Home Again

HOME AGAIN

BY Min Gacayan

I came back to San José the way you return to a sentence you never quite finished — certain you knew what it meant, only to find it still had something new to say. 

This past season, I worked with the City of San José's Office of Economic Development and Cultural Affairs on the #WeCreate408 campaign, where I was asked to do something deceptively simple: help people see creativity where it already lives. Whether in a neighborhood, a meal, or a Tuesday afternoon routine, my job was to help others look at San José differently. Little did I know, this Creative Challenge also extended to me. In trying to help others see their city anew, I found myself doing the same — and somewhere in that  process, a city I had always lived in became one I was finally building something in. 

That distinction, I've learned, is where the joy lives. 

But the first thing this city asked of me was simpler, still: pay attention. It had been longer than I'd like to admit. 

I spent years running anywhere else— studying in Switzerland, wandering through Seoul, attending biennales where art felt official and therefore complete. I knew San José the way you know a person from childhood: by who they were, not who they'd become. I had been looking at the city through the wrong end of the lens. 

San José never needed me to figure that out. A city fluent in community and alegría doesn't wait to be discovered— it just keeps building, keeps gathering, and keeps making. 

And I saw it. SJSU students opening Content Magazine to find their own art staring back at them, published for all to see for the very first time. People showing up to San José Day in the rain— not despite it— to write verses and make music with Los Panaderos. Kids at En Movimiento hunched over paper with Eastside Magazine, drawing love doodles to their mothers like it was the most natural thing in the world, because it was. 

What I found wasn't a city I had to introduce myself to but a community that had been here, whole and generous, all along— and was willing, when I finally showed up, to let me in. 

“What I found wasn’t a city I had to introduce myself to but a community that had been here, whole and generous, all along— and was willing, when I finally showed up, to let me in. ”

This is my letter of gratitude for that invitation. And my answer, at last, to a sentence I should never have left unfinished.

On the ghazal form: The ghazal is a classical Arabic and Persian poetic form, later  transfigured by Urdu and South Asian poets into one of the most emotionally demanding structures in world literature. At its heart, it is a poem of longing for the beloved. Each couplet is its own autonomous world, yet every one turns on the same repeated word, like a compass needle always swinging back to the same north. I chose this poetic form to frame San José as the beloved— whole, patient, and sovereign. 

A 408 Ghazal (from a Returned Daughter) 

I spent years collecting other cities like they could tell me who I was. It was waiting all along in a parking lot on Story Road, San José. 

The Caltrain moves through the valley without asking where anyone is going, opening its doors at every stop for anyone who needs them, San José. 

At every table, a new face; at every face, a city re-introducing itself.  I had circled the world not knowing the people I needed were here, San José. 

The area code is a kind of anthem for those who know what it means— not a joke, not an afterthought: four zero eight, San José. 

I came back from the world fluent in things no one here needed translated. The city taught me instead: look closer. You were never lost, San José. 

In the ghazal tradition, the poet names herself in the final couplet. Min, you went looking for home in every language— and here it is, San José.