As our team has been working to build 3, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the notion of home. Not just where we call home, but also what “home” actually means. In Western society, media and pop culture, we tend to talk about it as if it’s a singular, not to mention permanent, place. But as anyone who has moved countries knows, that’s not necessarily the case. For those of us who came to Canada from somewhere else (and there are about 8.3 million of us, according to Statistics Canada, plus the millions of people who belong to various diasporas), home is where we were born, the places we spent our formative years and where we live now. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that home is often located at the intersection of all those places, and that it can change as we change.
As anyone who has moved countries knows, home is not necessarily a singular—or permanent—place.
In many ways, this is a source of joy and connection. For actor Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, finding a home in herself has been an important and rewarding practice, especially as her career becomes busier, as you’ll read in our cover story (page 26). Elsewhere in the magazine, we explore how culinary traditions can lend a sense of home. As a Caribbean person, I have very strong feelings about sorrel, the drink we make every Christmas by steeping Hibiscus sabdariffa flowers—and I loved learning how many other cultures make it too (page 68). And of course we had to take a peek inside a literal home: tech power couple Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar’s Toronto abode, which perfectly combines Scandi style with South Asian cultural references (page 8).
But we’re also delving into more complicated questions around belonging. David McKinnon, former high commissioner to Sri Lanka and ambassador to the Maldives, argues that Canada’s economic interests depend on more young Canadians understanding the Indo Pacific region (page 52). We’re also thinking about home in the context of migration (page 34), and how an increasingly interconnected world makes it easier to go home, make a new home or rethink what home means to you, for better or for worse.
— Stacy Lee Kong, Editor-in-Chief
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