Australiasia : land of childhood

I always say I don’t know Australia, it’s where my grandmother lives, it’s where my uncles and aunts immigrated at some point to get away from China coming to Hong Kong. It’s the place where my cousins grew up and next to the country my step -dad was born. In the last five years it’s where my mom, dad and sister has been. I have never lived here, visited a few times, but in my mind it’s a foreign country.

Somewhere in my mind there are a fish and chips shop tucked away in the corner on a nowheew city where they serve food on news papers. People who stare at us because we are not from there, people with funny accents I have a hard time understanding. There are prefab houses, that go on for miles and miles and caution signs with kangaroos underneath it. Snip bits of memories, of a place I went as a kid.

But in the last few days, I remember I know this country. I sat in the back of the car listenning to the radio, the songs of my childhood and early teens come from the long long road trips we used to take in the winters or summers depending on if I was talking about home or here. I can see the miles and miles of ecluptus trees that you drive by on the hills, the highways cut out of rock, and the sheer face of sedimentary rock as we drive through, the lines of cars, and the orange sun sets, and the bright southern hemisphere moon, the star filled with stars, the big thick rain drops that can hit your window like it is little stones. After a few days, my accent starts to change, I start speaking australian, I pull my As and squish my ns, I start talking to random shop keepers and just slouch around in my sweats, and make up less face. I go for walks in the forest and shop at the mall, I fight teenagers to get my billabong sweater because Mambo is on sale. To have a patio seems normal, and I start doing interpretative ballet on the landing of the second floor just because I can, because I have space to breath, and can stretch my arms out and not touch both walls. I want to go look at the blue ocean, and wish it was summer so I could stare at the surfer boys, and smile at them out of the corner of my eye, where things are just easy, and no none knows what designers is hot, which is the best new resturant and I will never find myself sitting into an idotic bar paying $90 (USD12) for a flipping rose martini that I don’t want, but felt obliged to have. Where I can buy fresh bread down at the shopping center with the drive by liquor mart, the dentist, the cake shop, and supermarket and one chinese resturant that 10 minutes drive, without having to go next to a basement of a mall with Gucci and Prada just to get it, where food is just that and not a luxury, where you can get in a car and step on the peddle and go, for 10 minutes to ten hours, where random people will say good afternoon, where no one notices if you nailpolish is chipped and your clothes is a little ripped. It’s nice to be normal size again rather than be fat at size 8, and the other girls are waif thin. Today I kept saying “I miss the forest” because I do. I miss surfer boys, the smell of trees, and the fact the air is clean. I miss the dark nights where you can see the stars and wonder about existence, that you can hear the birds call, and maybe catch a glimsp of a possum or a kanagroo on the highway, and that I can have dinner on a table rather than on my lap in front of the TV because that’s the only space I have in my apartment. I forget that. I forget that there is the childhood and pre-teen side of me that fed ducks, and climbed on log playgyms, where I rolled on the grass and picked daisies to put in jars, that walked up the stairs to the second floor of the houses, some of it in New Zealand, some of it here in Australia. A different girl from the exhaust, steel, gloss of the city girl that I always see myself, the tough, quick witted, two kisses on the cheeks and “darling that is fantatstic” roll of the tongue bullshit that is second nature. I think that’s why sometimes I feel so tired and frustrated in Hong Kong, so sick of all the pushing and shoving, irrate at the rudeness, find the materialism hard to stomach, even if I am marching lock step with everyone else. Because I didn’t spend all my life there, I spent a lot of chilled out summers, a year or two, a few months here and there in a quieter part of the world, when things are slower, when life is simple. It was always there somewhere, even if I don’t remember it. I know the stories of the rainbow serpent, I know the story of aeterio, the land of the long white cloud, and kiwis, koalas, kias (parrot) are just as much part of what makes me as dragon boats, little red packets, and pandas.