Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  (Most of these friends, she would discover later, came from solidly middle-class families. Though they might have scrounged for money for a time, they had no real need to: if ever a real crisis had emerged, their parents surely would have come to their assistance. It was this lack of real consequences for any of their actions which allowed them to live so buoyantly, even though their consumption, in dollar terms, hovered only just above the poverty line.)

  So she moved out. Her Asian friends gazed at her in admiration tinged with disbelief. She had gone ahead and done the thing they all thought was impossible. It was this view of herself as fearless, intrepid and unbound by convention which she pursued over the years that followed. She loved having her own place, even if it was only rented (‘You must save,’ May said every time she went home for dinner, ‘You must buy, for a good future’): the enormous, unquantifiable pleasure of feeling like you controlled the space around you. The fact that she had to work in awful jobs like telemarketing only added to the mystique. She and her other ‘independent’ friends humble-bragged about the hairline margins between their incomes and outgoings. They were thrifty, hedonistic and ingenious. They paid sixty-five per cent of their incomes on rent and made sure that there was enough cash left over for cheap wine and creative clothes.

  After a year or two, however, she began to notice that her independent friends were becoming progressively less so. Even towards the tail end of their degrees, they were allowing their parents to put in generous contributions for things like extended holidays and overseas exchange trips. Being poor was just a game to them, like idealism and politics. For all their talk about poverty and climate change, a couple of years later they were buying homes and taking jobs at Mallesons like it had never even happened. All of the words they had spilled about justice were meaningless, decorative. Andie observed this with eyes that were keen and judgemental. She saw with the clarity of someone whose virtue hasn’t been tested yet.

  As Andie walked into the office, Elinor called out, ‘How are you?’

  ‘Good, thanks,’ Andie said automatically, noticing that Elinor’s hair looked different. The flight, the time difference, were catching up with her. She thought how nice it would be to sink down into a dense black hole of sleep. The news alert on her phone suggested that she read an article with the title, ‘CHINESE FLOODING INTO AUSTRALIA – WHO IS TAKING THE THREAT SERIOUSLY?’ She did not.

  Instead, aided by the Coke, she worked diligently for the next three hours until someone turned on the TV. There was some report about the election, some debate about asylum seeker policy. Wearily, Andie shrank into her cubicle: she knew if a conversation started, there would be no more work done that day. Sure enough, Ewan rolled over on his squeaky wheelie chair, smiling in the conspiratorial way which always preceded a political discussion. ‘How about those temporary protection visas, eh?’

  There followed a vigorous conversation interspersed with actual banging on the table. They talked about the Refugee Convention. They talked about the hypocrisy of invading a country to free it from a dictator and then treating refugees from that country as criminals for having tried to get away from the war. They talked about the new temporary visa system.

  ‘It’s such a farce – they can’t work, they can’t even rebuild their lives. Uncertainty plus forced inactivity have the most appalling impacts on mental health,’ Ewan said, and Andie tended to agree with him.

  Adele, one of the accountants, said, ‘“Asylum seekers”? Where did that come from? A refugee is a person seeking refuge. An asylum seeker is a person looking for the loony bin. Which, the way things are going, might not be such a bad description of this country.’ Shouts of laughter greeted this remark.

  ‘You know,’ Ewan said, ‘apart from the inhumanity of it all, I think the worst part of it is the waste. Think of the human capital. Not just for their sake, but for ours. I read a story recently, this memoir from the Second World War. There was this German refugee who made it across the border to Austria. He eventually got his citizenship, and when he came out of the office, a member of the public came up to him out of the blue and embraced him, saying, “Now you are free.” Imagine the power of that commitment – the kind of citizen you create. Welcome a person like that and you have them forever. You have their loyalty – for life.’

