I used to think belonging was something you could reason your way into. Live somewhere long enough, learn the language, understand the unwritten rules, make friends, do like the locals do, and eventually you’d arrive at a feeling of home the way you arrive at a correct answer. I don’t think that anymore.
A few years ago I was flying back from a business trip to Shanghai, a city I know well, a city I worked in, a city that still has a hold on me. I was standing at the gate in Pudong, waiting to board, when I saw it: the blue tail fin, the KLM logo, that unmistakable shade of blue. And then I heard it, the stewardesses chatting to each other, that particular Dutch cadence you’d recognize anywhere if you’d heard it enough. And something in me just settled. I knew, in that instant, before I’d even sat down, before the plane had left the ground: I was going home.
Not going back. Going home. The distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
What struck me later is that this wasn’t a decision. I didn’t weigh the Netherlands against China and conclude, on balance, that one was home. My body knew before my mind caught up. That’s the thing about belonging that I keep relearning: it doesn’t answer to logic. You can’t argue yourself into it, and you can’t argue yourself out of it either.
She has it too, now
My daughter has the exact same reaction. Every single time we’re coming back from a holiday, the moment we board the flight to the Netherlands, she says the same thing: “I am going home now, mama.” It is a strange thing, watching your own child clock a piece of your identity more clearly than you clock it yourself.
But belonging isn’t loyal to one place
Here’s what makes it complicated, and what I try to help the expat families I work with understand: belonging doesn’t ask for exclusivity. I feel at home landing in Amsterdam. And I still, often, ache for China in a way that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the senses.
This summer I was talking with my children about belonging and homesickness, a conversation that started almost by accident and went somewhere real. I told them about a moment from a trip to Barcelona, walking through the Montjuïc neighborhood. There were trees lining the street, and something about the smell, that specific, hard-to-name mix of warm air and green and dust, pulled me straight back to Shanghai. Not gradually. Instantly. One breath and I was somewhere else entirely, years and ten thousand kilometers away, and it felt, for just a moment, like home too.
Smell does that in a way nothing else quite does. It skips the part of your brain that would normally stop to explain itself.
Why this matters for the families I work with
When I run onboarding sessions for expat leaders and their families arriving in the Netherlands, belonging is almost always the real subject underneath whatever we’re officially discussing: housing, schools, workplace culture, integration. Because the honest question every relocating family is quietly carrying is not “will I adapt?” It’s “will people accept me, and will I ever feel like I’m home here, and if I do, does that mean I have to stop feeling like I’m home there?”
The answer, I think, is no. Belonging isn’t a single seat you have to give up in one place to occupy in another. It’s more like a body that can hold two homesicknesses at once, one for where you are, one for where you came from, without either one canceling the other out. My daughter feels the pull toward the Netherlands. I still feel a pull toward China, in flashes, usually when I least expect it. Both are true. Neither needs resolving.
That’s the part people find hardest to accept, especially the ones who pride themselves on being rational, on having it figured out. Belonging doesn’t care how well-adjusted you are on paper. It shows up, or doesn’t, in a blue tail fin, an accent, a smell of trees on a street in Barcelona. You can’t think your way there. You can only notice when you’ve arrived.
Recognise this experience, or living it right now? This is exactly what intercultural coaching is for. Feel free to reach out.
