On diaspora, belonging, and the gradual discovery that home is something we participate in making.
The idea of returning home assumes a certain continuity between the place we left, the place we imagined, and the place to which we eventually arrive.
For people raised between countries, that continuity is often more complicated.
I grew up in the United States as a Cambodian-American, carrying an identity connected to a place that was both deeply familiar and, in many ways, distant.
Cambodia existed through family, language, memories, expectations, and the stories through which the past survived into the present. It was never simply a foreign country. But neither was it a place I understood through the ordinary experience of living there.
Moving to Cambodia did not resolve that contradiction.
In some ways, it made it more visible.
Living somewhere requires a different relationship from remembering or imagining it. You encounter not only the things that affirm your sense of belonging, but also the mundane frustrations, competing interests, social hierarchies, and contradictions of everyday life.
You discover that affection for a country does not automatically produce an understanding of it.
And that being Cambodian does not necessarily mean knowing what Cambodia needs.
I have become more cautious about the language of giving back. It is usually well-intentioned, and I understand why it resonates with so many members of the diaspora. But it can imply a relationship in which one person arrives with something to offer and another is waiting to receive it.
The truth is more reciprocal.
Much of what I have learned about leadership, work, community, and my own limitations has come from living and working in Cambodia. The people around me have not simply been participants in projects I wanted to build. They have helped shape my understanding of what those projects could become.
Over time, my relationship with Cambodia has become less about recovering an inherited identity and more about participating in a shared present.
There is a meaningful difference between wanting to belong somewhere and accepting responsibility for the life one builds there.
Belonging does not eliminate the contradictions of living between cultures. I remain shaped by an American education, by the opportunities and assumptions that accompanied it, and by experiences that are not universally shared by other Cambodians.
I do not think those differences need to disappear.
They can be sources of perspective, provided we are willing to recognize their limitations.
Perhaps that is what returning has come to mean for me.
Not the completion of a journey back to an imagined origin, but the beginning of a more demanding relationship with a real place.
Home is not always somewhere we find ourselves.
Sometimes it is somewhere we slowly learn how to live, contribute, disagree, and stay.