Brisbane
On going back before leaving again
1/
It was summer 2014, I was working a second part-time job at a shopping centre in the middle of nowhere. The sun was scorching the road in the outskirts of Brisbane, the air was twitching if you stayed still for a second or two. Late morning bus was empty.
December in Queensland felt endless, then suddenly cold air blasted all over me when I got through the entrance.
My landlord at the time had a small business selling beddings with 3D prints. I helped hook up their online platform with a bank payment portal. It felt like a huge achievement for someone who barely knew code.
It was the age of Wordpress. Complex e-commerce websites were running entirely on the blogging platform with mega plugins. Woocommerce was one of them, and the one I used. Hearing it getting mentioned on a tram ride the other day tripped me over.
I was watching this person in their gym clothes talking to AirPods, walking a customer through the interface. There was no screen in front of him, he knew the steps by heart.
It was as if the world had never moved forward, but the fact that my brain was filled with AI news told me it was the contrary.
My landlord eventually went back to Beijing with his PhD in biochemistry and started building a startup for improving air quality.
I, on the other hand, after 6 years in Brisbane and 7 in Melbourne, am about to depart for Amsterdam in another week.
2/
Both my landlord and I were over the moon when the first online transaction went through the Wordpress site. He asked if I also wanted to help with their physical store, or a stand really. He framed it as a way for me to learn how to be a salesperson, a very important skill in life.
I didn’t think he was wrong, and sales was very much a core skill I had to develop throughout my years as a designer in pitches, presentations, and many other things. But I also knew to him I was probably extremely cheap student labour.
I needed extra cash, so I obliged.
The challenge though, remains till today that I suck at promoting things I do not believe in.
I didn’t like the 3D prints at all. They reminded me of a very particular Chinese aesthetic that was intentionally tacky and eye-catching. I saw it a lot at an import and export market when I grew up in Shanghai.
High saturation, forest or ocean print, and flashy.
At the time, I genuinely thought it was a betrayal of my dream of becoming a designer. But they were objectively popular for the local moms and aunties who were in their 40s and 50s. I still occasionally see it in Airbnbs on road trips in Australia or New Zealand.
I think that was one of the first few reveals of the roles of design and a reminder that my taste did not matter in that context, a fact that I had to relearn over and over again in my job.
Most of the time, the design I do is not about me at all.
I was suddenly reminded of a poster I made for promoting their bedding sets.
One Friday afternoon at my last job, the designers in Melbourne had a show and tell in a crammed co-working meeting room. Everyone was asked to bring and share their terrible early day designs.
Knowing perfectly the designer archetype, I shouldn’t have been surprised that people in fact had really cool early day projects from cute logos to full blown edgy steampunk-themed websites. It was inspiring knowing the limitation of tools like Dreamweaver.
Me on the other hand brought my naivety and a hideous poster promoting a fake 24K gold leaf for when you buy three bedding sets. I felt an overwhelming wave of empathy from my fellow designers’ reaction.
It was a hard feeling to unpack and articulate. I wanted to dig a hole for myself, and I probably immediately found something else to show for.
I will never show anyone this poster again.
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3/
For an entire summer, every weekday morning I would unwrap a huge cover on top of folded shelves and products packed last night, and set up a tiny space that could contain 3 customers at max and myself. The stand was in the middle of the shopping centre hallway, so people could still browse while they passed.
I did learn a thing or two about thread counts, but I also took every opportunity to slack off.
Towards the middle of the summer I came across an old post from 天涯 Tianya, an early version of China’s Reddit. It was already considered a very old-fashioned BBS site even in 2014. I looked it up; the site had been shut down 2 years ago.
Riding the early 2000 wave of prosperity and dreams, the site was full of people’s stories about their life abroad. The post I read was a migrant who started a new life in the Netherlands, and how he spent time with his boyfriend. It was a diary disguised as threaded posts; back then people called posting on the site “constructing a building”, because every new post became a block.
It’s not too different from threaded posts, only two decades ahead.
The story was simple.
A young Chinese migrant was describing his life after landing in the Netherlands. Each post was a small moment depicting a shared meal, a bike ride, a funny moment with his partner. Except they were a gay couple, and everything sounded so dreamy.
I learned about how protective the Dutch government is towards the renter because they were drafting plans to change the rental they were in, a lot. I had a glimpse of what a relaxed partner looked like from his words. There were a few entries on how they would spend Chinese festivals together and try to recreate hometown dishes, at a time when typical Chinese ingredients were hard to source.
