Draft I

It was the second year of my collage study, one dizzy afternoon in classroom; my professor was giving a lecture on the evolution of cities. Then he suddenly threw out a question “I believe that most of you do not have the sense of belonging to Beijing where you are studying and living, isn’t it?” this was a question never exist in my life for the reason that I had lived there for nearly twenty years, I never questioned whether I feel belonged to that city ever. But surprising me, I saw most of my classmates were nodding, some even looked exciting about “being understood”. Then, for the first time in my life, I went across to the words “sense of belonging”. I asked myself that question latter, unsurprisingly, my answer is no. That is normal, how can I say “I do not think that I am belonged to you” to a city where I have lived since being born.

But the truth that most of my classmates fight for years to go to study and live in this city without getting the sense of belonging push me to question “Do cities affect people in some way that make people feel better in it? Can people do something to get the sense of belonging by themselves when living in a strange city?” I gradually begin to pay attention to that, to discover whether the feeling of a city is common among urban dwellers in their everyday lives. It was first started with me, and I found that I do have some feelings to a city as long as I begin to notice that. No matter the city is the one I have lived in for twenty years or the one I got to know during a trip, different cities leave different feelings. Some of them give me a feeling of home, which in other words, the sense of belonging.