, on my way toward a 1000-mile trip to Iowa, I never thought I would ever miss the city I was leaving: Columbia, South Carolina. Now, more than a month after I have resided in Iowa City, Iowa, I am.

My old place, 1402 Dreher St., Columbia, would just come to my mind unannounced and stick there for a while. I don’t miss any particular thing about it, only the sense that, it was my home. Interestingly, when I was living there, I did not quite take it as THE home of mine, because, after all, it was a rented place and I knew I would leave one day. What I was missing back then, was my old residence in Beijing, or my parent’s house in Kunming. But now that I’m living in the apartment groups in Iowa City, that little white, two-bedroom house we lived in Columbia for two years has replaced, to my surprise, everything else to become the target of my homesickness.  

I did not realize that deep in my heart, I never questioned that place as my home, the place where I came back to every time after shopping at the other side of the town, studying on the University of South Carolina campus, or visiting other places. I have got to known every tree, flower, landmark and street near it. I probably even knew the squirrels running and jumping from the front to back, back to front, of the house.

And I love the track and field facility just across the street. While I was pregnant, that was the place my husband and I walked every single day after dinner. We always walked three circles along the tracks, and my husband did his little silly talks to the baby.

What grasped my heart most about this place, of course, was the fact that it was the place I went back to after giving birth to my baby. As the combined result of the tremendous experience, extreme joy and huge emotional swing, this little house, along with a thousand emotions accompanying the child birth, deeply planted itself in my heart and memory. Every time I think about this, I feel rather sad. My baby left her birth place and does not know when she will ever return.

Now the place is occupied by someone else, but somewhere in my mind, I still feel that it is my place. I’m sure the new comers will complain, like I did, about the rough floor, the shabby windows and the bathroom that is always wet and has lots of mold. But that was my home, my only home, for the past two years…

I also know that, in the coming days and months, for numerous times in my dreams, I would drive on Assembly Street, turn left at a signal onto Whaley Street, then right at the Kangaroo gas station, come to Hayward, then make a right onto S. Marion, and then finally, turn left to arrive at 1402 Dreher St. That was the route I had driven for hundreds of times, from all sorts of places, to come home.