---

From Here

by Wen Wen Yang

The smoldering joss sticks behind the psychic burned my throat as I sipped on chrysanthemum tea from a juice box.

“Where are your lodestones buried?” The psychic had a round face like my nainai, though she wore her hair in a pixie cut instead of the ubiquitous perm.

“The Bronx,” I croaked out.

The psychic snorted. “What were you doing there?”

Some three percent of the Bronx was Asian. I might be the outlier, the outsider, but it was still…“It’s where my family could afford a home to fit six adults and two kids.”

“And how often do you check on your lodestones?”

“Last time was six years ago.”

She clicked her tongue. “I think that’s why you feel so weak. Why haven’t you gone home?”

“My family and I–I wasn’t welcome home anymore.”

She threw her arms wide. “Not welcome in the entire city? Check your lodestones at least.”

“But,” I held out the three lodestones I had prepared. A lychee pit, a screw from my last pair of glasses, and a piece of a red jade pendant. “Couldn’t I use these here?”

The psychic seized my wrists. “Do you love this place the way you loved the places you left your first lodestones?”

“No.” I hated the heat, the requirement of car ownership, the library with only two branches and the niceties right before someone asked ‘What are you? Where are you really from?’

“Then go, visit your home.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She released my wrists and her face hardened at the insult. Why would I come to her if I wasn’t going to listen?

I had thought I needed to work harder, bury my feelings deeper to get over the homesickness. Food had lost taste. Music once evoked tears and smiles but now I could not find emotions anywhere. The world had no light despite the sunshine. I could not understand why others were laughing and holding each other. Nothing sounded funny. Their touch burned me.

After leaving the psychic, I bought last minute flights and placed the time off request at work. I booked the cheapest room rental near my old university. A reviewer had mentioned they were surprised by the area’s cleanliness. The backhanded compliment stung my cheeks so I set a reminder to leave a five star review. That night, I dreamt of missing connections and getting lost. I woke with my heart rattling my sternum like a caged bird.

---

My flight was the first one of the day. I stared at my maps app, at the pins marking where I’d scattered my lodestones. I remembered when I’d first enchanted them, pushing my energy into them like stuffing your favorite clothes into a too small backpack. A button from my favorite jeans before it had been stained beyond repair. An obsolete subway token. A coin that was so corroded that it was green and dusty. Vending machines wouldn’t accept it, but still counted it as a quarter before returning it. I’d kept them rattling in my pillow for weeks before I finally could feel their location when I scattered them in my room.

After we landed, I took the bus to the apartment. Everything smelled the same: overripe, sour. Music blasted from stores in a language that I had tried seven unsuccessful years to learn. The beats pulled at my hips, my shoulders. Two women opened the door, showed me to the spare room they were renting. They offered directions but I shook my head.

“I’m from here.”

They laughed and told me they were from the west coast.

Were they also running? Were they brave for escaping, or cowards for fleeing? Or were they also looking for a place where all their requirements were met, that elusive place at the center of a Venn diagram?

When they didn’t ask where my family was from, where I was really from, I wondered if that would be a question they’d ask when I was leaving. A parting shot that reminded me that my face was from a far off place.

---

As I neared the closest lodestone, the eroded coin, I could feel it pulling me, like a child determined to show you what they’ve created. I entered the university’s gates and stood in the shadow of its newest building, a gleaming tower with rust colored panels. Six years ago, it was still in the final stages of its grand opening when I pressed my lodestone into the dirt on the northern wall.

My best was average and expected here. When I left, my spent efforts didn’t matter anywhere else. I still didn’t return, determined to find another way to rise. The lodestone was a stepping stone out, not an anchor.

I sat on the bench between the lanes of traffic. I refueled in sunlight and car exhaust, listening to snatches of conversations with no satisfactory ending.

Next, I rode the train north, then transferred to a bus. By mid-afternoon I was in front of the high school. I walked the street around it, feeling the lodestone in the front garden. The students looked impossibly young with their soft jawlines and tormented skin.

My lodestone was not the only one, mixed among the buttons and zippers other talent used to ground themselves in the building. I wondered how far the others would travel, to grow or to hide.

What were the other magic workers trying to accomplish?

I didn’t probe their spells and caught the next bus out.

At each crossed intersection, the streets became a mix of familiar and new. There were now big box stores that required a car to carry home your purchases. The smaller stores that my mother called garbage stores were gone. The bars with opaque black windows were gone. Pop music exploded out of a bistro.

When I stepped off the bus, my school was gone. A hotel stood in its place.

The final lodestone, the relic of the token, was nowhere to be found. I felt dizzy, lost, despite the other familiar landmarks.

Where could I call home? I gripped the three newer lodestones in my pocket and stared at the planter in front of the hotel. No, I had no attachment to this hotel.

“You all right, ma’am?”

I looked up into the face of the concierge.

“I think I’m lost. Wasn’t this a school?” It didn’t feel right, like asking someone if they were my best friend.

The concierge smiled, teeth bright against his tanned skin. “Oh, you’re from here! This was P.S. 7. They got another building by the library.” He pointed further down the street.

“Wasn’t the library that way?” Someone had torn my memory’s map apart.

He sucked his teeth. “New location, moved like three years back.”

Could I trust that a library would last longer?

How many books had I slept beside?

How many had I pressed to my heart and thought, yes, here in these pages, I could live here?

I thanked the concierge and went in the direction of the library.

Yes, old friends, I am coming for a visit.

---

Host Commentary

Change can come from many places. For the protagonist of this piece, her family ties have worn thin, the welcome that most of us perhaps take for granted transformed into just another reason to stay away. So much of our self-identity can be rooted in things that are external to us: our families, our environments, our workplaces and careers. This story shows us a world where the strength of those anchors is palpable, magical – though no less meaningful than they already are in our own reality. As a child who didn’t belong, I too forged connections with my environment, building stories and magic into locations and landmarks. I’ve also felt, years later, the pang of returning home to find the landscape transformed, new housing estates or retail centres where something obscure and precious, no longer needed but still remembered fondly, once held more meaning than anyone else might have guessed. Books, though. Books endure – they hold not just the stories we love, but the people we were when we first encountered them. Each reading draws us not only into the pages, but back and within, to other places and times where we once felt safe and at home.