Seven Months

1. It was seven months ago today when I first arrived in Hiroshima; I remember stepping out of Hiroshima Station to a display of flashing neon and rumbling streetcars, feeling a long and unknown road stretch out into the distance. Weariness from travel and absorbing so many new things had me feeling a little romantic I suppose, but I felt as though I had finally crossed the threshold into the world my imagination had conjured months before my arrival. For the second time in my life I was living in a place that was truly foreign and completely outside my realm of experience. How many experience that even once?

2. Since then I have been reliving to a certain extent what my parents faced when we immigrated to Australia 20 years ago. Everything simple became hard, and the little things from home (be it food or getting a coffee) became small triumphs when located and experienced. Who gets excited over finding a decent coffee? Or things like Tim Tams, condensed soup and SPAM? SPAM was emergency food rations back home, for when I’d forgotten to do my food shopping and there was nothing left in the pantry (fried SPAM and eggs on rice), but I found myself doing the victory dance when I found a place that sold meat in a can.

3. (Which is not to say that I haven’t been eating anything Japanese. For one thing, traditional Japanese sweets are very similar to Chinese sweets, so there’s been a lot of red bean and sesame paste consumed in the last seven months.)

4. Finding is one thing, but buying it is another thing altogether. I’ve gotten very good at pointing — it’s amazing how much we can convey through just body language and gestures — and I’ve picked up enough Japanese now to guess at what shop clerks are saying about half the time. Baby steps.

5. Whilst on learning languages: there has been a lot of talk in the Australian media over integration recently; many commentators believe that if you come to Australia you should speak English, and any who don’t are “incompatible” with Australian life. To those people I ask one simple question: have you ever tried to learn a new language? Try it sometime: give yourself 6 months, see how much of a language you can learn. Give yourself a reasonable goal, say, to be able to have a basic conversation about everyday topics with a native speaker, with reasonable pronunciation and grammar. You might then appreciate how difficult it is to learn a new language. (And how easy it is to just give up.)

6. What else? Much to my amazement I’ve come to like teaching, though not enough to want to make a career of it. It’s hard work, but fun work, and most of the time I will come out of a class feeling like my students have learnt something. And I’ve come to dislike kids less — I actually look forward to teaching one particular little girl who comes to class with her mum. She’s two and a half, the very definition of precocious and utterly fearless. She’s loud and thinks I’m a walking talking set of monkey bars, but totally adorable. I’m glad I can give her back after the lesson, but I do love that hour of her havok.

7. That be all, I think. Sometimes I catch myself grinning like a fool as I walk down one of the main streets near my work, looking up at the sun reflecting off the now-familiar buildings, lighting the office workers and students and grandmothers and the crowds of bicycles crossing the road… sometimes it’s hard to believe that I’m really living in a different country. Then, to mimic a good friend of mine that is also living abroad, I turn towards Sydney and make a rude gesture: “hahaha, I’m in Japan!”

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