Pag.181
DOWN AND OUT
I lived on money I borrowed from the building manager
for the next few days, until my parents could send me my ticket to Australia. I
didn’t tell my friends and brothers I was going; I didn’t want them to worry or
to try to convince me to stay. It was a hard enough decision as it was.
The entire time I was in the air, I reminded myself
that the movies weren’t everything, and that there were plenty of careers for a
young boy with ambition. I could be a policeman. I could be a chef. Maybe I
could build furniture, I thought with a bitter laugh. I didn’t need Hong Kong, and
Hong Kong certainly didn’t need me.
But when the plane touched down in Australia, reality
struck me a painful blow. I wandered with my bag through the airport, looking
for my parents, completely puzzled by the instructions they’d given me. None of
the landmarks that they’d told me about were visible. There were too many
people, and none of them spoke Chinese. When I approached people with my scrap
of paper, which I’d gotten the building manager’s granddaughter to inscribe
carefully with the embassy address and phone number, people looked at my
shoulder-length black hair, my Asian features, and my poor clothing, and they
ran away.
I was alone, without even my parents, in a country
full of foreigners. Or, I corrected myself, in a country where I was a
foreigner, and always would be.
Finally, I found an airline attendant who could speak
a little Chinese, and was told that I wasn’t just lost—I was in the wrong city!
The plane had landed in Sydney, the main city of Australia; my parents lived in
Canberra, a short plane hop away, but far enough so that my handwritten address
was incomprehensible and useless.
With her help, I got on the right plane and arrived in
my parents’ city hours later than I was expected.
The Canberra airfield I stepped out onto was dusty and
brown, and the sky and landscape were completely alien. I walked around the
airport looking for my parents. There weren’t as many people there as at the Sydney
terminal, and I couldn’t imagine that I’d have any problems finding them—if they’d
waited for me.
But after half an hour of walking, I saw no one I
recognized.
Pag.182
I sat down on a bench, dropped my bag next to me, and
put my head into my hands. As bad as it had been to fail in Hong Kong, this was
worse by far. Who could understand me here? How would I find transportation to
the embassy?
And then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I looked up into the face of my mother, into her teary
eyes and smile.
“Mom!” I shouted. And embraced her with all of my
strength.
Just behind her was my father, still tall, but a
little stooped in his shoulders. The biggest difference: his hair was
completely white.
The years had passed, and I hadn’t seen either of them
for so long, and they’d changed—gotten older, tanned by the hot Aussie sun. And
I’d changed: I’d grown so much, and my hair was long and unkempt. We’d probably
walked by each other in the hallways, not recognizing one another, until my
mother took the chance that this thin, miserable-looking young man was her son.
“Welcome home, Kong-sang,” said my father, squeezing
my shoulder. And my mother kept on holding me.
But the words sounded strange.
Was this my home, a place I’d never been?
Or had I left
my home—the only home I’d ever really known?
Part of the reason my father was so happy I’d decided
to come back was that, at age nineteen, I was almost too old to become a legal
resident of Australia through my family connections. Always a practical man, my
dad knew that Hong Kong, the place that had sheltered him from the Japanese
army, would not be safe forever—that uncertainty would be coming, a few decades
later, when the island was returned to China. He was Chinese in his heart and soul,
but he had seen how the Communists treated his countrymen, and he wanted me to
have a safe place to run to if things went bad in the year 1997.
But when I finally got my Australian passport,
signifying that I had a right to enter and stay in this strange new land, I
felt more foreign than ever. I lay on my bed, looking at my picture, at the
sullen, ugly face that stared back at me. My face in the photo was unhappy, and
it reflected how I felt. The booklet gave me the freedom to come here whenever
I wanted, but it also gave me the freedom to leave. And after months of living
like a parasite on my parents, struggling with the language, the culture, and
the food, that’s what I wanted to do, more than anything else.
I found my dad resting in our common space—there was
more room for us here in the embassy than there ever had been in our house on Victoria
Peak. His eyes were closed, but I knew that he was awake and that he had heard
me enter.
“Dad,” I said, softly.
Pag.183
“Hello, Kong-sang,” he said. Now that I was grown—taller
than him, and as skinny as a rail—he never called me Ah Pao anymore. The name wasn’t
completely gone, however; the English-speaking embassy staff had taken to
calling me Paul, after hearing from my mother that her nickname for we was
Pao-pao. “”Did you want to talk to me?”
I nodded. My passport was clenched in my right hand. “I
spoke to someone in Hong Kong,” I told him. “They want me back. There’s—I have
a new contract waiting for me.”
My dad looked at me in silence. He knew I was lying. I
don’t think I’ve ever been able to fool him in my entire life. But he also knew
I was miserable here, and I was old enough to make mistakes of my own, while
still being young enough to survive them.
“I suppose there is no help for it,” he sighed. “A
contract is a contract.”
I held out my hand top him, and he squeezed it. He
looked at my hand, which still showed scars from my many years of falling on
cue.
“But son—never forget,” he said softly. “You will
always have a place here with us.”
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