As fall and the start of the school year approach, I’m reminded of what these days meant for my family for many years: the arrival of homestay students, some new, some returning. So, when I read Jennifer Robin Wilson’s (class of 2025) book, The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students (Page Two; 2025), almost every page brought back memories. (Full disclosure: Some of our students may have come to us through Wilson’s business, the Canadian Homestay Network.)

In chapter 1, when a student stays out long past her curfew leaving her host mother in a state of panic, I remembered the time a Japanese girl fell asleep on the bus, missed her stop, and got off the bus disoriented and confused. With very little English, she approached a random house, knocked on the door, and explained her predicament. Shortly after, we got a phone call from the people in the house grilling us to make sure we were decent enough people for them to drive this sweet and innocent young traveller to our home.

Chapter 2 includes a section on homesickness, which we encountered often. What I remember most clearly is bonding with a lovely young Chinese girl over her homesickness. All of fifteen years old when she arrived, dressed like a little sk8tr girl and kicking her legs like a small child in the passenger seat of my car, she stayed with us two-and-a-half years until she went off to McGill University in Montreal. We still see her sometimes when she’s passing through Vancouver on her way to or from China. 

Wilson goes on in other chapters to talk about creating emotionally safe spaces for children, such that one Russian boy was able to come out as bisexual, which he hadn’t been able to do at home. While reader a whole chapter on food, I remembered the time our Thai “daughter” and her mother, who stayed with us for her daughter’s first nine days with us, spent a whole day cooking the most delicious meal for us. In one chapter, Wilson touches on household chores. As parents, we expected everyone in the family to do chores and never had a problem with our students—except the time a Chinese student (who’d clearly never cleaned a bathroom) used the handheld shower nozzle to spray down the WHOLE room and then tried to clean up the water with a Swiffer mop WITHOUT the absorbent mop head. 

It’s clear from the subjects Wilson covers and the anecdotes she shares that she writes from extensive personal experience. And not only as a homestay coordinator and parent: she also experienced homestay personally when her mother, who started the company, took students in, and later as a mother when her own daughter went to France as an international student.

Over and above writing from a deep well of experience, Wilson researched The Heart of Homestay broadly, citing books ranging from Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well to Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, and a dozen-ish more that this anthropology undergrad would be happy to read. Not to mention dozens of articles from peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (on the ubiquity of noise in Brazilian culture, the journal of Adaptive Human Behavioral Physiology (on the human need for touch), and the Journal of Personality (on shame).

Wilson’s thorough research combines with her warm, friendly authorial tone to make her book a positive and helpful introduction to homestay—even when she’s describing the aftermath of a terrible incident when a student’s stray cigarette ignited a fire that gutted the homestay family’s home. Astonishingly, the homestay parents curbed their anger and not only allowed the boy to stay in their home, but worked hard at ensuring he wouldn’t carry guilt about it through his life. How could they do that? Because they’d formed a bond of familial love with him, Wilson says:

The family bond that Liz described came up again and again in my interviews, the host survey comments, and student testimonials. While some hosts are quick to identify this as love, others use related words like “bond,” “connection,” or “friendship,” but they share the characteristic of familial love. Psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson, who is known for her work in positive psychology, defines love as “the preoccupying and strong desire for further connection, the powerful bonds people hold with a select few and the intimacy that grows between them, the commitments to loyalty and faithfulness.”

In a nutshell, love is large. It is an emotion, but it’s also a verb. All loving actions, gestures, words, and commitments produce meaningful connections between hosts and students, but some of the most profound examples come at moments when we are most vulnerable. In the anguish of a devastating loss, or the depths of grief, or the intense pain of heartbreak, love persists. 

Over the years, my husband and me must have hosted fifty-ish students, for as little as a week and as long as three years; it’s been nearly thirty years since we hosted our first student and over a decade since our last one left, but several are still in touch with us. For us to have had Wilson’s book when we started out would no doubt have helped us a lot. Which is why I know what a boon it will be to all the new homestay parents who are setting out, as we once did, to welcome the world to their doors. 

If you’re interested in other cultures, whether by travelling yourself or getting to know people from other cultures here at home, check out my posts on these other books:

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, by Sheila Benembarek.

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral.

Winter in the City of Light: A Search for Self in Retirement, by Sue Harper.

And for something a little different:

The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems, by David Pate.