The location of nostalgia

"When I think about going back to Taiwan, I don't have the feeling of anxious expectation to go back as I had before," listening to the schedule of H's returning back to Taiwan, I commented.
"Why?" Her eyes wide open and question.
"Well, I feel, when I used to think of going back, the feeling was composed by the exacerbating expectation that there were someone waiting for me. They were eager to see me back, and I am eager to see them too. However, I don't have the feeling like that anymore."

I was a little bit surprised to hear my testimony. True, I still think of my aging parents, and all the friends that I am famililar with in different degrees, and I am interested in the stories we can exchange since our last meeting. However, the feeling is still different form what I felt as nostalgic before, say, the first year when I was in Chicago and I could only use long distant phone calls to contact people. I wonder, is it because that the people I was missing couldn't get access to the internet or other communication means as convenient as nowadays? It is very different from that by now, even when we are away from each other in great distance, we still feel the ONLY difference between us now is time difference. OR, more fundamentally, is it because the people I painfully missed--like my grandparents and C-- are all gone from my life for good?

Do the facts that the memories cannot be touched, cannot be reached, and are only available by imagination (rather than by recalling) constitute the authenticity of nostalgia, more than anything else? I wonder...

At the exact moment, I recalled the memory of my one night stay in Kaohsiung last time when I was in Taiwan. I arranged to meet with my second aunt, who I haven't seen for more than a year. The place we arrnaged to meet is no longer the familiar names of department stores such as "Han-shen" (the one near my grandfather's house), or even "the President," but "Da-yuan-bai," which I never recalled as familiar in my memory. Before my aunt showed up, 30 minutes I waited in the parking lot of Da-yuan-bai because of the traffic jam . It was a fumy night, around 7:30 pm. The juxtaposition of banners and moving lights of the cars and sectioned dining and shopping areas made the whole scene like a combination of commercial match boxes. The visual impact was so strange, but the humidity and smell in the air were oddly familiar.

By recalling this scene, surprisingly, I feel I have touched the body of my nostalgia. Even though I have no previous historical memory of that place, and I have no further reference of it either, the image stood out in my memory, so vivid and tangible, waiting for me to name it "my nostalgia."

Still, I cannot explain why this image pop up. But it did, after I read the following passage rephrased from Bhabha in James Weiner's article on "Televisualist Anthropology":

No longer are social and cultural differences guaranteed by an appeal to an authentic cultuarl tradition; instead, such differences "are the signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project-at once a vision and a construction-that takes you 'beyond' yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruciton, to the political conditions of the present."