Words and photos by Fiona Sjaus, Jerry Wong and Isa S You.
We don’t always think of students as migrants. Their stay is considered temporary — they can become migrants once they graduate and start applying for permanent residency, or get a full-time job. But students, international students in particular, are migrating every time a new semester starts. How do they navigate the space between home, where they are from, and home, where they are now?
Oliver Sage
In daily life, our bodies and minds are constantly in motion. Stuck on a plane for long hours at a time is an opportunity to sit with your thoughts, levitating above everything that distracts you from them.
For nutrition sciences master’s student Oliver Sage, this is an uncomfortable experience, worsened by the tiring discomfort of staying in one place for a long time.
“You’re stuck in the moment, in the present. And it feels like that’s often when things come into your head — did I finish this? Where am I heading in life existentially?” Sage said. “You can’t get into comfort until you’ve landed and even if you find that [comfort], you probably have another flight.”
And Sage often does, with stopovers in Toronto or Copenha- gen. It’s a feeling he said is compatible with a marathon or a climb, where the athlete accepts the thoughts that cross their mind until the feeling of relief washes over them upon arrival to their destination.
Sage said that the tense experience is only exacerbated by flight delays and complications.
For him, home is Brussels, Belgium where he spent much of his childhood and where his parents expect him to be there for the holidays.
“[Belgium is] the closest thing I would call home because my family’s there. My siblings live in different parts of Europe, but generally around Christmas, that’s when we all come to Belgium.”
Sage completed his undergrad in the Netherlands before coming to Vancouver where, he said, if you search up the city online it’s synonymous with West Coast vistas of mountains.
“Talking to my friends and asking [for] their opinions, they said ‘You have to move there. It’d be an amazing opportunity’ ... I found out that Vancouver was a very livable city,” Sage continued. “And UBC just really caught my eye.”
For Sage, home isn’t just one place — it’s a heritage that goes beyond the borders of his homeland.
Sage is also home with his mother’s Finnish roots. In the Nordic countries, everyone knows about a Finnish cartoon called Moomin.
“The characters look like these little white hippopotamuses, but they’re actually trolls,” Sage explained. The comic has since been animated into a show in Japan.
“It’s an interesting mix of cultures,” said Sage. “When you watch them, you can watch them from when you’re a kid to when you’re older because the stories are very relatable, and they always have these nice messages [about] kindness and adventure.”
Sage holds cups with the caricatures painted on them as close keepsakes, dishes that he used in Belgium that materialize his Finnish half — they hold both memories and history.
Sage finds home in the synthesis of the many things that piece him together. Being only weeks away from graduating, he does
not know what’s in store for the months ahead as he considers applying for either a PhD in nutrition, or a dietetics credential, but he knows he’s looking for adventure a long way away from home.
Victoria Sin
The flight between Vancouver and Hong Kong can range from 12 to over 30 hours, depending on layovers and connections. For Victoria Sin, the lead up to these long-haul flights during the holidays is always stressful.
“Every time, a couple days before, I start frantically preparing everything,” she said.
Sin keeps all of her documentation, like passports, in a little pouch and makes sure she carries it with her when she travels home.
“I think this really encapsulates the mental struggles of the amount of things you have to prepare before you take that journey here or back. I like to make a lot of checklists, because I’m afraid by the time I get to the airport and in the gate, if I forget anything, that’s too far gone.”
Sin is a fourth-year commerce student, minoring in Asian Canadian and Asian migration studies. As part of the Chinese diaspora from Hong Kong, her family immigrated to Vancouver and later migrated back to Hong Kong in the late 1990s where she grew up.
“By tuition status, I’m a domestic student,” said Sin. “I grew up in Hong Kong and then I moved here for university. So by that definition, I would kind of count myself as an international stu- dent.”
Recalling her first memory of coming to Vancouver when she was a child, Sin found the city stuck with her and helped her make the choice to come to UBC.
“It wasn’t as dense and it just felt different, like a breath of fresh air,” she said. “Then when I did come here, in my first year of university, I felt more almost like at peace with my identity — which is kind of interesting because it’s a completely new environment.”
While Sin is in Vancouver, her parents send her packages with treats and letters.
“It’s nice to see a reminder of things that my parents said to me. Even though we text, it’s nice to have a physical reminder,” she said.
Seeing her family and friends when she returns makes the distance worth it.
“I know that when I step out of the gate I’ll see my parents. They usually come pick me up so that makes me really excited,” she said.
Despite this, Sin carries mixed feelings when she travels back home.
“Sometimes I get scared going back where I have to hide pieces of myself or how I’ve grown because I feel like people back home expect me to be a certain way that I was before I moved away.”
Sin said many UBC students are also from Hong Kong which makes the process of going home easier for her.
“The widespread pattern of travel, just people from Hong Kong and here, allows for so many direct flights. It’s also such a privilege for me to have friends who are also travelling together so that it’s less lonely or less scary.”
Regardless of time zones, long airport lines and being away from her family, Sin is grateful for the experience she’s had.
“I think I’m very lucky to also just be able to call both places home and feel like travelling between home and home. It’s like a really complicated thought process but it’s great to feel [to] some degree comfortable between those places.”
Mina Leghari
Mina Leghari is far away from home. And there’s no reminder like the first step she takes out of the airport, when the humidity of Dubai hits.
“Even the air is different. The sun [in Vancouver] is so warm and weirdly orange. I feel like in Dubai it’s like a beam and beats at you. And it’s so hot and it’s so bright,” said Leghari, a third-year psychology and philosophy student.
There’s always an adjustment period when Leghari goes home. “It takes me a while to get used to even my bed ... It feels a little bit off.”
Leghari was born in Toronto and moved to Dubai when she was in the fourth grade. She makes the trip home twice a year.
“I think when I’m in Vancouver, I’m always like, ‘Oh, I’d love to stay for the summer and just see what it’s like.’ But then I think when it’s getting close to summer I’m so homesick,” she said.
The transition from leaving home was especially difficult in her first year of university. In the absence of her two brothers, parents and cat, the quiet of her dorm room took time to adjust to.
“It was kind of the realization that I can’t just go knock on someone’s door and be like, ‘Hey, let’s play Mario Kart or some- thing’ ... it’s just me on my own.”
The 12 hour time difference makes it hard to forget her family is on the other side of the world. “It was just a very lonely experience at first. When your family’s all you’ve grown up around and are the people that you spend time with the most and then they’re not there anymore,” said Leghari.
Direct flights to Dubai are scarce, so her trips take 14 and a half hours each way. She says the return trips to Vancouver are so much more exhausting once the excitement of being home wears off.
Leghari said that they call for hours, showing her the cat and updating her on new plants in the garden. “It just [makes] me feel like ... okay, they’re not that far away. Like, they’re still there, I can still see everybody and I can still talk to everybody.”
Among Leghari’s keepsakes from home is a dodgeball 7s shirt, from a dodgeball game between the students and the teachers, which reminds her of her high school friends and the happy times back home.
Another treasured possession is a deck of cards, bought on a going-away trip to a waterpark and aquarium in Dubai. It’s a reminder of a fun memory and her relationship with her dad.
“The reason that I really got into card games was because of my dad.” Her father collects card games and they used to play card games every night prior to her departure.
Leghari said while it can be hard, her parents’ pride in her helps her feel secure in her decision to move so far from home for a degree.
“That honestly helps a lot, knowing that my dad is really proud of me for doing something like this.”