Stuff – mothers guilt

I feel like a crap mother because I don’t really engage with other women with kids the way quite a few of my friends do. It’s because I have my own goals and interests, away from parenting, and even though I know it’s silly to feel guilty about it. I do.
I know people with kids in the area, and I know people with kids who I click with. But the thing is I just can’t seem to fit in more than the occasional play date.
I’m thinking about my own childhood. I have absolutely no memory of 0-3 years old, but I’m sure I was more active than my kid is in the community. I had a community.
I grew up in the big city and there was constant stimulation. I guess it’s not a bad thing to grow up in the quiet suburbs.
I’m also feeling quite guilty for leaving him at my parents today as I get some uni stuff done.

If H were the stay at home father, there wouldn’t be an expectation that he bond with other men and hang out in a group.

I guess we have less than a year of this lifestyle where I juggle trying to do my own thing, with trying to be the ideal mother.

I really hope he doesn’t end up being anti-social because I’m a bit of a bookworm nerd. This is one of the reasons I’m keen for him to start school next year.

 

Hong Kong…

Just knowing Melbourne and Hong Kong are in my immediate life plan and that I’m going to go to both within the next 6 months has really changed my self-perception. I no longer feel as if I’m a mildly depressed housewife in the outer suburbs of one of a mining city.

I’ve decided to go to a conference in Hong Kong. I don’t get any funding from my university but it’s one that’s directly related to my research. That and I have been thinking about going back to Hong Kong for the past 30 years or so. It’s now or never. There were plans to take hubby and baby, but an 8 hour flight, Disneyland, mummy wanting to do some research/writing/work, Daddy’s first time in a big Asian city… just not doable in 5 days in the middle of the school term.
This will be my first trip overseas in 8 years. I had a really bad flight back from London back in 2002 and vowed never to fly beyond the equator again.
I don’t really know anyone in Hong Kong. It’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to work and live, but hadn’t really thought too much beyond dreaming about becoming “real” again…which I know isn’t going to happen because I’m illiterate in Cantonese/Chinese.
I’m looking on the map from a brochure I got at Flight Centre…I’m so excited about going, never mind the barbwire looking purple border separating China from North Korea…oh and they’ve left out Xingjiang/East Turkmenistan – which makes it easier to forget the Dateline interview with the Guantanamo Bay Uighurs who were wrongly accused, released but denied entry to most countries around the world, including Australia, because of pressure from the Chinese government.

What I love so much about Perth is what I hate most about it. The isolation.
I’m probably in for a shock.

I’m just looking forward to being somewhere less isolated and suburban. I’m really hoping it will open my mind a bit. I do feel I’ve become parochial and boxed in since I came back to lead the life of a suburban housewife. Sometimes the most exciting thing that happens in my day is having to think on my toes when my kid decides he needs to poo and I don’t have any nappies, wipes, toilet seats, or a toilet around.

I think I will go on this conference even if it’s simply an exercise to take my studies more seriously.

 

I want, I want…

My house is a mess because I have very little furniture! I need storage solutions…

Is this the humble Billy?

Ahh library book shelves…

 

My latest obsessions…

* Coffee….the smell of a fresh brew makes me want to go on a long road trip…up and down the West Coast of the US of A…

* The Eaton Sisters …

I’m reading about the Eurasian sisters and writers Edith and Winnifred Eaton – who wrote under the pen name “Onoto Watanna”. I’m reading Diana Birchall’s biography on Winnifred at the moment and am completely fascinated by her life story. Birchall is Eaton’s grand daughter. Edith and Winnifred were one of 14 children born to a Chinese mother and English father. Both became writers but whereas Edith chose to identify with her mother’s people and write about Chinese people as an almost insider, and under the pen name Sin Siu Far, Winnifred chose to construct a half-Japanese persona and write about Japanese people and culture – though also as a Eurasian almost insider.
Reading about these two women reminded me of 1996 (?) Eric Liu’s musings, in The Accidental Asian, on how his Eurasian children will have the option to identify with, claim, discard their Chinese/White identities because they are visibly bi-cultural. I’m completely in awe of Winnifred’s audacity. She must have been quite a character. Birchall biography documents her later life and she had very sad and complex relationships with her sons. There’s the argument that Edith’s writing is more contemporary in that she writes about race and cultural issues the way someone in this era would, and that Winnifred’s plays into what we now identify as very Orientalised images of the East…but I don’t think that we have broken out of the latter. I can see how it happens. The audience almost expects it. Edith published one short story collection because she died relatively young. Winnifred died in her 80s. She also wrote under an Irish pen name later on in life.

* Victorian Mental Asylums in Epsom, Surrey.

I spent some of my formative years in Epsom because my parents were migrant workers at the asylums there.

Here’s a BBC story about how typhoid female patients were locked up at Long Grove. They were sane to begin with… It would have been so scary being locked up with the criminally insane. I remember Dad said there were older patients there who weren’t mentally ill, at least not to begin with, but may have been placed there because they couldn’t speak English. He mentioned a Polish patient who remained in England after one of the wars.

