homecoming

A number of things.

I've been finding it difficult to make my usual observations about the things and people surrounding me - strangers, acquaintances, atmospheric descriptions etc. Something about this particular environment makes it difficult for me to turn my gaze outwards. I find it especially difficult to empathize with the people I see here, something which is compounded by the fact that this weather is inconducive to long walks and public transport here is the shits. So I sit in the rarefied and filtered air of a car, in a little bubble that isolates me from the outside. Like almost everyone else in this country. No wonder we are so antagonistic to one another. Each one of us alien, each one of us the other. (ref. to Foucault and Arnold for more on the gaze, Said for the other)

There's this strange sensation that dogs me here. This is home, I know it to be home. But it feels like I've stepped or been forced out of my skin here. It is, but it isn't. Theorizing about this in the shower has led me to believe that it stems from the fact that this place and this house is home not by choice and not because I have made it so but purely because I happened to grow up here. I had little say in this. It is home by default. In contrast (I know, I know. I'm romanticizing the past.) I had an active role in making myself a home in Sydney. That was a deliberate choice - taking four years away from this place, to assimilate in Sydney and to submerge myself completely in a different place, culture (hate using the word and stereotype of 'culture' but I'm too lazy to find the right one), maybe identity. Two homes - one passively so, the other made as such. How now brown cow?

While I'm on the subject of different experiences in the same locale conditioned by ethnicity, I remember talking with D about how each of us experienced Sydney and Malaysia respectively. D found Malaysia hospitable, fascinating, and contradictory. People were unfailingly nice to him here, more so than in Sydney. The dysfunction of government and everyday life in this neck of the woods was a sometimes refreshing change from the usual. In contrast, I found greater hospitality and openness in Sydney. The way everything ran like clockwork without ever seeming hurried there charmed me. Maybe the two experiences were that of outsiders. He, as the 'mat salleh' visiting a postcolonial country, experienced a culture eager to please the white man. I, as the untypical Asian in a country of migrants both established and recent, experienced - what exactly, I still don't know.

April is still months away but I can't wait to return. I'm considering doing what E did and returning a week before my family comes. But for different reasons. I want the chance to be in the city alone one final time, as I so often was these four years but especially the last 6 months. I want to see it alone, without people to usher around the sights. Ride the familiar bus routes, walk my favourite tours of the city. Surprisingly or not, I enjoyed the solitude. And the freedom that came with it.