I opened my phone religiously every day, starting from the top and making my way down, when I was having lunch and every chance I got to slack off. It was pulling me through the screen to the flip side of the world.
I had an escape.
I also had perhaps my only bad performance review at a job. My landlord was not happy when he spotted me on my phone when he dropped by to check in.
·
4/
I saw a girl pulling up her chair and strolling towards me in the middle of a Graphic Design class at uni. We were in our sophomore year, busy finding tutorials for Adobe Illustrator in the only computer lab that offered a full room of iMacs.
“Hey what’s your name, I am Tina.”
Stunned by the sudden greeting, which probably rendered danger more than a sense of welcome in the moment, I found myself intrigued by the person in front of me, who had the face of an Asian girl but also spoke perfect English. I later learned Tina’s family had decided to migrate to Australia from Taiwan when she was ten.
There’s nothing that bonds two uni students faster than a shared identity of being an immigrant, not to mention both being Asians, and over-achievers.
Last month I saw Tina exchanging vows with her husband in front of giant and lush trees in Toowoomba, a town a 2-hour drive away from Brisbane.
I liked the fact that I rented a car and drove there, even though it ended up blowing up my budget after a few add-ons at online checkout and physical pick-up. Not having to pay anything extra from any possible incidents brought me an immense sense of relief.
My first trip to Toowoomba was also via a road trip. I was on the passenger side of my manager’s car at my first agency job. One of our clients happened to be based in the town.
The elevation on the highway before entering the town brought me back to the day. My manager was praising how quiet his Volkswagen was when driving on the highway, meanwhile the passing of same-sex marriage in Australia was announced on the radio in the background.
In the lead up to the wedding where Tina and I were messaging each other, we marvelled at how much time had since passed, and how many versions of ourselves we had lived through. Final year, graduation, first, second and third job, falling in love, two long relationships for me, and now marriage for her.
I never stopped reminding her of the fact that she was the first person who wanted to get to know me at uni without the contract of being in the same group assignment. She mentioned the time we were working together at what I considered my first real job — tutoring the same Graphic Design course, one year later.
I teared up at Tina’s vow for wanting to find her partner in every universe and timeline. I also made sure she knew that I thought her vow was in every way superior to her husband’s (sorry Alex).
One thing for sure, as Asian kids, we both like winning and working ourselves to the ground.
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5/
The bedding business had another partner, who was perhaps in her late twenties at the time. She was training to be the manager at the Cantonese restaurant I was waiting tables at for my other part-time job.
She ironed her white shirt every single day and wore a clean ponytail. I always liked working with her.
I also remembered her as the girl who stayed.
Like many of my friends in the bridging course, I wanted to make money the day I landed in Brisbane. But unlike most of them, who didn’t need to rely on a part-time job, I was shocked to my core after finding a curry bowl opposite my school cost $8 for lunch.
It was triple the price of a lunch I would spend in Shanghai as a high school student, yet it was considered a cheap meal. So I pulled out Word, wrote and printed copies of my first CV, and handed them in person at a few places in Chinatown.
A classmate of mine, who spent his high school here with his family, was working at a steakhouse and getting paid just above minimum wage plus tips. Mine was one-third of his base salary, and without the tips.
But what I lacked in pay was made up by the sheer quantity of my working hours. I would grab whatever shift available, sometimes more than thirty hours a week, that was enough to cover my rent at a shared house and groceries. I was proud of myself.
I felt a certain comfort after settling into the restaurant reality very soon. Even though I knew it was supposed to be a temporary job, that I should be immediately seeking better alternatives, I started enjoying the fact that I was covering my own rent and groceries, the steadiness and predictability.
“Just two more months.”
“I deserve to take a breather, assignment deadline has been crazy.”
Every time I had the thought again, I wondered if I was actually good enough to do anything else, if I was ready to give it up.
By the time I realised, I had already stayed at the restaurant for two and a half years.
There are a lot of similarities between the career break I have been on and the period of time I finally decided to leave the restaurant. Both took me an extensive time to act on my thoughts, to convince myself it’s going to be okay.
I felt the husk of my shell had shed off completely, during both of the periods.
Luckily, shortly after a period of floating and unnerving time post quitting the restaurant part time, I landed a tutoring job at my uni. Tina was my fellow tutor, and we had an extremely cool lecturer parachuting from another uni. During the semester break, she went for a joint military exercise with troops from the States. Tina and I had our jaws on the floor.
