Sweet Home

Home, sweet home!
The home is something every human must have.

If a guy lives in a flat on his own, he normally doesn't call it home. He might call it his place. If he has a family, then he has a home.

A home though it has to be, it can turn into something like a cage if the sweetness turns sour, with one or more family members having become bad or foul, or with the mortgage balance to be paid off exceeding the market value of the home by onefold or two, or with most of the timber got eaten hollow by termites to a poor state beyond repair, or......

When these sorts of things happen, one still has to go home everyday to enjoy the unhappiness it provides. He might go away as the door is free to open. But he simply can't. There exists an invisible bondage.

People have to have a home to be happy. Yet many people are not happy just because they have a home, many failed family relationships render a bitter home instead of a sweet one. People just have to put up with the bitter part, in order to maintain the home as it is, and let themselves be trapped in a confining unhappy space.

In the ancient times one builds himself and his family his own house, or hut, or shelter. Our forefathers came a long way from Africa to this part of the world to settle down. They created their homes with their own hands. This was what every single man was once supposed to be capable of doing. Nowadays in developed cities such capability has no place.

I built myself a hut when I was a teenager, and called it my place for more than two years. It survived torrents from the sky, typhoons from the ocean, and two cold winters from Mother Nature. The winters were a bit colder than we are having now, I recall vividly that I had to add a fireplace to burn some charcoal to keep it warm inside. With a space of only roughly 2 metres by 1.5 metres by 2 metres, it just didn't take much charcoal to keep it warm. It must be a miracle however, that the tiny wooden hut hadn't caught fire, and the builder and owner hadn't died of carbon monoxide poisoning!

Before building the hut, I had even dug a small cave on the hillside. Amazingly it didn't collapse in the rains, but it got really wet as water dripped from the root tips of the vegetation on top of it all the time, so it was not inhabitable during the rainy season. Soon I deserted it because it didn't feel really good staying in there.

Many little American boys sleep in a tent for the first time in their courtyard to experience camping. When they hear an animal approaching in the middle of the night they abandon the tent and rush back to their cozy room.

Back then in my early teens I was yet to know anything about camping. To the best of my belief all places other than home just had to be hazardous and scary. Without a courtyard and a tent I never had the luxury of enjoying such funny experience. But I did do something that no other kids across the world would like to do. I once fixed in a tree a piece of timber from a used traditional coffin of Southern Chinese style found on a hillside used to be a cemetery, for lying down up there as an option of enjoying a hot sunny afternoon under the foliage during summer vacation. I didn't call it my place of course. I recalled no caterpillers came to disturb. I was very much afraid of caterpillers.

Now a local city kid simply can't do any of these sorts of naughty things in this over developed metropolis. The several hundred square kilometres of land mass have long been packed with monster buildings and fancy houses. What a boy can do is to urge his parents to choose some units in there, have the father written a cheque, and then move in with all his electronic games devices. And there are places nearby in which he can eat to get fat conveniently. And there are still places nearby in which he can have fun when he has had enough computer games. And there are extra places abroad to which he can fly for holidays and shopping with his family. His father just needs to make enough money by doing what he is good at, like speculating in flats and stocks.

If the father goes well with his speculating, the boy will soon have a second home and even a third home without doing anything but being lazy.

I was unfortunate, without a successful father, I had to build myself a second home when I was a teenager. Now a poor old wildlander though I might be, I have a mobile shanty as my second home. I can always choose a scenic spot of greenery to set it up and call it my temporary place.