The people we knew were all nurses or domestics from the hospital, and all were non-English. They did the work no one else wanted to do. My parents knew people used the work visa as a stepping stone to other occupations or life choices. In fact a few of them were so embarrassed that they ever wiped a mental patient’s arse and do such menial work, that they denied ever having lived in the town after they became bankers and stock brokers etc.. One of them was my bank manager uncle. Our family friends were Irish, Spanish, Italian, Hong Kong and Malaysian Chinese…There were possibly other ethnic groups but I don’t remember.

I’m looking for more information about these asylums as this is where I spent a lot of my childhood…waiting for my parents to finish work. I was in the creche, smuggled into the kitchens. I remember the Great Hall. I remember picking apples and chestnuts off the orchard trees. Maybe I’m romanticizing the English meadows, but I remember driving along a road lined with large oak trees or maybe they were willow trees. I’ve never been much of a botanist. Most of all, I remember being completely fascinated by the patients. There are two occasions that I remember quite vividly and I think it’s because they were the only occasions where people were acting “insane”. I remember hanging around one of my cousins who worked there briefly and taking swigs of his Guinness whilst walking in and out to watch him attempt to tinkle with the engine of his Morris Minor.

It’s funny how up until recently, I never really thought about my time in England. I seem to have more of a connection to a place I have no conscious memories of than I do of England. I forget that my experiences growing up here and feeling rather alien isn’t just because of my ethnic background – it was because not only did I look different, I also sounded different. That and I stopped hanging out at insane asylums.

 

Logistics of motherhood…

The strangest thing happened today. I managed to hang out with L and get some writing done – albeit in my shorthand and on scrap pieces of paper lying at the bottom of my bag.
I discovered a small cafe near the local library. What’s great about it is that there’s a corner with old children’s toys. They’re dirty and not very exciting, but because we don’t have those toys at home…it’s all new to L. He kept himself amused for nearly 2 hours with blocks and foam numbers…he didn’t seek my company and was content just to build and explore.
We were supposed to be at playgroup but I gave him an option and he chose the library.
I know some people think it’s strange that I give him options…either…or…neither…nor… But he has likes and dislikes, and playgroup is not school. I’m not going to let him wag school. Hopefully I put him in a school that he gets a lot out of…
I sometimes worry about him not having enough contact with other kids. Not sometimes…all the times. But he seems to like older kids at the moment. He would have liked to have had a big sister I think.

 

Aspiring Writers/7 up USA/Togo/Hapa

I watched half of 21Up USA last night. I’m not sure how many kids they’ve interviewed, but I noticed that most of the kids who’ve been to university want to be writers. Interestingly, the ones who don’t have writing aspirations have the most interesting stories. They’re only 21 and think they know it all.

I was thinking about this when I was in my ESL class today. I have friends who really love the nuts and bolts of English grammar, explaining grammar and read grammar books, watching grammar video tapes in their spare time. I really don’t sure their enthusiasm. What I love about teaching (when I don’t have to deal with assholes) is the human interaction and learning about humanity.

Today as I was doing an exercise on neither…nor/either…or… we went off track and a student told me about the civil war in Togo. I felt so ignorant because I didn’t even know there had been a civil war there. Though she reassured me that not many people did because everything else overshadowed this war. One of my other students, a Vietnamese refugee who has been in Australia for 30 years, recounted her refugee experience and they compared notes on what the resettlement experience was like. They spoke of the meager rations they were given in refugee camp.

As they were talking, I thought to myself, “I wonder who is the refugee of tomorrow?” and..”God I’ve turned into one of these middle-class women who I used to find odd because they were so intrigued by things that were just part of my every day life.”

It made me realize we shouldn’t categorize each other by race/visual difference, but by how many generations removed from a peaceful, suburban Australian life we are. My husband and I are not the same race, but we are the same number of generations removed from the working-class migrant experience.

When I get some time weekend, I’ll finish watching 21 Up USA. It’s more interesting than the UK version because it’s more contemporary. The kid’s were born in 1985 – so I’m a decade older, but can still identify the “characters”. I’m intrigued by the Hapa kid. I’ve no idea what my son will look like when he’s older. I’m sure he won’t look like that Hapa kid, but it’s just interesting to see what older Hapa men look like.

 

Anna May Wong Must die!

This show looks fun. Pity it’s in London.

Anna May Wong Must Die! is Anna Chen’s one-woman show about Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star. This personal journey through the life and crimes of Anna May Wong grew from a half-hour programme about the actress, A Celestial Star In Piccadilly, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2009, written and presented by Anna.

“I discovered her at an early age when, growing up in the far East of London, I was the only Chinese kid in my school. I often wondered where everyone else was who looked like me.

