The Idea of Home

The Morning Routine

When I was a child, I lived with my family in Hong Kong, a short walk from the Rocky Bay beach in a place called Shek O.

On school days, Mom or Dad would wake my sister and me at about six in the morning, and we would crawl to the bathroom and wash our faces before coming to the breakfast table.

We would each have a small bowl of sugary cereal – often Froot Loops, Cap’n Crunch or Frosties, and just occasionally, an exotic option called Weetabix (which you’ll note is distinct from its Antipodean cousin, Weet-Bix). That would be followed by toast, jam and Flora margarine (because butter was bad in the late 80s), and then again by a breakfast ‘main’: French toast, bacon and eggs, or pancakes or crêpes if we were lucky.

When we were done we would walk down across Rocky Bay Beach to the bus stop to get the number 9 for the 30-minute trip out to Shau Kei Wan, and there we’d take the subway to Causeway Bay, a short walk to school.

These memories of our morning routine are vivid, they’re enduring and persistent. Already I can remember the bleary-eyed difficulty of getting up at that hour – particularly on winter mornings, which in that part of Hong Kong at 6.00am could be below 10 degrees. I remember the taste of Cap’n Crunch, or the sound of the old Leyland buses arriving, or leaving if we were late (and you can imagine, if we were late, no French toast).

If you ask me about ‘home’, it is often Shek O in Hong Kong that I will think about.

Where is ‘home’?

‘Home’ is such a powerful word – I’m certain one of the most powerful there is. The emotions and connotations it can conjure are so diverse that it can mean all kinds of things to all kinds of people, and indeed, in my life, ‘home’ has a variety of meanings.

You should, I hope, get a clear sense from my childhood that I had an undeniably good home, that I had nurturing, involved parents, and so, at its best, the word home reminds me of sunny afternoons and apple pie, of climbing trees and chasing dogs. It reminds me of Shek O.

In preparing to speak to you tonight, I thought about why I go back to that childhood experience of home, why so many of us, I think, find in our childhood homes the deepest essence of the idea represented by the word.

There’s something of the work-in-progress about the homes we inhabit in the present. As, often, memories, our childhood homes become something of a keepsake, something more permanent, though not necessarily unchanging, than our present homes.

There’s something there in our childhood homes that hopefully cuts directly to our very identity. And that is one of two things I’d like to return to: identity, and belonging.

When someone asks me the seemingly simple, seemingly straightforward question, ‘Where do you come from?’ – a kind of shorthand for ‘Where is home?’ – I feel the need to answer with a convoluted, sometimes-anxious explanation of where my parents are from, where I grew up, and where I live now.

Identity, I think, over belonging.

There are three places that count as homelands for me, and note the distinction from the simpler ‘home’. They are Hong Kong, where I was born and where I grew up; the Philippines, where my parents are from, and where we visited most summers when I was a child; and the last, at least to date, being Australia, where I’ve now lived for thirteen years.

I believe in making my current situation ‘home’. It makes it easy to be in the world – to have all places become home. When I first moved to Melbourne, people kept asking me why I didn’t seem homesick. ‘Well, Australia is home,’ I told them. ‘As long as I live here, I am home.’ Did I miss Hong Kong? I did, but adopting as home wherever it was that I was made it easier to be there, made it easier to love what was great about the place, and made it easier to accept its shortcomings.

That was a great coping mechanism, and yet, sometimes I feel that that ease of adapting was perhaps the result of an absence of home, not necessarily the result of all places being home.

All of those places I mentioned are, in very real, very intimate ways, home – and yet, and I will need to explain myself here, none of them are, really, or at the least, none of them are fully.

When we visited Manila when I was a child, my sister and I were exactly that: visitors. We did not speak Tagalog, we did not know our ways around. We looked like our cousins, but very different, too. We understood some of the customs, but not all – so while we would observe enough of those to create an expectation of a cultural fit, we would transgress enough for people to tut-tut, to smile in that benign bemusement at the ‘yes-they’re-foreign’ kids who should really know better.

