Less Is More - A Personal Reflection (By Chris Hwang)

            Just two years ago, my family and I decided to make one of the biggest decisions of our lives. In February of 2015, my dad called a family meeting immediately following dinner. When my brother and I heard this, we knew right away that something was wrong. We could sense it in his voice. My brother and I being the curious kids we were, incessantly questioned the reason for the emergency meeting. My father simply responded, “you’ll know after dinner.” After a while of asking “why,” my brother and I started to guess. Every guess made me more and more nervous about what I was about to hear. Eventually, I came up with a question. One that made me tremble every time I repeated it in my head. “Are we moving?” As soon as my dad heard me say this, he stopped eating, glanced at me, and then at my mother. My face started to turn bright red. My stomach started to bother me. I had completely lost my appetite. Although he replied once again with, “We’ll talk later,” it was evident that we were moving. It was soon to be a reality that I didn’t want to face. I mean after all, I had been living in that beautiful and spacious house all my life. Not to mention, in the city of Danbury all my life. If we were to move, I’d be leaving all my friends behind, who were like family to me.

            What felt like a perpetual dinner came to an end. With my stomach in knots, it was finally time to have our family meeting. It took all my might to listen to what I was about to hear, and to hold back my tears. It was apparent that my father was prolonging his speech but I couldn’t blame him. After all, it’s really tough to tell your family that you need to move after you’ve been living there so long. When he finally gave us the news, my brother started to cry. I felt awful, but there was nothing I could do to show empathy. I was in shock and disbelief. In an attempt to console him, my father opened up his laptop, and brought up the Zillow website. He then instructed my younger brother to help them pick out a new house. The only catch was that it had to be in northern New Jersey. After seeing all the “cool” houses on Zillow, my brother started to feel a little better. In fact, he even became a little excited about moving into a new house. My dad’s trickery didn’t work on me! I was too consumed by sadness, anxiety, and fear to be swayed into a state of excitement and jubilation.

            The next day I went to school feeling terrible. I couldn’t concentrate in class. All I could think about was that in a few months, I would no longer be living in the place that I so-called “home.”  People noticed my peculiar behavior, and asked me what was wrong. I couldn’t tell anyone because tears were always so imminent. Over the course of the next few weeks, I started to embrace it more and more. For the rest of the school year, I didn’t think too much about the move. Instead, I tried to make my last few months of living in Danbury unforgettable. It was around May when we finally decided to put our house on the market. To our surprise, it sold in one day. However, it made me angry to think that someone else would take over my bedroom and my backyard and all the hiding places that my brother and I used for cover when playing man hunt. It turns out, a nice, older couple bought our house and I knew they would care for it. 

            Days and days went by but we hadn’t found a house “suitable” for us in northern New Jersey; Sparta to be precise. There were a plethora of homes to choose from but my parents were too selective. We viewed countless dozens of homes. The homes were always nice, but most did not have a flat backyard, or the kitchen was too small, or there was no bonus room or finished basement for my brother and I. We were starting to lose all of our optimism. Finally, my dad gave in and suggested that we find a place to rent until we find that "perfect" house to purchase.

            It was early June when we finally found a place to rent. It was a petite place, but it would do for the time being. My parents biggest fear was that we would have trouble adjusting, considering that we would be downsizing. All our lives we had been used to living in a spacious house, and now, we would be challenged with living in a cramped quarters where we would feel as if we were on top of each other all day and night. 

            At first, it felt this way, but as time progressed, we adapted to our new scenario and even began to notice something that we had never truly felt in our larger house: unity. While living in our prodigious house in Danbury, our family rarely ever spent good, quality time together. My mother would constantly be in the kitchen cooking, my brother upstairs in his room playing with his Legos, my father in his office, and me in the family room playing video games. We were always so spread apart despite living under the same roof. It was as if there was a large, invisible wall that separated each of us brought about by artificial boundaries of space and distance. But from what I have noticed thus far, our old ways are no longer present in our new home. Nowadays, I find us all sitting together in the cozy (tiny) living room watching TV, reading books, playing cards, or engaging in cheerful dialogue; things that we rarely did as a family before. I even sometimes find us all downstairs in our basement having a family game of ping pong. What was once a nightmare turned out to be a bright future for my family. It has brought us closer together, or in other words, unified us. 

          Today is now April 5th, and we are in contract for a larger home. We will be moving in less than three weeks. As much as I am looking forward to living in a nice big house again, I fear that my family will go back to our old ways, all doing our own thing and creating zones of solitary reclusion in our new, larger house. I fear that we will forget how to enjoy the quality time that came along with our small town house. I regret being fearful of living in such close quarters with my family, which I first assumed would aggravate me; because it did nothing but make me appreciate my family all the more.