To think of home is one thing, but to inhabit home from a space away from home is another ordeal entirely. You find the art in the way you wipe your sweat off your brow between flicks of the wok, in the way you discover that the rhythm of running a house is no different from running a stall, all alternating-turns and finely-executed shortest-paths that would put you, as you imagine when you have the time to, among the great artists, the dancers, the dreamers, the twirling sword-heroes of old. To find familiarity in a foreign state is to understand how the fastest way to crack an egg into a plate with one hand is also the way that lets you dispose of the shell below the sink as smoothly as possible, or to understand how the misapplication of a dash of oil cascades into mismixed sauces, mistimed cooking, gas fires from the wok's overflow, a veritable dictionary of contingencies etc. To discover that what is often the fastest path is also the finest, and most times the sweetest. Reading the ebb and flow of the crowd as a sailor reads her stars and tides, to learn to approximate benefits and costs, a calculus of food, time, and money. To understand that nothing lasts forever, but the flick of the wrist ten thousand times will eventually be sufficient to qualify one as a master. To come to terms, slowly, that your survival depends on this perfection. To find one day that the wok has become the full moon, and the chili fumes if you imagine hard enough nearly resemble the real stuff back home, mountain-grade, unassailable, whole.