Fall 1949 , a teenage girl from a wealthy family in Sichuan ran away from home. Wearing only bamboo braided slippers and silk pajamas, she ran from her mountain top courtyard house all the way to the foot of the mountain, thinking she would never want to see her mother ever again. Destiny made her wish come true. Over the next 15 years, the house that she called home no longer echoed with her laughter. Instead, an oil lamp was lit up every night besides her bed – in case she should come back, she would see it and know that  her mother is waiting for her.

Sixty something years later, an 18 years old girl landed in Pearson International Airport for the first time. Heavily jet-lagged and furiously happy, she carried her 50 lbs of luggage and walked out onto the street. Toronto is a bit chillier than where she flew from. But she loved it. She loved it because she got to be away from her forever messy apartment and hard-to-please tiger parents.

"Homecoming 回箱” is an interrogative series that examines the decisions we made in relationship with where we live today. When packing my luggage to study overseas for the first time, I had no experience packing because I had never lived anywhere besides home. I folded everything into squares. Then grandma came, “If we packed like this back then in North Korea, we wouldn’t have any space for food.” And she jumped in and helped. She rolled my loose squares of T-shirt tightly into a scroll. Grandma ran away from home and served in the People’s Liberation Army from age 15-17. I flew from Pudong Airport in Shanghai to Pearson airport to study in Canada around the same age, and there, I started my journey in Canada. Every time we move, we make choices of what eventually goes into the luggage with us. That 50 lbs of luggage is full of choices; they are squeezed into each other, along with our bittersweet memories of home and family. Now I print them onto paper, and these are the shapes of our decisions.