By Rima Rokh
What does home mean when you have more than one answer?
For some people, home is easy to define. It is the city they were born in, the house they grew up in, the country their family has always called home. But for those of us who have grown up between cultures, cities and countries, the answer can be a little more complicated. Home might be where you were born, but not where you grew up. It might be where your family comes from, but not where you have spent most of your life. It might be the city you left behind, the city you live in now, or somewhere you only visit but somehow still recognise as your own.
Sometimes, home is all of these things at once.
There is a particular experience that comes with growing up between cultures. You learn early that identity isn't always one thing. You might speak one language at home and another at school. You might eat the food your family grew up with while being surrounded by something completely different outside the house. You might celebrate traditions that belong to one culture while building your everyday life around another. Without necessarily realising it, you learn how to move between worlds.
For many third-culture people, this becomes part of who they are. You learn to adapt. You learn how to read different rooms, understand different customs and find familiarity in places that aren't necessarily familiar. You begin to carry pieces of everywhere you've been with you.
And sometimes, that can make the simple question, “Where are you from?”, surprisingly difficult to answer.
You might give the short answer because it's easier. You might name the country on your passport, the city where you were born, or the place where you grew up. But sometimes none of those answers really tell the whole story. How do you explain a childhood shaped by one country, a family rooted in another, friendships formed somewhere else and a life that continues to move between places?
Maybe the problem isn't that we don't know where home is.
Maybe we've simply been taught that home has to be one place.
As you grow older, your definition of home can become even more complicated. A childhood home can become a memory. A city you couldn't wait to leave can become somewhere you suddenly miss. A country you once felt disconnected from can feel strangely familiar when you hear its language, taste its food or recognise a tradition you didn't realise you had been carrying with you.
Sometimes, it only takes something small to bring it all back.
The smell of a particular dish. A song you haven't heard in years. Someone saying a word in an accent you recognise immediately. The feeling of walking down a street that you haven't seen since you were a child. These moments remind you that places can stay inside us long after we have left them.
Maybe that's why home isn't always somewhere you return to.
Sometimes, it's something you recognise.
And people can become an even bigger part of that feeling.
When you've lived between places, the people you meet along the way can become your anchors. There are friends who know the different versions of you. The person you were as a child, the person you became when you moved away, and the person you are now. There are people who understand the references, the languages, the contradictions and the stories behind you without needing an explanation.
You can meet them anywhere in the world and immediately feel something familiar.
A new city can feel like home because you're sitting across a table from someone who knows you. A friend's house can feel more familiar than your own. A conversation can transport you back to a place you haven't been in years.
Sometimes home isn't the city you're standing in.
It's who you're standing next to.
Of course, growing up between cultures isn't always romantic. There can be moments when you feel like you don't completely belong anywhere. You can feel too foreign in one place and not foreign enough in another. You can be asked to explain parts of yourself that feel obvious to you but unfamiliar to someone else.
There can be a strange feeling of always being slightly between things.
But perhaps there is another way to look at that space.
Because living between cultures also means being able to understand more than one world. It means knowing that there isn't always one way to celebrate, communicate, eat, dress, love or build a life. It means being able to take pieces from different places and make them your own.
You don't have to keep cultures separate.
You can blend them.
You can take your grandmother's recipes and change them. You can listen to music from three different countries in the same afternoon. You can speak one language with your family and another with your friends. You can carry traditions forward while creating new ones of your own.
Your identity doesn't have to fit neatly into one box simply because a form asks you to choose one.
Maybe that is one of the most beautiful things about being a third-culture person.
You get to create your own definition of home.
It can be the place you were born, the place your parents came from, the city where you spent your childhood, the country where you built your career, or the place you found later in life. It can be all of them, or none of them.
It can be a collection of memories rather than a location.
It can be the people you choose to surround yourself with. It can be the traditions you decide to keep and the ones you decide to reinvent. It can be the food you make, the languages you speak, the clothes you wear, the music you listen to and the stories you tell.
It can be everything you've carried with you.
At Dukkan Avantique, this idea of home has always been close to the way we think about identity. We are interested in what happens when different cultures, places and experiences come together and become something that belongs entirely to you.
Because maybe home doesn't have to be inherited.
Maybe it can be created.
Maybe it can exist somewhere between where you've come from and where you're going.
And maybe, for those of us who have grown up between cultures, the question isn't really “Where is home?”
Maybe it's simply:
“What does home mean to you?”