  A satisfied silence descended on the room. Andie hesitated. ‘I had a friend from Vietnam whose parents were boat people,’ she said at last. ‘I met with her mother. I asked what she remembered about her first impressions of Australia. She said, “I’d never seen a sky so blue.”’ Another small sigh went round. ‘Still, you say we have their loyalty for life. That’s a pretty big call, don’t you think?’

  Ewan looked at her with mild surprise. ‘Well, it’s only logical, isn’t it?’ he said, in the tone of one speaking to a person who had suffered mild oxygen damage. ‘Wouldn’t you be grateful if you’d been given a home and sanctuary from one of the most awful regimes imaginable? And not just refugees; migrants in general. They can appreciate what we offer them here – safety, opportunity. They’re often the most patriotic of all citizens, and no wonder. We give them work, shelter, education. All things that Australians take for granted.’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose –’ Andie found herself floundering. She wanted to object, but neither the thoughts nor the words were forming properly. She wanted to say that migrants weren’t just ‘given’ jobs; they took them and created them. Every permanent residency, every citizenship, every visa was a ticket to security and health care and hope – yes, this was true. Yet it was also an Australian’s chance to have his office cleaned and his clothes repaired and his taxis driven affordably… Ewan’s words were true in the way that a photograph is true: they contained no deliberate or obvious inaccuracy. Yet it was only a single angle, chosen to be flattering to the speaker, and what she wanted to say was that such a story can be worse than having no truth at all.

  What she said instead was, ‘Yeah, I guess that I mostly agree. There are lots of migrants who feel deeply grateful for what we’ve done for them. But I think there are also those whose gratitude is mixed with other things – they understand that it’s not just a gift, it’s a transaction. And then refugees, who’ve run away from some awful horror … I’m sure some must be so happy to be here, but others, being refugees, just ran to anywhere that would take them. They don’t necessarily have any great love for Australia …’ She found herself rambling. She was not sure where this impulse to disagree had come from, or what was so objectionable about Ewan’s formulation.

  Elinor said, ‘What’s love got to do with it? Why should it be compulsory to love the place where you live? People paying their taxes and not setting fire to stuff is good enough for me.’ She looked eagerly around for their smiles of amusement.

  Ewan nodded slowly. ‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes,’ he said, nodding deeply, as if emphasis could be substituted for agreement. ‘But let’s get back to refugees. What do you think of this argument that they’re only “economic migrants”? I don’t see why anyone would believe that. Why would you risk your life crossing the seas unless your life was really, truly in mortal danger? Why would you leave your family, your culture, everything you know, just for the sake of money? It just doesn’t seem possible.’

  ‘It’s pretty fucked up, isn’t it?’ said Adele. She went out onto the balcony to smoke.

  ‘I regard national borders as arbitrary, anyway. A very modern and unnecessary phenomenon.’

  ‘Well, Elinor, we all know you have plenty of opinions on the topic.’

  Elinor grinned. ‘Still, don’t you think that this distinction between refugees and “economic migrants” is kind of arbitrary? I mean, poverty is scary stuff. There’s no reason why being threatened by your government should be more morally important than malnutrition or disease. It’s just ranking one version of suffering over another.’ She leaned back, scrutinising the strength of her own argument.

  Andie said, ‘Would you really have to be on the p
oint of death, though, to be willing to risk your life? People have their hopes. Even here –’ She found the corner of yet another anecdote, whose relevance she wasn’t quite sure of. ‘I heard on the news that a woman from western Sydney died after a water-drinking competition. It was hosted by some radio station. You were supposed to drink as much as you could just for the chance to win a Nintendo Wii.’ She saw Elinor and Ewan exchange quizzical glances. ‘What I’m saying is, people want to believe that things can be different. Whatever their initial circumstances are, they always think there’s a way to make a change, that they can win the next one. This woman, she probably had everything by Third World standards, but she ended up killing herself for a stupid Nintendo. Imagine if the stakes were higher. Imagine if the only two choices were getting on a boat, knowing you might end up at the bottom of the ocean, or spending the rest of your youth making iPads in some sweatshop. Or cleaning people’s houses, mopping up after their horrible babies, day in, day out … At least in one case, there’s a possibility that one day life will be different. I know which choice I’d rather take.’

