About Me

Whitefella Australian learning how to be gwai lo (鬼佬) in Hong Kong

Monday, July 25, 2011

Home?


Everything seemed to be flowering prolificly
I had the delightfully odd experience recently, of heading back to Australia, after having lived for six months in Hong Kong. It was odd because I realised that for the first time in thirty years I was arriving in Australia but not coming 'home'.
It forced me to think, as I did over a lot over the three weeks of my visit, about what constitutes 'home' and why. Some of it is pragmatic - you have a house, a room, a place of your own - and that is what makes it feel like home. Some of it is emotional - this is the place where you feel the strongest connections to people, and to the land. Some of it is practical - the place feels familiar, and you know your way around, at all sorts of levels.
Looked at like this, travelling to Australia perhaps ought to have felt like coming home, because I still have strong emotional and practical attachments to the place, even though I don't have a house there. And yet, and yet... it wasn't home, and I could feel that quite viscerally. So perhaps at its core, home is about where you have chosen to be, and want to be. For now, and for the forseeable future, Hong Kong is where I want to be, and so leaving it, even to go somewhere like Melbourne where my connections are long and deep, really did feel like being 'uprooted'.
So what did I notice that was great, or not so great, about the visit? Seeing friends was wonderful, and being 'on holiday', even a working holiday, meant it felt like I had the time and the energy to chat at length, about all sorts of things. Of necessity, given the political awareness of many of these friends, it meant catching up on the issues of the moment in Australia, which consisted mostly of; the carbon tax (let's hope!), the ban on live cattle exports (bizarre - 'we're going to kill and eat you, but we feel bad that we're doing it so brutally'), and asylum seekers (Australia's racism on display). It also meant catching up on eating 'Western food' that is hard to find in Hong Kong, like good baklava, and great artisan bread.
Swan River pea (Brachysema lanceolatum)
It has been a wet year in Australia, after ten years or more of drought, so all the native plants that I love so much were looking amazing. Everywhere I looked my favourite plants were flowering, from grevilleas, to Banksias, to the humble Hardenbergia. One of my favourites, the flame pea (Chorizema cordatum), which originates from Western Australia, was in full flower, with its arresting combination of pink and orange. It all felt like a feast for the eyes, even if I had to endure Melbourne winter weather to see much of it.
As I was studying while I was over there, I was lucky enough to find a spot in the library at Monash's peninsula campus which looked out on some beautiful gum trees, and this offered the perfect backdrop to an intense study session. It was also great to get some intellectual community while in Melbourne, and attend the Winter School at Monash, and have the chance to talk study and research related issues with other students and staff.
So there were a lot of good things about my trip - both things that I had expected to enjoy, as well as things that I hadn't. There were some things, though, that were not so good. If you've read any of this blog, you'll have realised that I love the public transport system in Hong Kong. It works so well, that travelling any other way seems like an inconvenience. So it was a shock to the system to come back to Melbourne and be reminded quite forcefully that many public transport systems do not work so well. In Hong Kong very few people run for public transport, because it comes so frequently that there is genuinely no need to do so. Why get hot and sweaty when the next train is a minute and a half away?
[.....] I wrote a couple of long paragraphs about my experiences trying to have faith in Melbourne public transport, but I decided to delete them in the interests of not sounding like a whinger. I could write a similar couple of paragraphs about my experiences driving in Melbourne, of which I also had the dubious pleasure. The latter was a reminder of how ridiculously spread out the city of Melbourne really is - even travelling on a freeway it takes a long time to get places.
Hardenbergia violacea
All of these transport experiences are a reminder of what a huge impact urban design has on a city. I hadn't realised how much I had normalised the conveniences of high density living until I came to Melbourne and realised how far away even the relatively 'close' things can be. One example will probably tell the tale very simply. Walking away from my apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui, I will usually pass two or three supermarkets within a five minute stroll in any given direction. One day in Melbourne I drove for an hour, but because most of it was on freeways or arterial roads, although I must have been within reach of many supermarkets, I didn't pass even one.  To me, those two experiences side by side speak volumes about the liveability of the walking city versus what Newman and Kenworthy would call automobility.
A blurry, but empty Northcote Plaza
On a more amusing note, when I did get to a supermarket another day, I was genuinely confounded to walk into a shopping mall and find all the shops closed. I had forgotten that 5pm was a 'normal' time for most shops to close, because I have adjusted to Hong Kong, where everything is open until ten or eleven at night, and often much later. For a moment I genuinely wondered if it was much later than I had thought, because my mind was refusing to make sense of all the shut-up shops. I did at least find the supermarket open, but it was a lone island of people amid a sea of vacated real estate.
Perhaps 'home' is actually about these everyday expectations about what happens at a station, in a shopping mall, or on the street?

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Just like school...

Sadly, no photo for this, but better a post without a photo than no post at all. My new (low) ambition is to actually write something other than my thesis, however short!
So tonight was a big thrill because M. and I started an actual bona-fide Cantonese class. So instead of all my ad-hoc practice and learning from books and online lessons, I got to sit in a classroom with other students, and go back to the basics.
I loved it! My pronunciation is definitely going to improve. Our teacher, Crystal, was a very clear and consistent speaker, and was good at explaining the nuances of the mouth muscles which help shape the different sounds and tones of Cantonese. She was very quick to correct people when they were wrong, but she did it with a smile, and was very encouraging, with lots of repetitions of 好 (good) and 得 (okay) to help us along. We practised all seventeen initial consonants and the 51 final sounds of Cantonese, and repeated them all many times. Very useful, even if it felt like being back in Grade 1. M really did not enjoy this part of it. For myself, I hope I get corrected on my pronunciation every lesson for the entire course. What a thrill. M swears she is not going back, but I trust that she doesn't really mean that!
In the second half of the lesson we learnt to say, 叫 (I'm called... My name is...) and 澳大利亞儿 (I am Australian, or really, I am Australia person), or whatever country you were from. I was pleasantly surprised at the diversity of the class. There was someone from Germany, France, Italy, Taiwan, Austria, Fiji, three from Japan, three from the US, and three from Australia. For sure I had learned how to say all these things already, but the endless repetition of them in a classroom situation, as well as having to say them out loud, on your own, in front of a roomful of people, really helps them stick in your mind. Bring it on!