During the Spring Festival, the year-after-year topic of “nostalgia” follows us everywhere. These days, WeChat Moments often features essays and reflections written by friends who have returned to their hometowns, expressing longing for their native places. Most of these emotionally charged works are tributes to “the beauty that has passed” and memories of “good mountains, good waters, and good human warmth.”

Whether it is the passage of time or memory, perhaps both are the “nostalgia” that countless people dream of and long for. Returning to one’s hometown, the fields that once rippled with golden wheat awns or rice ears are now covered with towering high-rises; the mountain ridges once blanketed with lush green grass now echo with the dizzying roar of machinery; the once quiet and leisurely small town is turning itself into yet another “Little Shanghai” in a race against the clock—and before it has even imitated much of the metropolis’s modern glamour, it has already contracted the “modern diseases” of smog and congestion.

At present, the hundreds of millions of Chinese people riding the tide of the times stand at a crossroads. As cities expand, those who feel nostalgia can no longer find their ideal identity, whether in the metropolis or in their hometown; they feel alienated from the big city because they are not its masters, and alienated from their hometown because it may no longer recognize them as its own. This awkward role leaves people with a vague sense of regret and melancholy that surges up from time to time.

Ordinarily, many people resent the gap created by the urban-rural dual structure and hope that the place they call “home” can also share in the dividends of the era’s development. Yet when their hometown changes along the path of urbanization, they try to preserve the “peach-blossom spring” scenery of “curling kitchen smoke and crowing cocks and barking dogs.” Expectations and inner conflicts pull them in different directions. In fact, the writer Thomas Hardy once lamented that British urbanization had destroyed the tranquility of villages and the simplicity of villagers, and the renowned Indian director Ray, a staunch supporter of modernization, also reflected in his later films on the decline of rural culture. Such inner conflicts largely shape people’s judgments about future urbanization.

The tide of the times is irreversible. Remembering nostalgia does not mean resisting cities or avoiding urbanization. Perhaps “seeing the mountains, gazing at the waters, and remembering nostalgia”—letting the modern and the traditional live side by side and set each other off, and building a spatial whole that organically unites nature, culture, and society—is the “Garden of Eden” people idealize, and truly the ultimate goal that urbanization pursues. If village mergers and old-village redevelopment simply copy the model of industrialization wholesale, the countryside will lose its original charm. It is gratifying that in recent years many places have seen a wave of “returning home to start businesses,” with young people enlivening the countryside with new ideas while the older generation holds fast to fine local culture, the two running parallel without conflict and nourishing each other.

“Where the heart is at peace, there is my home.” Hometown forever nurtures the soil for dreams to blossom, and is forever the warmest lamp in the depths of the soul.