As a Residential College admissions assistant, I have the pleasure of introducing starry-eyed high schoolers to the RC and the burden of the greatest ethical question known to man — do I admit how rancid the dining hall is? My new job is the fulfillment of a long-time dream. I’ve always idolized the superheroic figure of the tour guide — both the encyclopedic knowledge of a place and the zealous proselytizing. Did you know WCBN started in East Quad Residence Hall? Did you know that Abeng Lounge is the University of Michigan’s first multicultural lounge and features a signed copy of Bobby Seale’s memoir?
It’s difficult to overstate my love for East Quad. When I was a high schooler, chronically unable to handle basic assignments, all I dreamed of was joining a writer’s commune. Tired of worrying about grading and academic prestige, I wanted a community whose residents lived and studied alongside each other, bonded by a shared love of the arts, theatre and foreign languages — a place where the halls might be filled with Spanish insults, guitar chords and Shakespearean monologues. This was the promise of the Residential College.
I spent my first year of college at home. I can’t even estimate how many hours I spent pacing around my room attending Zoom classes. That year, I made a few friends, but not a single person who I would turn over my heart to. When I finally transferred to the RC, I felt like my loneliness was cured. In my first RC social science seminar, I randomly complimented someone’s Dungeons and Dragons T-shirt and we talked for hours — about tabletop games, about Earthsea, about border politics and Queer theory — and he’s still my best friend to this day. East Quad became a home populated with the most nerdy, deranged and exciting people I ever met.
It’s possible to love one place too long. During fall exams, I spent roughly four days straight in the building without ever seeing the sun, writing 10 pages a day for my finals, and I didn’t even live in East Quad anymore. My meager existence felt shockingly similar to my endless, Mountain Dew-fueled all nighters in high school. Had I changed at all?
In my moments of greatest desperation, I turned to the hedonistic pleasure of streeteasy.com, a website for New York real estate listings. For a brief moment, I forgot assignment deadlines, piles of class readings and workshopping my resume.
“The city that never sleeps” offers a new lease on life — endless museum tours, visits to the fourth-largest library in the world and more than two people of Color in the neighborhood. Before the native New Yorkers send me hate mail, I’m the first to admit I know almost nothing about the city. That’s exactly why it appeals to me. New York offers the vaguest promise of a diverse cityscape, creativity and endless takeout, the furthest mental point from my daily life.
Homes — like paintings or poems — are a medium of expression. As philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously theorized, “The medium is the message.” Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist, elaborated that the medium is a mold of, rather than an X-ray into, our consciousness. We pour our hopes, our insecurities and our passions into the physical space of our homes, hoping that it will shape us into our desired selves. This is the root cause of our Zillow-sickness: Our obsession with browsing for homes we can never buy, with endless interior design tutorials and makeovers.
Consider the new proliferation of TikTok aesthetics: dark academia, cluttercore, cottagecore, goblincore, corecore or fiber-optic-cable core. All of these are simultaneously interior design trends and lifestyle brands. Dark academia promises that the mere invocation of gothic interiors and musty bookshelves will turn you into a French intellectual. Consider, too, the minimalist craze that swept the internet a few years ago promised that one could become a more efficient, more peaceful individual simply by decluttering one’s space. Of course, if your space cannot be navigated easily, decluttering is a no-brainer. But minimalism isn’t about pure decluttering. The vogue for discarding anything that doesn’t “spark joy” and acquiring random trash that adheres to minimalist aesthetics (mugs, clothes, even nativity sets), is more mystic than organizational. It demonstrates an understanding that our interior lives are, in some part, cultivated through our exterior surroundings.
Unfortunately, it’s harder to build a home than a Pinterest board. On her end, Joan Didion describes her painful disillusionment with New York; in her final year of city life, she suddenly found herself crying at Chinese laundries and dreading the public library. Dreams hit the pavement. You move back into your parents’ basement if you’re lucky enough to have parents, and they’re lucky enough to have a basement. StreetEasy data shows a 17% increase in rental costs between 2019 and 2022 alone. One hundred-thousand New Yorkers, nearly 1-in-83, are unhoused. The mayor hopes to alleviate these issues by kicking out vulnerable migrants — including families with children — from homeless shelters. One recent Times article reported that the city has lost nearly 100,000 housing units due to the city’s richer residents buying and combining smaller units. One landlord, Mr. Croman, cajoled or evicted residents of a six-unit apartment complex so he could convert it into a home for his own family. One resident, a creative writing professor, told The Times that he had always dreamed of living in New York. He has since moved back to Maryland.
