Deep in My Hometown: My Northern Shaanxi

Shannxi Association of Canada

2025/12/7

I was born in Northern Shaanxi—a place kissed by the sun and nourished by the loess soil. It is the hometown to which my grandparents and parents dedicated their lives, and the source and home of my soul.

My childhood memories are filled with playing and frolicking with my friends in the flat courtyard in front of our cave dwellings. The winds of the four seasons swept across the Loess Plateau, bending the sorghum, filling the air with the laughter of the farmers, and blowing into the most primal and pure warmth of my life. The rolling hills, each ridge and mound, gently cradled us like the earth's palm. Back then, the sky was blue, the land was rich and deep, and the hearts of the people were as open and honest as the loess beneath their feet.

The people of Northern Shaanxi are simple, kind, straightforward, and honest. The upright, kind, hardworking, and simple character of my parents, like the winds of my hometown, has silently seeped into my bones and blood. No matter where I go, how far I travel, or how time changes the world, it can never change the essence of a Shaanxi native within me.

After graduating from university, I worked in Xi'an, the provincial capital, for sixteen years. During that time, amidst the hustle and bustle of city life, I often thought of the smoke rising from the chimneys, the twilight, the courtyards, and the adults chatting under the moonlight in my hometown. At the end of the last century, I went overseas and immigrated to Canada. Now, twenty-seven years later, I have lived and worked in Toronto and am now retired. This unfamiliar land has slowly become my second home, but my true roots will always be planted in the loess soil of northern Shaanxi.

Over the years, at least once a year, I embark on the journey back home. No matter how far the journey or how disruptive the time difference, as long as my health permits, I go back—to see the old house, the loess soil, those familiar faces, to hear the Shaanxi dialect, to eat Shaanxi food, and to stand in the wind of my hometown to let my heart find peace again.

Because that is where my life began.

There, my family, whom I have cherished all my life and who always think of me, reside.

That's Shaanxi, a place I can always return to and never forget.

As long as I can walk, my journey home will never cease. That land is my lifelong homesickness, and also my eternal strength.