回老家 Time For Home

“Grandpa and Grandma have brought it up many times. They still want to return. Your dad and I want to move back south, too. We’ve been in Beijing for forty years. Long enough.”

“I understand all that. But do you really have to sell the Beijing apartment?”

“Better so. If we don’t sell now, property prices will only fall more.”

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What is the most accurate English translation of laojia (老家)?

According to DeepSeek—

There is no single, universally accurate translation. It all depends on the context.

Hometown—the most common option, referring to the place where you were born or grew up.

Parents’ home/family home—emphasizing that your parents still live there.

Ancestral home / ancestral village—referring to the place your family comes from, or the home passed down through generations.

Of course, after presenting all the options, AI thoughtfully (and slyly) added one more sentence: if all you want to express is the idea of one’s hometown, then home is the simplest and safest choice.

The safest choice.

And yet, for someone like me—someone who doesn’t have a laojia—it is also the most misleading.

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“Where are you from?”

Back when I was studying in the UK and the US, I must have been asked this question thousands of times. And when the person asking was a foreigner, it was always easy to answer. First, “China.” If they seemed interested in knowing more, “Beijing.”

Beijing. For years, this was the answer that rolled off my tongue without a second thought.

In my twenties, it made perfect sense. I was born in Beijing. I went to kindergarten, primary school, and middle school there. Both my parents lived and worked in the city, bought apartments and settled down. During my years abroad, whenever I said I was “going back to China,” what I meant was a long-haul flight from London or New York to Beijing. Once the plane landed at Beijing Capital International Airport, all I needed was a thirty-minute car ride to get back to myself—or, more precisely, to my parents’ home in Chaoyang District.

I was at home. Home was Beijing.

And from a more distinctly Chinese institutional perspective, my identity as a Beijinger was also indisputable. After all, my household registration, or hukou, was in Beijing. My national ID number began with 11—in China, that eighteen-digit number is the most important code through which a person exists in society. The coding system was established after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, following the administrative divisions of the time. As the capital, Beijing was placed first in the North China sequence.

Hence, Beijing: 11.

I am an 11!

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In 2017, at 25, I officially moved back to China. When I decided to return, Beijing was the default settlement choice for two simplest reasons: my parents owned apartments in the city, which gave me, their only child, a rent-free place to live. The industry I was interested in—media—was centered in Beijing, the cultural hub of mainland China.

One more reason, actually: my friends were all in Beijing, too.

In our twenties, before our lives had grown into separate branches, a group of my female friends and I looked, from the outside, like identical Beijing girls. Most of us had ID numbers beginning with 11. We had all gone through nine years of compulsory education in the city, most likely in public schools. Our parents were all “ocean-divers” (下海的人)—the ones who chose to start their own private businesses during the economic boom of the 1990s, made money in the 2000s, and sent their daughters to Western countries for education. We Beijing girls thus became university students in the UK, US, Canada, or Australia, majoring in business, social sciences, or art while swiping our parents’ credit cards. Once we received our BA or BSc degrees, our instinctive response was to return to Beijing, our respective cradles.

Nobody ever asked, “Why Beijing?” The return was not an answer, for there was never a question.

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From 2017 to 2026, I worked and lived in Beijing, pretending to be as usual as a Beijinger. My work had never left the media industry; my life had never left Beijing, either. I lived in an apartment my parents bought, in the same building as theirs just a few floors down. My office is several blocks away from home, located in the buzzing CBD. My husband and I registered our marriage at the civil affairs bureau in Beijing’s Chaoyang District, and my Beijing girlfriends—except those who had moved abroad for marriage or further study—were still here.

What changed was not the location, but the context—hence the question. Gone was the Asian-looking student girl in the Western world; now I enter many social occasions as a proper working adult, meeting other Chinese from all over our country. No one asks me “Where are you from?” anymore; the new question is, “What’s your laojia?”

I then pause and consider which answer to offer.

The simplest version, when I wanted to brush off the conversation, was still: Beijing.

If I felt like adding a little complexity, I would say, “I was born in Beijing, but my ancestral hometown is Jiaxing (嘉兴), Zhejiang (浙江).” On my family’s household registration booklet (户口本), the column for ancestral origin (籍贯) still reads Jiaxing, where my grandfather was born.

