Once upon a life: Helen Oyeyemi

As the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, novelist Helen Oyeyemi knows how hard it can be to feel at home. But when she was assaulted in broad daylight in a London park, she had no option but to pack her bags
helen oyeyemi
"Eventually I managed to get a good kick in and ran off": Helen Oyeyemi in London earlier this year. Photograph: Graham Jepson for the Observer Graham Jepson/Observer

There are many traits I've inherited from my parents. Among them are a love of, and geeky interest in, perfume (that's from my mum), an innate conviction that the plausibility of a piece of information is in no way connected to its truth (that's from my dad), and (from both of them) the idea that you don't have to stay in a place just because you were born there, or because you're used to it.

My parents moved from Ibadan to London 22 years ago. Of course it wasn't easy. They've put up with a lot and have since found tons of friends, fun and a place of their own. My mum's jokes were one of the only good things about last year's general election for me. Especially the text message where she mused about starting up her own BNP – the British Nigerian Party (slogan: British Jobs for Nigerian People!). So, as my mother's daughter, here's what I think about migration: it's just as John Dickson Carr wrote concerning murders. The first is the hardest. After that, it's a piece of cake.

Throughout the summer of 2006 I had this feeling that London isn't where I'm supposed to be. One afternoon I was sitting in Green Park, reading The Executioner's Song, as you do, when a stranger who spoke English with an Eastern European accent approached. He asked if he could talk to me. I was enjoying the book, but was also ready for a break from its essential intensity, so I said: "Okay."

The man sat down and we exchanged some small talk about London. Then the man asked if he could lay his head down on my lap. I said no. He laid his head on my lap anyway, and it was indescribably awkward. That thing happened where, at the exact moment you most need to be rude and bolshie and defensive of your personal space, you become almost perversely polite.

That was my first mistake, allowing the fellow to lay with his head on my lap as he continued with his idle chitchat. Occasionally I looked down at him and there he really, actually was, looking up at me with an expression that I suppose he thought was soulful. The man then asked if he could kiss me. Again it was a no, and again he ignored that. Moments later he'd pinned me to the grass with his whole body and was planting kisses wherever he saw room for them. I remember clearly how very weird it was. I remember just how much I didn't want him to be doing what he was doing. Worse, for the first few moments my reaction was feeble. That nutter was very sure of himself, and for some reason it seemed wrong to bother him, or undermine his confidence. I wouldn't be surprised if every girl has a story like this, and probably lots of them end much more tragically than mine.

Eventually I managed to get a good kick in and ran off, was pursued by him and carried back to where we'd started, kicked him again, ran off and got away. There were couples picnicking around us, and none of them seemed to find such antics at all unusual. Some of them even laughed and smiled at the two of us. True, there was absolutely no harm done. But I came away from that afternoon quite sure that those shenanigans were of a type that could only have happened to me in London. I wouldn't say the Green Park stranger was a catalyst – aside from being extremely startling and a nuisance, he seemed to be validation of that impulse to try to find a place that suits me (or a place I could become suited to).

Home is where your teapots are. I packed up my teapots and began to roam, usually for six to eight months at a time, though there was recently a year-long spell in Cambridge. What can I tell you about the behaviour of cities? I'm greedy about cities – I like to form my impressions of them on my own, and on foot as far as possible, looking and listening, having conversations with bridges and streets and riverbanks, conversations I tend not to be aware of until a little later, when I find myself returning to those places to say hello again, even if only in memory.

Now I've been doing this for a while I know that I'm looking for a city that would like me to be one of its people. I can tell you that that city isn't Paris. Paris didn't care at all, and that made me fall for it all the harder. I spent a large part of 2008 wandering through poised, pearlised central Paris. One night I walked from the 18th arrondissement to the first, accompanied by a rather beautiful philosophy student who knew the city well. He drew me into a small but perfectly formed square of houses and told me about a friend of his who had stumbled upon this very square. Standing there all alone at dead of night, this friend of my friend had found the square so unbearably beautiful that he'd become physically aroused…

Retrospectively, and in the light of (pleasant) things that happened later, there may have been some subtext to what I was being told, but that night I completely missed it. I was too busy peering short-sightedly around the square of pale, proud mini-mansions, desperately wanting to be slain by beauty and feeling annoyed at not being sensitive enough for it to happen. There were too many interiors here, aloof interiors inaccessible to my teapots and me. We had to move on.

As I drew up a shortlist of cities I could feasibly try next, I thought long and hard about times had in New York, and I began to wonder if I'd missed encouraging signals from that city. Almost a full year before my spell in Paris, my friend Rachel joined me in Manhattan for a celebration of something – we didn't know exactly what. Somewhere on the Upper East Side we saw some helium balloons tied to a lamp post, took them and went down to 34th Street. It was night time, we were wearing sunglasses. Our plan was simple: we meant to take the balloons up the Empire State Building and let them go. The guards weren't having it. Rachel and I argued that it was my birthday (it wasn't my birthday). Nothing doing; the balloons posed a security risk. I was wished a happy birthday, and one of the guards agreed to hold the balloons for us while we went up and took in the view. He kept his word, and when we came down from that dazzling panorama, we took the balloons to Central Park and released them there. They went up reluctantly, those balloons, and took a long time to disappear. Remembering that, I didn't try to make another go of things with New York. That city's tolerance is one of its greatest strengths, but you can't commit to mere tolerance.

By contrast, Prague was openly inviting. And yet. I was unable to take its invitations seriously. I love that wacky city, but all I can think of is the evening I was sitting outside a café in Vinohrady, talking to someone I was beginning to like very much, when a man came by with a bucketful of enormous sausages and offered them to us in a manner very similar to that of the people who wait outside theatres and restaurants with roses, trying to get men to buy a flower for the woman they're with. My friend appeared completely bemused and assured me he'd never seen such a thing in all his Prague-dwelling years. I didn't believe him. Prague is that kind of city.

As I packed my books and teapots in preparation for moving to Berlin, I wondered if I was on my way to a city I could actually have a functional relationship with. Well, I'm writing this from Berlin. City of my dreams, if you're reading this somehow, I'm still available.

Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi is published by Picador at £12.99