The word longing is embedded in the word belonging. At first, they seem like opposites. One suggests you have arrived; the other, that you are still searching. But for many multilinguals, the two are inseparable. Every language we speak anchors us to a place or community, and every language we cannot fully reach stirs an ache for what is just beyond our grasp. We live in the liminal space of both truths.
I feel it when a Cantonese phrase surfaces in conversation and I am instantly back in my grandmother’s kitchen, steam curling from a pot of soup as she calls out, “食飯啦!” (“Come eat!”). I also feel it when I reach for a word in Mandarin, certain of its meaning yet unable to summon its sound, leaving me in silence. Each language I carry holds both the comfort of belonging and the pull of longing: one reminding me where I am rooted, the other reminding me of what I could or should be.
Over time, the longing doesn't disappear. What changes is our relationship to it. We stop treating it as a flaw to fix and begin to carry it as part of our identity; a quiet reminder that who we are is still unfolding, still tethered to the languages and cultures of places and people that shaped us. It becomes a longing that lingers with us in the scent of a dish we can almost name, in the half-remembered lyrics of a childhood song, in the way a familiar word can stop us mid-step.
And sometimes, the distance between longing and belonging closes for a moment. A shopkeeper greets you in your family’s tongue. You order a dish without having to translate it. Your child calls you by a name you thought had been left behind. In those moments, the ache softens, and we are reminded that longing has always been a part of belonging. Belonging is not about fitting in perfectly. It is about recognizing yourself in the words you have, and letting them anchor you to the people and places they came from.
And maybe that is the work of a multilingual life... to keep walking the border between what we have and what we hope to hold, gathering moments when language lets us feel whole, and carrying them with care until the next moment when longing and belonging meet.