After bouts of denial and anger, Cheung’s acute pain has ossified into resignation. “My soul is happier back in Hong Kong or in Asia.” However, a draconian national-security law was passed in mid-2020, press freedoms have been curtailed, and political figures have been imprisoned, causing a mass exodus from the city. “I’m just here to get work experience,” he told me. He always saw himself returning one day-the Bay Area was a temporary location. Justin Cheung works in San Francisco’s tech industry but grew up in Hong Kong, coming to the United States for college. Yet I heard a wide array of reactions to the loss, from acceptance of a national fate to frustration with a country’s aggressors, from fear of going back to eagerness of someday returning. It was as if a label had finally been put on a constellation of ghoulish emotions each has felt. I wanted to know: How does it feel to know that you can’t go home?įew of my interviewees had heard of the term migratory grief, but the notion seemed to strike a chord. I spoke with people from Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong-all places whose recent political upheavals, in different ways, have rendered them almost unrecognizable. “There’s more of a fear, versus the sadness, the yearning.” “We’re entering the space of traumatic grief,” Cruz said. Natalie Cruz, a psychologist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles who regularly works with migrant families, told me that the mourning is qualitatively different for those who uproot their life for asylum or due to political upheaval. They grieve not merely their severance from a homeland, but the demise of a place as they knew it. People like Monastyrskyi who emigrate from countries that have undergone severe political changes can feel that their home has irreversibly transformed. Read: I can’t stop watching a livestream of Kyivīut not all migratory grief is exactly alike. Many have to memorialize family gatherings, languages spoken without self-consciousness, positions of respect in a community-essentially, an emotional belonging. Every person who leaves their country of origin-exiles, refugees, international students, migrant workers-experiences loss. Some psychologists might say that Monastyrskyi is experiencing migratory grief. Monastyrskyi’s sorrow has morphed into anger. Shortly before the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, Luhansk was one of two separatist territories whose independence was recognized by Vladimir Putin. He couldn’t even go back when his grandmothers died in 20, respectively. His emotions were akin to mourning, putting him in a constant state of longing. “After 2014, I felt I lost the ground under my feet,” Monastyrskyi, now a graduate student in history at Yale, told me. Later that year, Ukraine granted limited self-rule to Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk, and Monastyrskyi’s activist history protesting the occupation made any return to the city he grew up in feel too risky to fathom. Monastyrskyi hasn’t returned home ever since. A few months later, he left for western Ukraine, to begin his graduate studies at a different university. They were all released days later Monastyrskyi had convinced his captors that he was no threat as a student, even though he had collaborated with Ukrainian authorities. Without much explanation, Monastyrskyi told me, he and his friends were detained in the basement of a local government building. One day, on his way home from a coffee shop with friends, he says, they were approached by Russian soldiers in an SUV. Yevhenii Monastyrskyi was an undergraduate at the University of Luhansk, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, when war broke out in 2014.
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