  There was a silence. Elinor frowned into the middle distance, as if she found this appeal to the personal beneath her.

  ‘Careful, you’re starting to sound like those open-borders people,’ Ewan said. He looked around at them, grinning, inviting them to share the joke.

  Elinor said, ‘I’m all for relaxing the borders. It’s a pointless and impossible task keeping people out. Practically Sisyphean, policing however many thousand miles of coastline we have.’

  ‘There still has to an admissions process, though. I mean, I agree with you in principle, but think of feasibility. There have to be rules …’

  ‘Oh, yes, I agree. But there’s no legal obligation …’

  Abruptly Andie stood up. ‘Bathroom,’ she murmured as she pushed through the group, almost tripping over Elinor’s legs. Swiping her card, she walked out the door and past the pot plant, onto a balcony buffeted by the noise of traffic. She leaned on the railing, inhaling the polluted city odours she found somehow reassuring. Rolling hills or sweeping bushland never offered her the level of solace she found in the stink of the movable dumpster behind the supermarket on a hot evening. There was always this disjuncture between the landscapes people claimed to love and where they actually chose to live. People wrote poems about bee-loud glades and then went home to their rich metropolitan existences. If they spent all of their time in the glades there wouldn’t be so much poetry in the world.

  She wasn’t sure why the conversation had become suddenly unbearable. Really, most of her colleagues were excellent people. They were some of the cleverest individuals around, dedicating their working lives to making things better for the poor. Yet there was a gap, as if a portion of their empathy had been surgically removed. It was easy enough for them to understand why a woman might risk her life to flee from torture, starvation, rape. Yet even they, with their glowing educations and their fulfilling, challenging jobs, could not grasp how that same woman might perceive the awful dailiness of being poor: how it might feel to see one’s vigour, youth and potential drain away under the constraints of such an existence. What more did such a woman need apart from food, electricity, clean water? Certainly not the chance to read, to learn and travel. To encounter such phenomena as knowledge and beauty, and create them.

  She drew herself back, checking her own biases. Did she understand these things? Could anyone who hadn’t lived them understand?

  She remembered one of the first jobs she’d ever done at Real Difference. Back then, the organisation’s Australian chapter had only just been founded. She had been hired as an intern, working nine to five for no pay. She was pitiably excited about it. Her role was utterly unskilled, with only undergraduate idealism to sustain her through such tedious tasks. She had helped with the newsletter, cleaning up the grammar and the formatting, and in the process had seen an article which Ewan had been editing.

  It was a first-hand account, a piece by a young Somali man who had just settled in the outskirts of Melbourne. He spoke of the wonder of being able to find so many things in the shops: eight different kinds of meat, fourteen different kinds of cheese. He was shocked by the variety and extent of items for your physical convenience: trams to take you a few hundred feet, vibrating toothbrushes to save you the effort of moving your hand up and down. He spoke, too, of his discomfort at the looks that people gave him. Compared to them, his arms were so long, his legs so gangling; Australians, he said, were so very compact, it was as if they had been squashed into the ground. Sometimes when he turned around the eyes that followed him were curious, and sometimes hostile. Taxis would refuse to stop and he would wonder why. He would be speaking to someone, friendly, open, smiling, then he would turn around and from the corner of his eye would see the hidden grimace, their response to his accent, his blackness which could not help but be offensive. He felt, he said, like a great blot of ink in an otherwise colourless ocean. Sometimes he wanted to become like everyone else, disappearing in the sea around him. At other times, he was not so sure. Did he want to disappear like that? He was not so sure at all.

