A multimedia exploration of ancestral motifs through a diasporic lens. As the word “nostalgia” derives from the Greek words for “homecoming” and “grief,” this piece borrows from the visual language of the octagonal feng shui mirror, a protective talisman for the home, and the compass, a magnetic wayfinding device originally invented in Han Dynasty China for divinatory purposes. The auspicious number 8 also appears through the ba gua (eight trigrams) of Taoist cosmology, and the eight phases of the Moon, culturally and linguistically associated with home, family, and timekeeping. UTF-8 encodes these symbols and emoji for the web, allowing them to be displayed here with minimal impact to the file size constraints.