Young Writers Society

Entering the freeway in my Aunt’s car haphazardly peeling steamed sweet potatoes felt like some form of cultural warp in space. As I cruised along the freeway, my legs numb from a long plane ride and eyes gritty from not enough sleep. My eyes took in the familiar white and green tiles of the high-rise buildings stained with serpentine streaks of grime and dirt. It’s not eight o’clock yet and the city is quiet, relatively.

Returning, feels like some licensed holiday from a life of pretense. A struggle to assimilate an identity that was almost there but wasn’t, it is the struggle my parents don’t go a day without speaking. How because of our skin colour, the particular symmetry of our facial features we’ll always be subjected to a set of preconceived notions before we even open our mouths. But that, comes with the package deal of being human, like the liberal chicken salt on your chips you wished they sprinkled less of.

Yeah, being human sucks.

But I’d be lying if I said the difference in the melanin pigment in our skin didn’t contribute to the sense of oddity. It is less a matter of difference and more a struggle for familiarity. An intimacy that is the mother tongue of your bones because you were breed on that soil. And I grew up smelling a language of charred smoke from the stalls selling beef entrails, drenched in star anise, peppercorn, citrus peels and other species. Sentences constructed from the motorcycles that zipped between the cars, because in a small town it was easier to slip through the gaps then to navigate the roads. We can set the tone of the town, how during the day, groups of unemployed men sat on the stone benches in the park. Barefoot, cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they slapped down cards after cards, their skin weathered by work and sun turned to a shade of faded leathery brown. Or how middle age aunties and grandmas hoisted their grandkids on their hips, humming age old nursery rhymes strolling under the tree shades. But the world is not a story, a narration where changes can be mapped and charted if we took the time to break down the structure and plot where the fractures originated from.

It is a language that is felt by the absence of what was thrust against the observation of what is. A memory tetris as I stepped into my grandparent’s house again. At first glance, it resembles the lifting of a sheet of tracing paper revealing the piss poor imitation of the original image. Between a crystallised memory of the house, encased in the sedimentation of time and the unyielding force of what is present, reality shudders and sheds off the tracing paper held together by the vision of a past I couldn’t let go of. The worn rose coloured tiled floors, the overhead half - opaqued ceiling shrank before me, I had grown since the last time I returned.

Everything, was smaller than I remembered.

The wooden shelves, where bottles of medicine pills now took up a whole row. Yet the calendar, depicting an almost dizzy array of horoscopes, festivals and Chinese birth times, a consistency throughout my childhood remained on the left side of the wall. But most of all, the foreignness in my throat as I struggled to come up with anything else that wasn’t ‘grandma’ and ‘grandpa’. A foreignness in my throat as I sat on the red stool I had sat on every weekend in my childhood and clumsily clumped the preserved vegetables my grandma had set out for me against the mantou. A foreginess that grew and threatened to overwhelm me, as I felt their eyes on me as I ate the porridge and mantou. An act that I knew meant concern, worry. It was quiet, and sunlight, in pale yet vast pails spilled down from the ceiling and diffused into the room. My grandma amidst the gentle mocking of my failing chopstick skills, tell me of the room she had cleaned out on the third floor, of how I should take a shower and lie down for a bit, I could come down for lunch whenever I woke.

I had forgotten this. In the busied life of attempting to catch up with a rhythm I couldn’t quite understand, a dance where I only know the silhouettes of the steps. I had forgotten that halfway across the world, there was still a home for me.