Long-term living away from home sits somewhere between travel and settling down. A trip can last ten days or two weeks before most people hit their limit. You do not have to change your habits much; you either put up with inconvenience for a few days or let yourself go a little, knowing home is still the destination. Settling down is different. It means groceries, bills, errands, and all the tiny responsibilities that accumulate into a way of life.

Living temporarily in one place for months or years belongs to neither category exactly. Unlike tourism, it has to deal with the ordinary mechanics of living. Unlike permanent residence, it comes with the knowledge that you are, in the end, only passing through. That is why this kind of life is usually stripped of the emotional glow found in guidebooks. It becomes plain, repetitive, even trivial, and in those trivialities you end up rediscovering what life actually rests on.

For people of my generation, the rough trajectory often looks like this: settle, leave, settle again. We grow up in one hometown, move elsewhere for school or work, spend years drifting, then eventually choose a place to stay. Some people go straight from childhood stability into adult stability with barely a gap. I did not. Between those two forms of settlement, I have had a long season of living in transit that is still not fully over: from my hometown to the provincial capital, from there to the national capital, from there to a rural place overseas, and now to a major metropolis. When I count it up, I have been living this way for well over a decade.

The word New Yorker being rendered with a term that emphasizes "guest" captures something important. In a big city, newcomers are guests no matter how long they stay. Beijing is no exception. The old native families are mostly associated with the southern parts of the city, while if you trace many people in the north back three generations, their origins form a map of the whole country. In truth, there are hardly any pure natives in a great city. What exists is mostly the advantage of those who arrived earlier over those who came later. The later arrivals often have to begin with harder, more physical work, and that economic difference easily turns into a sense of natural superiority among the established population. Farther south, cities like Shanghai have long carried their own deep-rooted biases, including prejudice against people from nearby regions.

Still, the more diverse a city becomes, the more room it tends to make for difference. A younger city such as Shenzhen barely has a meaningful native class in the old sense. People from every direction gather there, and with less historical baggage the local rules are often more accommodating. Today there is also a class of urban migrants who arrive not through manual labor but through education and professional status. They can fold themselves more easily into local ways of life. That, too, can sharpen the frustration of people who feel their own position declining. In any case, settling permanently in a place where you once lived as a temporary resident is never easy. Yet going back is rarely easy either. By the time many people finally choose where to stay, they are no longer optimizing for the best life imaginable; they are choosing the option with the fewest side effects.

Learning to belong without fully belonging

When you live somewhere temporarily, "when in Rome" stops being a cliché and becomes a daily test. You have to reach some kind of truce with the place around you. In regions with a strong cultural center, newcomers are absorbed through language, habits, and unspoken expectations. The same distinctive local habits can also serve as a barrier, keeping outsiders at a distance.

What people call circle culture often works this way. It marks who belongs and who does not through obvious but not fatal differences. A newcomer either adapts and becomes part of the circle, or leaves, or survives on the edge with a low-connection social life. Anyone who lives in transit for long learns this instinctively. There are usually two workable paths: merge in while keeping some independence, or help establish a new set of rules in a new direction. The first takes tact. The second takes courage, and it also requires an environment willing to tolerate reinvention.

That is one reason new cities and immigrant cities are so appealing to people who live this way. If there is no new world waiting, you try to make one. But when a city loses momentum or starts running into hard limits on resources, divisions between people quickly sharpen. Walls go up. The next utopia is always somewhere farther away.

A portable life measured in suitcases

This kind of life can feel very free. Most of what matters to you has to fit into two large suitcases, one carry-on, and a backpack. If you do not return "home," you may in fact have no home to return to, because the key has already been handed back to the last landlord.

But once you find a place to land, the whole apparatus of ordinary living expands again: rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, tea, all the daily necessities rushing back into your life at once. People who have done this many times often become practical environmentalists. They buy with waste in mind. During the first week in a new city, it makes sense to purchase supplies with a maximum horizon of about one year, because a year is a fairly stable unit in this kind of life.

I have counted before: clothing for all four seasons, with one set in use and one backup, can be kept under fifty items. That fits into about one and a half suitcases. The remaining half can hold a light quilt and a pillow. The carry-on and backpack take the personal items and a book or two. In theory, that is enough to arrive in almost any city and begin living. As for furnishing a temporary room, 5,000 RMB is enough to buy a complete set of new basic furniture and kitchenware. If you buy secondhand, you can even afford a bit of taste. When it is time to leave, you can sell it or give it away without much waste.

