I’m back in London after almost a decade in the US – and I’m feeling homesick | Bim Adewunmi

4 hours ago 6

I don’t know how accurate it is that the children of immigrants are themselves well suited to leaving home. But I do know my own experience – I first left home when I was 11 to go to boarding school, and I’ve barely looked back since. My most recent leaving happened at 33, when I moved from London to New York with a multi-year visa, clutching a receipt for the large brown boxes that would arrive some weeks after me.

I have the good fortune to root well in new soil. You’ve heard of the idiomatic fish out of water? I have strong evidence to suggest that I am not that fish – I am the fish that thrives outside the water, perhaps even astride a bicycle. I moved to New York in 2016, with the intention of staying exactly 12 months: to report on an electric election year – and then return home with a chapter (“My Brooklyn Year”) of my eventual memoir tucked away in my mind. Instead, I stayed for almost a decade. Much has changed: silvery streaks have appeared at the crown of my head. My palate has widened dramatically to accommodate the vast cuisines of North America. Sometimes, when I stand up from my desk, I make an involuntary sound. And now, I am back. Coming home, just as my older bones are discovering, is an experiment in friction.

I flew back last August, and with me came some precious cargo – otherwise known as a toddler. Made and assembled in the US, and complete with a Brooklyn accent and a taste for tacos and apple and cinnamon Cheerios. Have you ever moved across an ocean with a small child? Look, if you have to do it, then you have to do it. But I can’t recommend it. Packing up the only life a small person has ever known, and trying to re-fabricate it 3,000 miles away is hard emotional work, for the kid, but also for you. We pulled through, though. We’re south Londoners now. We did it!

This is my first time being a parent. And it’s my first time living in London as a parent. Before I left, I lived in a tiny flat above a cafe in Clapton, in the east of the city, answerable only to myself, and with a disposable income spent exclusively on myself. These days, I am almost never travelling solo. I haven’t been on a single night bus since I returned. The Young V&A (formerly the Museum of Childhood; name change in 2023) has seen more of me than my actual favourite museum in the city, the Geffrye Museum (sorry, The Museum of the Home; name change in 2019). And the last theatre show I saw was My Neighbour Totoro (we exited prior to the intermission as my young companion couldn’t deal with the depiction of the soot sprites without some ice-cream).

The city of my youth has been reconfigured by an invisible hand. Moving south of the river for more space means so much of my geographical familiarity is back to zero. New buses and trains, new cafes and new venues, where kids – and prioritising their play – are king. Thankfully my friends are still here, and often willing to travel to us, but my home city feels like an uncanny valley a lot of the time. And the people … ah, the people. Being away for almost a decade made me forget the reticence of Brits. How often they recoil when you try to commune and connect on even a shallow level. I won’t forget the person who shushed my excited child in a Royal Academy of Arts gallery when he loudly pointed out the eyes on a Kerry James Marshall painting. And it’s amazing how few people on the underground ever offer to help with the buggy.

I don’t so much miss New York as the way New Yorkers live in it. I miss New Yorkers. I miss their chat, their friendliness, their ease with being human. I miss how unafraid strangers are to shout a compliment (or an insult, to be fair) across the street, or to congratulate you on your visible pregnancy. I am grateful for London’s superior open green spaces, but what I really crave, it turns out, is the people that make their city feel more lived in, simply by occupying the space with more vim and vigour, the way Brooklynites do. Thomas Wolfe wasn’t totally right. You can go home again. You just have a lot of notes.