And in Hong Kong, which I consider home above the others, there were many reminders that it was not my ‘natural’ home, that we were still foreign. There, too, we didn’t speak fluent Cantonese, and we didn’t look like everyone else, didn’t understand all the customs.

So I lacked in a kind of belonging at that level, and yet these places are still – strongly, comfortingly, powerfully – home.

I get a very large sense of relief, for example, when I fly back into Tullamarine. I know a trip is over when the Customs folks eyeball me for food or wooden souvenirs.

I’ve been describing, I think, a hierarchy of elements that can cause one to feel ‘at home’, something along the lines that shelter, comfort and nurture are basics that need to be fulfilled, and then you can step up to ‘belonging’. But it isn’t belonging that has made me feel that these places are ‘home’, it is another step in that hierarchy. I feel they’re ‘home’ because they form a part of my very identity.

I hope many of us here tonight can relate to that. This College and this Chapel, for example, are homes. In both cases, that sense of their being home arises not from any one thing: I think first there is the physical or spiritual shelter they provide, there is the comfort and nurturing offered by the tutors and staff or the reflection and prayer that takes place within it, and from the belonging that comes from being a part of this community. And I think sitting atop all this is identity: that of being a ‘Trinity student’, that of being Christian.

At times, I’ve worried that not having a more concrete concept of home has caused me to lose something, because nowhere is truly home. But I don’t know anymore that that’s the case. My reckoning is that in the end, I’ve gained more than I may have lost. This ‘rootlessness’, if I can call it that, allows me to float in the world, to identify with anywhere, even if I don’t quite feel I belong. And much of that has come from creating an identity as a floating person, comfortable anywhere, comfortable with floating.

At Home at Trinity

So by way of coming to an end: I hope you see in Trinity a home, a place of belonging, one in which you can see a part of your identity.

I hope you continue to cherish the other homes that exist in your life – physical, emotional, spiritual. I hope that if your previous experience of home is one of lack or absence, and even if it is not, that you find here something more present – people that are or will come to be like family, a place that offers you rest, an experience that nurtures you towards dealing with the successes and challenges of your life.

I hope that living and learning and gathering within the diversity of this community enables you to more easily find common ground and bridge gaps with all kinds of people. And I hope that being a part of the village that it is allows you get to know most of its people, and know, deeply, a sense of its friendship.

And finally, I hope you can see it as a part of you. I hope that even many years from now, whenever you step through the College gates or the doors to the Hall or this Chapel, that you can sigh, sit deeply and say with gratitude, ‘I’m home’.

A reflection delivered in the Chapel of Trinity College in the University of Melbourne, 16 May 2010. You can 'like' Trinity on Facebook here.

At home, in Delhi

Hotels tend to promote themselves with ‘home-away-from-home’ connotations – telling guests about the available comforts, the conveniences designed to make their travels easy, and, most of all, the friendly, personalised service. Sometimes, guests leave testimonials to the effect that ‘the hotel staff were like my family’.

And if you watch closely, you’ll often see guests making too-intimate conversation with the waiters and other staff, in a unilateral effort at connection in faraway places.

In February 2008, I was at the Hyatt Regency Delhi, when I sat facing a man who really needed to connect:

A man who looked like Freud, nursing a red wine in the Executive Lounge, is showing the waiter photos stored on his phone.

My son and his girlfriend, he says.

My other son and his girlfriend. Neighbour’s daughter. My mother-in-law, he says with a mixture of affection and amusement. Travelling in Canada.

He shuffles through a few. My daughter is in the wedding … my daughter and this girl are good friends.

This is today, here in Delhi, he says more loudly, awaiting the waiter’s reaction.

Yes, yes, Delhi, says the waiter, happy to see the familiar among these family shots.

He scrolls on: Here’s my backyard, that’s an owl.

Snow … this is near where I live.

