I was at an Asian supermarket buying a six-pack of chrysanthemum tea the other day when I noticed the shelves by the register were overflowing with trays of lucky food and fake gold. Staring at the face of a cartoon ox, it became clear that the Lunar New Year had crept up on me again.
As I paid for my things and stepped out onto the street, I felt uneasy. It wasn’t that the New Year had come around again so quickly (although it had) — it was something else. The feeling hit me again as I walked through the quiet streets of Canberra. I knew what it was. I had felt it before. It was the feeling that I was not where I was supposed to be. It was the feeling that my duty was to be someplace else.
A few years earlier I had moved from Melbourne to Canberra. At first, there were considerable benefits to living so far from my parents. My mother stopped asking me to drive her to Costco to buy chia seeds. My father stopped asking me whether I had serviced my car. But as time went on, I began to realise that there was a considerable cost to that distance too. I wasn’t homesick, exactly. I didn’t feel a longing to return. But I was sometimes plagued by this feeling that I was supposed to return. It surfaced in the strangest of moments and was often followed by a sensation that something inside of me was being slowly chipped away.
Many of the social and cultural traditions I had grown up with are absent from my life.
Many of the social and cultural traditions I had grown up with are now absent from my life. Some of them are significant in obvious ways (Lunar New Year, Mid-autumn festival) while others are more subtle (taking Zantac before Hennesy, watching your mum spread pseudoscience through WeChat). For so long, I believed that these traditions were an indelible part of me; permanent and visible like tattoos or birthmarks. That was until I found myself standing in an Asian supermarket staring into the eyes of a cartoon ox. It had been so long since I had been home that I felt like a defector — foreign and disloyal. There were no dinners to attend and no red pockets to hoard. There was only one place I was supposed to be but it was on the other side of a border that could close at any moment. So I wondered — was it okay to not go home? To risk this slow erasure just because life had made it too inconvenient? I had quarantined twice. I didn’t want to do it again.
I knew, of course, that the answer was yes. But how do you live with the dull ache of that decision?
I cracked open a chrysanthemum tea. I popped an antacid. I waited until the sinking feeling in my stomach went away.
This past year has been a year of many firsts. I attended a live-streamed funeral (eerie), made my own banana bread (not good) and bought dumbbells from Kmart (ambitious). It was, however, not the first year I’d found myself stuck in the wrong city, making do.
A few years ago, my friends and I held a Lunar New Year dinner to usher in the Year of the Dog. That year we had all chosen not to go home for different reasons (‘too expensive’/‘forgot’/‘didn’t want to’). We sat around piecing together the customs using guesswork and WikiHow. We ate foods cooked from frozen and took turns repeating superstitions we had learnt from rote: Don’t eat pears; they symbolise death. Don’t clean the house or you’ll lose all your wealth. It was an approximation of tradition. We were flippant about taboos. We even talked about death.
I craved proximity to the things that made me and I was nostalgic about them like I was nostalgic about chrysanthemum tea.
It wasn’t that Lunar New Year was particularly important to me, but the dinner had felt necessary. I craved proximity to the things that made me and I was nostalgic about them like I was nostalgic about chrysanthemum tea. I knew the food would not be as good as it was back home and that the dinner would not absolve me of my guilt. I knew too that the simple act of imitation would not recover the parts of me that I had already lost. I realised that the dinner was a wake, rather than a reunion; one of the first in what would become a lifelong act of lamentation.
But as I sat among people who were like me — people meant to be someplace else, people also burdened by the guilt that came with distance — I found a comfort that I hadn’t known before. In coming together, we had created new traditions that could dull the ache of losing old ones. They were not perfect. They would probably never be. But as I found myself drifting from a place to which I could no longer return, I knew that comfort from imperfection would have to be enough.
Amy Duong is in the 2020 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition. She lives in Canberra and works as a data analyst. You can follow her on twitter or Instagram .
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