My parents were told America’s roads were paved with gold. Native Bangladeshis, they hoped that moving across the seas would offer their children political stability and peace. Growing up, I remember my mother’s late nights, studying so that she could earn a second master’s degree and hopefully enough money to eventually buy a house: the American dream. But in the final years of my high school education, while COVID-19 choked America, I couldn’t look at my hometown without seeing its history of redlining. I couldn’t attend class without remembering that in 1968, 8% of students said they would violently resist integration. Trapped in our suburban house, my parents discussed whether they made the right choice.
I hoped to escape my segregated, parochial hometown into the extravaganza of campus life, like Stephen Dedalus fleeing for France. My imagined commune turned out to be endless 4 a.m. nights and emails to Spanish professors about mental health. Many times, I’d be kicked out by DPSS officers when I was taking a brief nap while working late in East Quad lounges. At my first university, some students drove cranes to make a living. Here, I could pay my tuition with the number of Canada Goose jackets in one room.
East Quad itself has been the site of enormous power struggles. The aforementioned multicultural lounges were only founded after extended protests organized by the Black Action Movement, which effectively shuttered the University for 18 days — overall class attendance dropped by 75%. Reluctantly, the University agreed to create campus spaces to support minority students and aim at proportional representation of Black students in the undergraduate population (a promise that was never fulfilled). Other beloved community spaces, such as the Benzinger Library, have also taken continuous protests to create. Since then, the University has attacked East Quad’s common spaces in a variety of ways. In 2001, when the Benzinger Library was delisted as an official library, the impromptu Benzinger Library Cooperative seized the space and successfully ran it as an independent library. BLC Founder Ed Atkinson complained to The Michigan Daily that administrators wanted to turn East Quad into “one big corporate break room.” The same article also comments on administration’s dislike of the Halfway Inn — a basement cafe whose walls students would paint and decorate — and the student government’s open lounge where residents would contribute murals and furniture. Both spaces no longer exist.
Where do dreams go? The only comfort is to continue dreaming, in more and more fantastic fashions. What if my parents had never crossed the seas? My mother promises that, in the old country, families care for their sick and all my relatives know my name. I am homesick for adventures on rickshaws, throwing bananas to gangs of city monkeys, climbing the mango trees outside Dhaka University and listening to the stomach of the city churn during Ramadan. I am homesick for history.
Of course, these memories are not my own. I know only the Bangladesh of the ’70s through the tales of my parents’ childhood. Now, Dhaka has few monkeys and many skyscrapers. I can detect a slight English inflection in my mother’s Bengali: We have been here too long to return. My grandmother, who has survived the birth of three countries, lives in Grosse Pointe. She will never return to her old home. Her husband’s sprawling collection of books sits, stewing in the mildew of locked chests.
Our migrations are products of history. Everything from the Quit India movement to the New Deal played a part in my suburban upbringing. The freshly industrialized and globalized world has caused unprecedented upheaval in the ways that we experience home. At the turn of the 20th century, Russia experienced a phase of rapid industrialization, much later than other European powers. Following the emancipation of serfs in 1861, as many as 23 million peasants gained the rights of full citizens, such as the ability to buy land, own businesses and migrate freely. However, when many peasants flocked to cities looking for economic opportunities, they found themselves subject to new systems of control. Under capitalism, they had to rent land and submit to the bourgeois attitudes of city life. This shift caused widespread anxiety about the destruction of communal relations and traditional countryside living. Groups like the Socialist Revolutionary Party emerged, hoping to achieve an agrarian socialist paradise. The famed writer Leo Tolstoy responded by founding a commune, engaging in “bread labor,” and practicing a radically simple Christianity. In the later 20th century, we would see the emergence of a symbolic battle between Soviet-style commie blocks and American style private homes. For critics of state communism, the commie block was the ultimate symbol of repression and drab life under the Reds.
Home, as an expressive medium, does not just shape individual identities but also structures our communities and the ways we are able to think about shared spaces. The symbolic triumph of the privately owned nuclear home has brought us to the most toxic edges of globalization and industrialization. This is the most painful realization of my quest for home. There is nowhere in the world where you can flee from history. For all the aspiring authors and witty auto repairmen in New York, it’s still the home of the stock market. For all the deranged bohemians in East Quad, it’s still a University-run property. Even fleeing to seek community is hopeless. I am two semesters removed from graduation, and I have no idea where I will go.
A hundred years from now, home life and cityscapes may look completely different. History is not over. But, even the impossibility of homecoming will haunt us. In the “Odyssey,” one of the world’s oldest homecoming narratives, Odysseus spends 20 years laboring to return home from the bloodiest war of mythic Greece. When he finally arrives, his infant son is a grown man and his loyal dog is dead.
In this world, where do migrants and dreamers go? Where do the tired and the poor find themselves? We live in an age with no true home.
Statement Correspondent Awmeo Azad can be reached at awmeo@umich.edu.