The luxury of not turning life into an itinerary

Living somewhere is nothing like traveling through it. You are not preparing to depart every day, nor are you following guidebooks and strategy posts from one stop to the next. Temporary residence allows a certain looseness, and that looseness is extremely luxurious.

Think about it: someone else uses their one annual vacation to visit the city where you happen to be living. They carry a camera, wake early, sleep late, and fill every hour with maximum efficiency. Meanwhile, you stay in your little rented place all day because it is cold outside. That freedom to choose is the real luxury.

This way of life is simply a lifestyle. Famous attractions and shareable experiences are not necessary conditions for it. You can judge value by guidebook standards if you want, or enjoy things privately on your own terms. If it makes you happy, that is enough. There is no need to believe that all those "must-see" places are truly indispensable. A large portion of that language belongs to tourism marketing, another sizable portion to personal showmanship, and only a small part to what you might genuinely feel yourself. Whether something is worth seeing is a question you can ask yourself. If you feel the need to ask everyone else first, it probably is not that important to you. At that point you are just becoming an echo. Blind exploration may be better.

Food is where homesickness becomes biological

Among all the local customs that shape a person’s mood while living away from home, food may matter the most. Eating strictly according to local habits every day can become tiring if your body never adjusts. Eating your hometown food every day does not work either, because outside home it often tastes slightly wrong. The strange and interesting thing is what happens when the two mix and produce a third flavor.

This is visible everywhere in immigrant cities. Customs among people of the same ethnic background may remain relatively close to those of their place of origin, but food almost always changes to suit the local environment. People who live in transit probably contribute a lot to this process. You may be able to control where your legs go, but retraining your stomach is much harder.

Search for Lao Gan Ma on Google Trends in the US and you will notice that interest has risen in the past couple of years, especially in places like California and New York. Maybe more international students are less interested in fully absorbing a new world and more inclined to return to something familiar through food. To put it in a more unappetizing way, "I" am really "we." A person is a symbiosis between a mammal and microorganisms. A good deal of what we call attachment to native soil may not be purely emotional expression from the mammal at all, but a life-and-death demonstration by the microbes. Eating is a conversation between me and the many lives living with me. Very few people truly overcome themselves in that realm.

Passing friendships, lasting solitude

People living this way do make friends. Some even settle down impulsively, build a family, and stop moving. But most relationships fade with the next departure and survive only as a few exchanged greetings during holidays.

More often, the loneliness of this life cannot be removed, and there is no real need to remove it. On a long bus ride or while ordering a meal, you may meet someone new. You do not need names or contact information. You are each only passing through the other’s field of vision.

With strangers, you can be more honest than usual, or less honest than usual. The degree is flexible. By contrast, when people settle down and have to live daily with family, neighbors, and familiar routines, they need a stable version of themselves that does not crack too easily. The friendships formed while living in transit resemble the old saying about a gentleman’s friendship being as light as water: thin, but thirst-quenching.

Then again, it may be better to learn endurance than to keep chasing relief. In the long run, people who live like this are self-sustaining organisms. A solitary figure moves lightly enough that it eventually disappears into the crowd of other passersby. Sympathy may seem desirable, but no one truly needs pity and no one really deserves it in any special way. Everyone is climbing their own mountain.

The mountain is there whether you dramatize it or not. If you do not cross it yourself, you will never see the other side. Moving others, or even moving yourself emotionally, is not what climbing requires. The mountain does not know. Do not steal another person’s path; cutting your own route is more interesting. There may be nothing at the summit. That is all a summit is. The North Pole has no north beyond it; boundaries do not announce themselves forever. Trade a vulgar joke, share a drink, and the next stretch begins.

A search for roots that are not a place

Living in transit is, in the end, a private search for roots. But the root in question is not necessarily your hometown. It is the courage to place yourself somewhere in life without hesitation, without constant regret.

You may never find it. The search itself is already a form of courage. When the backpack is packed and ready, other people’s judgments lose much of their force. You look ahead once, briefly, and set out.