If I happened to have had a couple of drinks and felt like talking a little more, I might say, “I was born and raised in Beijing. My ancestral home is Zhejiang, but my dad was born and raised in Xi’an (西安), Shaanxi (陕西). What do you think?”

And if I was tipsy with bubbling enthusiasm, I might go even further. “It’s complicated. My paternal and maternal grandparents are from Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces respectively. My mother was born in Jiangsu, but my dad was born in Shaanxi. They met in Beijing and had me here. So I’m a Beijinger?”

A Beijinger?

The full stop had become a question mark.

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At what point did I realize “I’m a Beijinger” could only end with a question mark?

Was it during my childhood, when my grandparents repeatedly reminded me that I was a “southern girl” (你可是个南方女孩)? Both my paternal grandparents came from Wangdian (王店), a small town under Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province. They were born in the 1930s and eloped to Xi’an after the PRC was founded. For forty years, they worked at Xi’an’s national power factories and raised two children: my great-aunt and my father. After they retired, their son—my father—invited them to live together in Beijing.

For my grandparents, the “living together” part was nice. The “Beijing” part, however, took effort to manage. My dear grandma, a once pampered young lady from the prosperous Jiangnan (江南) region before the Communists came to her Zhejiang hometown village, rebelled at even the idea of “the North” (北方). So some of my childhood memories went like this:

Grandma picking me up from kindergarten. The teacher, a young Beijing woman in her twenties, complimenting my fair skin, probably just making polite conversation. My grandmother, beaming with pride, replying, “Of course! Our girl is Southern!”

Grandma taking a taxi to the supermarket. The local Beijing driver couldn’t understand her thick Zhejiang accent when she told him where she wanted to go. Worse, he grew impatient and started muttering angrily about her accent. “Beijing people are so uncultured. You must never grow up to be as uncivilized as they are!” she complained to me furiously when she got home.

Grandpa and grandma patiently fed me cai fan (菜饭), a specialty rice dish from the Jiangnan region made by steaming small green vegetables, fresh pork, and rice together until soft, and shared their elopement story with me. At age 20, in the 1950s, the couple’s determination to run was firm, fueled by passionate love and uncertainty about the chaotic political environment. However, when they had only made it to Henan—still halfway to their final destination, Xi’an, for transit—Grandma could no longer hold back her tears. “Oh my, you have no idea how filthy the North is! The moment I stepped into that station, I almost fainted from the odor and noise!” Immersed in despairing memories, Grandma scooped out a spoonful of cai fan and fed it to my mouth.

Was it when I traveled to Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, on business trips with my father, and discovered that the people hosting us considered me one of their own? The uncles and older brothers at the dinner table would enthusiastically raise their glasses to me and toast, “Welcome home, Xi’an girl!” (西安闺女) I would stand up and toast back with baijiu, appearing sweet to bury my deep shock—what do I have to do with this city?

Or was it when my Beijing girlfriends—my fellow 11s—and I talked more deeply about our lives in our thirties? I finally realized, after rounds of wine and sharing some of our most intimate family stories, that my relationship to Beijing was entirely different from theirs. Most of my girlfriends are indigenous Beijingers, in that at least one of their parents has put down roots in the city in the previous generation. My parents were different. They arrived in Beijing only in the late 1980s, carried by a mix of personal effort and the winds of the times. Throughout the 1980s, university and college graduates didn’t have to find jobs on their own; the state assigned them positions, with schools coordinating placements in advance. That was how my parents, two young Southerners (I am ignoring my father’s Xi’an roots and counting him as a pure-blooded Southern boy for the sake of Grandma’s wish), who had just graduated from college in different cities, were blown to Beijing. With job assignment, they were naturally given Beijing hukou—a “status” considered highly valuable today, but back then merely a piece of paper.

For 40 years, they called Beijing their home. They started a family, my father went into private business and made money, and they had me.

For 34 years, I called Beijing my home. But never my laojia.

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My parents first brought up taking my grandparents back to Zhejiang in the spring of last year, in a way that sounded casual yet premeditated. “Grandpa and grandma are both over ninety now; we need to start thinking about the final years. We could sell our apartment in Beijing and use the money to rent a big villa in Hangzhou. There would be enough room for them and us. And when you come to visit, you’d have plenty of space, too.”

