China-sick - from Victor Hugo

How can I explain home-sickness for a place that technically isn't ever my home? Hugo does it much better than I ever could.

"Since he left town, Paris has been transformed. A new city has shot up that is to him in some ways unknown. Needless to say, he loves Paris; Paris is his spiritual home. But through all the demolitions and reconstructions, the Paris of his youth, that Paris that he has carted around religiously in his memory, is now a Paris of bygone days."

"As long as you are busy bustling about in your native land, you imagine that you couldn't care less about these streets, that these windows, these roofs, these doors, are nothing to you, that these walls are foreign to you, that these trees are any old trees, that these houses that you never enter are useless to you, that these cobblestones you are walking on are just stones. Later, when you are no longer there, you realize that those streets are dear to you, that you miss those roofs, those windows, and those doors, that those walls are necessary to you, that those trees are beloved trees, that those houses you never entered you entered everyday, and that you left your blood and guts and your heart on those cobblestones. All the places you no longer see, that you will perhaps never see again, though you have hung on to their image, take on a painful loveliness, come back to you with the melancholy of an apparition, make the Holy Land visible to you, and are, so to speak, the true face of France; and you love them and you evoke them as they are, as they were, and you cling to them, and you don't want anything to change, for you hold the face of your homeland in your heart as you would your own mother's face." - Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, Rose translation, p.371-372

Of course for me, it's not so bad as that. I have been back, I have seen the changes, and it hasn't been that long. I barely remember specific windows, but the sidewalk in front of my grandpa's house, which has chicken tracks in the cement. The streets were just streets, but when I lived on Big Willow Road, there was one of the only Subway's in Beijing at the time across from me, and an open market around the corner. The women dancing the courtyard on friday nights...people riding down the street with umbrellas...the grapevine we had...red mushrooms growing on our broom...sugar cane sellers and their carts...all of it.