We were paid $50 per hour. “I am finally earning adult money now”, I told myself.
The ponytail girl, with her spotless shirt, often brought up her desire to leave the restaurant when we were off shift. She had plans for the bedding business, a different full-time job and bigger things for herself.
She stayed.
I wondered about her reasoning. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was the wrong thing to do, that she had probably wasted her time staying there, day after day.
The truth is I don’t know and also, who am I to judge?
But I saw a version of myself staying at that restaurant, and all I had was this feeling of wanting to run.
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6/
I spent a few more days in Brisbane after driving back from Tina’s wedding. It perfectly fits as part of a goodbye tour before I enter the next chapter on a new continent, the city I read and fantasised about at the bedding stand.
I thought after 7 years away, and becoming a new person, I could see the city in a brand new light. After all, I had attributed my reasons for wanting to get away to the life stage I was in, the restaurant job, my ex and the lack of things going on.
On the first day back, I drove past Buranda. I remembered getting off the bus at that intersection on the first day my ex from high school landed in Brisbane. After two years apart, we were excited about reuniting and building a life. But unlike what the Tianya post had promised, we were unhappy stretching out a relationship we had already grown out of.
Perhaps, I picked up the bedding job to also run away from him during that summer.
I took a walk in the Botanic Garden opposite the hotel I was staying at. I was once one of the crowd who ran laps along the river. The riverbank has always been stunning, and it still is. But the loop was my way of fighting the anxiety of my first job.
I’d run 7 or 8K almost daily. I loved the sting on my skin after an hour under the sunlight, I loved sweating, but I also hated how endless it felt. I didn’t know what I was running towards.
In the same track, I had to wait for results and calm myself down from round after round of PTE, a language test to qualify for getting permanent residency. It felt like a money-making machine for the company, and a recurring nightmare for me.
I was so happy meeting my friend Thania and spending an afternoon with her adorable daughter, who just turned two a few weeks ago. We had reconnected at the end of last year after a period of silence. But I felt guilty. Guilty of feeling my energy immediately left my body after just an hour playing with Kaylee. Babies are relentless with their energy and there’s no room to negotiate.
Guilty of not being there for when Thania needed her people being a new mom. I thought I wasn’t being a really good friend at all. After leaving Brisbane, I am now moving further away.
I stared at the world outside the window of my bus on the way back after saying goodbye again to Thania. I used to take the same bus to go home in the opposite direction around midnight, after the restaurant shift.
The final straw was the Garden City Shopping Centre. I was catching up with another fellow tutor, and my mentor Felix at my first job. I told him I studied and stole his CSS files for all the projects I got put on.
He smiled and said “yeah, we have come such a long way.”
It feels ridiculous to type this down, but both my ex and I treated the shopping centre as an exciting place, a retreat if we had something to celebrate that particular week. We would do takeaways, browse gadgets in JB Hi-Fi.
The Coles corner of Garden City hasn’t changed at all. 8號胡同, the fruit and veggie stand in the middle of the hall, Reject Shop, Coles. Even the shops in the food court, like Taste of India. I felt a chill on the back of my neck.
And I still felt I would be judged walking past the Cantonese restaurant. I became suddenly aware of the clothes I was wearing, whether I looked presentable, even though when I peeked inside, the people had changed.
I didn’t walk through Story Bridge or to the other side of the river bank, Kangaroo Point, Wollongabba. It was where Erik and I started, and we have now also parted ways.
Everywhere I walked, I was overwhelmed by waves of memories stitched up across different time periods, with different people I formed close relationships with.
There was nowhere to hide.
·
7/
There’s something funny about remembering the post from Tianya. I have also written things on Douban that are still gaining likes and interests. In a lot of senses, I am now the guy who posted on Tianya. But here I am, ready to leave again.
I am also no longer that naive to think whatever I read and fantasised about Amsterdam from that website would be my experience. After all, I was tricked by another Chinese author about Melbourne and Australia. Even if they were true, my experience would be different, as it should be.
I so desperately want to defend myself and claim that I am not running away again. After all, I adore Melbourne as a city, and I know there is so much more this city has to offer.
But I felt it again.
Like the moment I was sitting in the shopping centre the summer I was selling the beddings when scrolling on my phone.
Like the moment I was leaning my head on the bus back to my rental with my ex after my shift at the restaurant ended at midnight.
Like the moment I was catching a breath after running along the Brisbane River not knowing my destination.
I wanted to leave.