What's Home
Preeti
Preeti first arrived in Hong Kong in 2010 on a working visa with a bank, stepping easily into a global banking role that soon sent her onward to Chicago and then San Francisco. Years later, she returned to Hong Kong not as an employee but as an entrepreneur, this time on an investment visa, having co-founded a fintech company with two friends. Her mobility is not accidental, as she decision “I get pretty bored after three, four years with a place, and I need to move around”. Preeti does not chase home, she carries it lightly, like a passport she rarely opens.
Preeti was born in Rajasthan, raise in Bombay, trained in the United States, and for now in Hong Kong, she moves through cities. For Preeti, home is not a place but a pattern, the familiar click of a well-run system, the comfort of a roti after a long day. She does not seek belonging in the traditional sense. “For me it’s very easy to feel at home… I don’t have a sense of great belongingness to any city,” she reflects. What others might call rootlessness, she experiences as freedom.
She concludes as “I feel at home in whichever place I am,” Preeti is a transmigrant in the truest sense, not uprooted but unbound. Her story reminds us that for some, home is not a singular destination but a movement between places, identities, and possibilities.