  Andie had thought it a wonderful article. Not because of any special use of language: it was a plain story, plainly told. What struck her was the story’s ambiguity. The Somalia man wanted a happy, inconspicuous life, fitting in with his neighbours. But to do so, he would have to become just like them, and this was the part which frightened him. It was an existential threat: he was frightened of unbeing. Because if you cease to think and function in a way that you recognise as yourself, how can you be said to exist at all?

  Ewan had edited the piece for clarity and style. (This was extremely warranted: apart from being repetitive, it was spelled quite remarkably badly for a document written in an era when spellcheck existed.) In the process, however, he had stripped all the ambivalence from the story. In the updated version, the Somali man still feared that Australians would never accept him; the difference, though, was that there was no sign of uncertainty as to whether this acceptance was desirable or not. It was the fascination without the repulsion, the yearning with the fear all stripped away. In a neat little touch, Ewan had added a line at the end, tracking back to the ink metaphor. ‘Eventually,’ the new final line of the article read, ‘the ink dissolves.’ This was supposed to be the joyful conclusion, a heartwarming story of successful integration. All that any migrant could want was this ultimate happiness: ecstatic dissolution into whiteness.

  Andie shook her head viciously from side to side. She was frustrated with her colleagues, unreasonably so. They could not help being fundamentally convinced of their own lovability. People had been telling them how loveable they were ever since they were born. Why shouldn’t white people love themselves? When you looked at the lengths to which other human beings seemed willing to go in order to be close to them … All over the world, brown people and black people and yellow people were drowning in water and climbing barbed-wire fences and suffocating in produce trucks to get to England, America, Australia. Was it for love or money? Mostly money, Andie thought.

  She felt like smoking a cigarette, even though she had actually never tried one. She liked the thought of holding an elegant object between her fingers but hated the smell, the sour odour that it left on her father’s clothes. Her father had recently moved out of her parents’ house. He was living with his mistress – unfair as it was, she would not do that woman the respect of calling her his girlfriend. Parents weren’t supposed to pursue their desires in the way their children were. May, when she told Andie about it, had been shaking with rage. ‘Some China person,’ she said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let Benjamin go over there!’ She’d heard that line before. Her best friend in high school had come from Guangzhou; Bonnie’s mother must have hosted her a dozen times, yet she had never said anything to Andie beyond ‘How is school?’ and ‘Have you eaten?’ This lasted until the very last time she saw Bonnie, before the family moved overseas. She and Bo
nnie had embraced, then Bonnie’s mother had crooked her index finger, beckoning Andie over. Andie had leaned in to hear her, almost breathless with anticipation, and Bonnie’s mother had said, ‘Beware Shanghai women.’ Not a word more. To this day, Andie regretted not having probed further.

  Back at the meeting room the conversation was tapering off. Little sandwiches were being handed round, triangles with incongruous olive slices. She ate several and avoided speaking. ‘Now let’s be reasonable,’ Ewan said at one point, and she felt a fresh stab of unreasonable dislike for him go through her body.

  ‘Well, we have to be evidence-based …’

  ‘You can’t be swayed by all these stories …’

  Andie thought of Lisa, the maid from Indonesia, twitching and turning grey as she lay on the floor. The mind expressing its rebellion against circumstances through the body. She thought how distasteful it was that the girl’s humiliation had been reduced to a debating point in her mind.

  ‘I’m thinking of taking a sabbatical,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’m not sure how long for. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ll be back at all.’ The words surprised her. She had not intended them to come out like that; indeed, she had not been planning them at all. But once she had spoken, she had a feeling like a wall collapsing. Of course she was about to leave Real Difference. She had always been going to.

  There was a short silence. Andie realised that what she had said was perceived as hostile; given the timing, there was no way it could be taken otherwise. Elinor gave her a hard look. ‘What’s this?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t you just take some time off recently? You just got back from the Philippi— I mean, Indonesia. You have to write that report. We have to send it off to the university. We’ve got expectations to meet, you know.’