I completely understood their reasoning—then and now, in this and that moment.

Hangzhou is the capital of Zhejiang Province, only about seventy kilometers from Wangdian, my grandparents’ laojia. Both of their original families had been torn apart when the Communists came to power in 1949. They had no ancestral house left to return to, nor any close relatives still alive. Moving to Hangzhou would be the best available compromise: as close to laojia as possible, while still offering the conveniences of modern life. Most importantly, it would let them eat the foods they loved in their final years. My grandfather’s favorite was stir-fried eel (响油鳝糊) finished with a generous splash of hot oil. My grandmother loved freshly milled rice cakes (石墨年糕), sweet fermented rice balls (醪糟汤圆), and savory soy milk (咸豆浆). During their thirty years in Beijing, finding these foods that met their standard of laojia authenticity had been an impossible mission.

I understood all of it. My grandparents’ urge to return. My parents’ urge to provide. But what about me?

What about Beijing?

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“Just admit it, you don’t have a laojia.”

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And having a laojia in the first place—a luxury, isn’t it?

The person closest to me who possesses this particular luxury, and whom I envy most for having it, is my husband. He has an entirely legitimate, bona fide hometown: Henan (河南). Never mind that both his parents now live in Beijing. Never mind that he also has a Beijing hukou. Never mind that he actually grew up in Shenzhen and speaks fluent Cantonese. He was born and raised (at least in the early years) in Henan, with two parents who both have generational roots in the same province. Every Lunar New Year, when I “return laojia” with my husband, we have a clear destination: Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan Province, also where all his relatives on his father’s side live. The family dinner on Lunar New Year’s Eve would bring together more than thirty relatives across three generations in his grandfather’s apartment. The night is noisy and bustling, with everyone speaking the Henan dialect, drinking baijiu, and playing local mahjong. My husband’s aunts would roll out noodles to make yangrou huimian (羊肉烩面), a local lamb noodle specialty. The next morning, my husband’s cousins would wake me up for hula tang (胡辣汤), a spicy, peppery soup, and doufunao (豆腐脑), a soft tofu pudding.

Nobody in his family ever asked each other that question—

What’s your laojia?

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This year, Grandma officially turned ninety. She’d always been a woman with a remarkably strong body, wearing only single-layered pants in the chillest Beijing winter. “I’ve never seen a doctor in my entire life!” she would proudly claim whenever I visited her.

But over the past two months, Grandma has suddenly started experiencing abdominal pain. I accompanied her to medical appointments and ultrasounds. My mother took her to see practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, prescribing her herbal decoctions and acupuncture. Grandma suffered from constipation, so the doctor believed her stomach pain was caused by years of accumulated feces in her intestines. Grandpa and my mother helped Grandma manually remove her stool, massaging her abdomen daily, taking care of her nutrition and mental state as best they could. But the abdominal pain hasn’t gone away; even with all the treatments and care, she’s still languid, losing her usual joyful spirit.

Grandpa and Grandma have been preparing their burial clothes—quietly, but openly enough within our family. Last year, as a final touch, they told me they wanted to buy two pairs of canvas shoes. I took them to Neiliansheng (内联升), a long-established Beijing shoe-shop chain. Grandpa and Grandma both tried on the classic style—black canvas, white sole, minimalist design. They nodded in satisfaction, so I went to pay.

“Remember to put these on us when the time comes!” Grandpa said with a gentle smile, patting me on the back.

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But wait—

“I dreamed about those rice cakes (年糕) again last night...”

“And we have to eat little wontons (小馄饨), too, right?”

“Of course! Wontons (馄饨), zongzi (粽子), pork aspic (肉皮冻)...”

Grandma counted the dishes off on her fingers, describing each with great animation. Her body, curled up from pain, suddenly stretched a little, and a happy pink appeared on her face.

Having battled against recurring abdominal pain for over two months, Grandma had lost her appetite. Her already slender frame had grown thinner still. Only when she talked about the food from her laojia did her eyes light up.

“Once we return home, I’ll be able to eat all of it!”

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Once we return home—

Hui laojia (回老家)!

Time for home.