A couple with two passports, carrying home in their suitcases
A Czech and a Chinese spouse, three wedding rules: one new country a year, a hometown dish in every home, no overnight fights. Seven years, thirty countries — and year ten, finally, both hometowns.
At Anna and Chen Mo's wedding, every guest received the same favor: a map of the world and a pen.
Anna is Czech, Chen Mo is Chinese, and they met working on a farm in New Zealand. The host asked each guest to write down a place they hoped the two of them would go together in the coming year. When the maps came back, the marks added up to more than thirty places. Anna laughed and said, "Our home has always been in a suitcase anyway."
Their marriage agreement was drawn up while they were dating, at a campsite, and it has three clauses. One: every year, at least one country neither of them has visited. Two: in every place they live, cook the other a dish from your own hometown. Three: no fight may last the night, because "the trip is too short for a cold war."
The first is easy enough to understand. The second became the infrastructure of the marriage. In an apartment in Tokyo, Chen Mo made dumplings and Anna braised beef from her grandmother's recipe. In a guesthouse in Lisbon, Anna baked bread and Chen Mo stir-fried two dishes from home. What they keep in the suitcase is not clothes but seasoning: Sichuan pepper, paprika, star anise, caraway. Anna says she has only one standard for whether a place is good to live in, and that is the stove. Chen Mo adds, "We're not renting flats. We're grading the world's stoves."
The third clause is the hardest and the one that works best. One year in Iceland they had a serious fight on a driving trip: wrong navigation, darkness coming, half a tank left. By the agreement, neither of them was allowed to carry it overnight. So they finished the fight in the car by apologizing in turns. Anna said sorry in English, Chen Mo said sorry in Chinese, and by the third round they were both laughing, and the car pulled into a guesthouse in the next town. The northern lights the following night became their most unforgettable memory.
For people who keep their home in a suitcase, what is pressed into the bottom is not clothes. It is two promises: to see the world together, and to fight well together.
In seven years they really did reach more than thirty countries. But one item stayed permanently at the top of their list, unvisited: each other's hometown. Chen Mo had never been to the Christmas market in Prague in winter. Anna had never seen the rice fields around Chen Mo's village in summer. Both of them stalled, a little deliberately. They had agreed to go back in the tenth year. "The first nine years for the world, the tenth for ourselves."
On New Year's Eve of the tenth year they set off fireworks in the courtyard of Chen Mo's family home. In halting Chinese, Anna read out a letter she had spent a long time preparing, addressed to Chen Mo's grandparents. At the end she said, "Thank you for your country, for producing this person. I have two hometowns now."
While the fireworks were still breaking overhead, Chen Mo took a photograph of their old map. The thirty-odd marks had faded. The newest was a heart Anna had drawn two days earlier, at the spot marked for her hometown.
Anna later let a friend in on their stove scorecard. Over seven years they had rated homes in more than twenty countries, out of ten. The Tokyo apartment got nine for a strong flame. The Lisbon guesthouse got only six because the pots were too small. The highest score went to the guesthouse in Iceland: under the aurora, the biggest pot, "and we had just made up that day, so everything tasted good." The scorecard was taped to their refrigerator and toured with them for seven years. Their friends said the two of you have far too much time. Anna said, "We're not scoring. We're collecting evidence of the places where we ate well. What is home? Home is a menu that keeps getting longer."
In the end
Two people from different countries, speaking different first languages, reduced home from a house to two suitcases and three clauses. It turns out a marriage can be that light, light enough to carry around the world. And it can be that heavy, heavy enough that on every night of a fight, neither of them will let it last until morning.