This is my neighbour. The girl who got married, this is her house.

Oh, said the water.

We had a party for Valentine’s Day, I don’t know if you have Valentine’s Day …

Yah, eh, February … February 14, the waiter says, as if to prove that he knows it.

The men get together and cook a meal … for the women.

The waiter nods politely.

My brother-in-law … this is in New Hampshire. This is a party there … his daughter is getting ready to go to college.

My nephew.

My brother-in-law.

My wife. My son. My father.

The waiter asks after his father.

He’s, uh, 81 – he’s old, the man says as he scrolls on.

What kind of dog is it?, the waiter asks when the next photo appears.

It’s a pug. P-U-G.

This is behind my house … sunset.

Business trip I took to Minnesota. Back to my mother-in-law’s house. I think this is Christmas time. My in-laws have a small cottage on a lake … it’s beautiful.

Again, The waiter nodded politely.

It was cold … we all got up and had coffee on the dock.

An associate of Freud turns up, watches the proceedings for several moments before he interrupts … Excuse me, he says to the waiter, before turning to Freud: Weren’t we meeting in the restaurant?

Freud looks up briefly: I think we’re meeting here. We’re here, he says as he goes back to showing the waiter his photos as the other man comes to sit opposite him … it’s an antique, he says, even as the waiter turns to the other man to take his drink order.

The first man shifts his attention to his associate. They eat at 8.00, 8.30 here, he says. So did you go to surgery? How’d ya do?

On Loss

Three meditations on loss.


One 
At the start of this month, I watched Isabel Allende talking to Andrew Denton on Elders. Her words stayed in my head for days afterwards – she was like a mystical sage. Viz:

Denton: You left Chile and you went into exile because your life was in danger. What is it like not to have a place to belong? 

Allende: At the beginning I was totally paralysed by nostalgia, the feeling that everything had been taken away from me. I had lost my family, my house, my in-laws that I adored, even my dog, my job, of course, everything that was dear to me. And my country. Your country is the place where you don’t have to ask – you know the code, you know the clues, you know the jokes, you have the references, you get the accent. You look at a person and you know exactly where that person stands in the society. You only have that in your own country and, of course, I lost it when I left Chile. I became a writer because I was living in exile and my first book was an attempt to recover what I had lost. So in a way now I have my country in my books.

Two 
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From ‘One Art’, by Elizabeth Bishop

Three
He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas’s other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato’s myth?

He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the ‘Es muss sein!’ of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

With the sunset in my eyes

Thursday: Just off the Sydney Road tram, a short walk from Blyth and a left turn, and the Hope St Bus Line timetable says the service only goes to 7pm on weekdays.

I decide to walk home down Hope Street. The sun's low and has that wonderful last hurrah glow about it. Sky's really blue, really clear. 


Earplugs have been sending me this:

1. Heaven Can Wait, Charlotte Gainsbourg 
2. Pick Up the Phone, Dragonette 
3. We Walk, The Ting Tings 
4. It’s Good To Be In Love, Frou Frou 
5. Here Comes Your Man, Meaghan Smith 
6. Oh My, Gin Wigmore 
7. Vagabond, Wolfmother 
8. Astral Weeks, Secret Machines 
9. Waitin’ for a Superman, The Flaming Lips 
10. Sweet Disposition, The Temper Trap 
11. 3 Rounds and a Sound (Live), Blind Pilot 
12. Vingt à Trente Mille Jours, Françoiz Breut 
13. Love Her for That, Teddy Thompson 
14. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Wilco 
15. 11:11, Rufus Wainwright 

The street's still light industrial in places, and residential for decent stretches. There’s graffiti at regular intervals, some of it crass or blah and some of it intentional and beautiful. I take photos of some of it, and interesting house numbers, a SOLD sign, a house with a tiled doorbell sign with a missing tile (something-BELL, and something-HARD), and other things.

It takes 25 minutes to walk from Sydney Road home, what with all the stopping to take photos. Life's good.