“In the streets, men of a certain vintage would yell, ‘Oy, you! Anna May Wong!’ I thought, ‘Blimey! How do they know my name’s Anna?’ And then I saw her. She was in an old black and white film on the telly. The tall Chinese screen goddess in Shanghai Express, blowing the blonde Teutonic Marlene Dietrich off the screen and blasting her way into my respect

“Up until then, my only role models had been Madam Mao and Imelda Marcos. I didn’t know whether to start a revolution or steal a handbag. Now I could add stabbing villains to my options.”

Part comedy, part social critique, this funny, fascinating look at the movie icon dismantles Chinese stereotypes and reveals the human side of the dragon lady of dragon ladies.

Am 2/3 done with the MA but now feel like deleting 2/3 of the 2/3.

 

Hide and Seek

I can’t seem to make up my mind about what to do with this blog.
Fortunately, I’ve discovered the “Privacy” function in wordpress. Last time I couldn’t make up my mind about a blog or two, I deleted the blog(s)…which I now regret because one of them was my pregnancy journal.

I do however have plans to learn CSS – cascading style sheets, buy a domain and set up a website next year. It’s going to be the “hobby” in my motherhood+1career+2hobby formula. I was going to cook for the second hobby, but then remembered that I have two hungry mouths to feed and If I only cook for fun, I’m going to end up with a very skinny husband and son. Hey…is that a zeugma because I’m missing an adjective before “son”. That’s my new word: zeugma. [And yes...my husband can cook, but I don't like what he cooks 80% of the time, which is why I've claimed cooking duties and given him washing up duties. Also I'm a lot quicker in the kitchen.]

I’m feeling a bit vague and ditzy as I type. I have, according to the doctors, a “mild head injury”. On Sunday I went to my favourite cafe, only to find that it had been taken over by some ladette bogans. I mean power to women who want to claim bogan guy behaviour as their own, right down to the crotch scratching and love for Anthony Mundine, but the cafe is small and didn’t have enough soft furniture to dampen their ladette conversations. Also, one ladette started off a conversation…”I worked with an Asian once…”. I mean it could have been…”…and they have very nice hair,” but I’d already stereotyped them more than they had me. So I sat outside…
A gust of wind came in from no where and hey presto, the heavy pole of the outdoor umbrella hit me on the head. The nice waitress rushed up to us. My husband said, “no damaged done…” I smiled feebly because I was in a state of shock and stumbled across the road before feeling nauseous and tired. I didn’t pass out and it was just a dull surface ache – but you know, you hear about people in the media saying stuff like, “Oh…but she was feeling fine…and dropped dead within 24 hours.”

My beautiful boy gave me kisses on the head and a big hug.

So what’s my point – freak accidents happen. Thank goodness I was too lazy to get the high chair for my son and he was in my husband’s lap.

I’m blogging as I wait for the courtesy Toyota shuttle to pick me up. The car went in for service yesterday and there was so much wrong with it, it had to stay in overnight. I’m learning quite a bit about cars because my son is car crazy. I’ve learnt a lot about the VW – how it was the Nazi’s Model-T ford but production had to stop during the war, that the scirocco looks like the golf, and that the mini cooper is a descendent of the austin cooper, morris minor… My son’s favourite car is the Mini Cooper Coupe – I looked into getting one and didn’t realise that it’s a luxury car selling at $75,000.

I’m clucky but have always said I need to finish my draft before I think about having another child. The MA is plodding along. It’ll be good to get this finished because I think I’d like to at some stage continue and write a PhD around contemporary feminist issues – started thinking about it when my Friday morning class started talking about their lives. I have a really sassy Iraqi lady who is fiercely intelligent. She is a widow supporting two young children – her husband was blown up back home in Iraq- sadly it was when he went back into Iraq after escaping into Syria. She’s around my age and it’s just incredible to think all the time I had been navel gazing, blogging, watching my inane American teen dramas as a form of escapism, planning my next holiday, afraid of the quiet suburbs and the loss of my independent self..she was living in dusty, hot, Baghdad, lost her premature baby due to the fact she had only a Baghdad hospital for medical care, lost her husband, lived in a war zone…. She came out here by herself and is a woman warrior. She reminds me of my maternal grandmother. Ballsy. Yet still very conservative. She was explaining to me that she had to wear a veil and all women have to wear a veil because if they didn’t it would cause problems between the men who see them [objectify them] and the men’s wives. The thing is this woman shares similar attitudes as me towards world peace and the big issues, but yet when it comes to this, she falls back on the conservative attitude where men do not take responsibility for their actions. My grandmother, and to an extent my mother, shared these attitudes. The whole idea that you’re asking for it, if you reveal too much flesh. On the other hand, to believe that you are attractive to men means that you have a healthier self-esteem than say the woman who feels she has to expose more to make herself more sexually attractive.

I’m thinking, will I lose touch with the world if I stop working next semester?

 

Can’t do it all but that’s okay!

What happened to this post.

Well that’s all…can’t do it all, but it’s okay.

 

X men – the last stand

I watched X men – 3 on telly last night. What a terrible film. The premise is interesting enough but the narrative was so bad, and so were the female characters.
- The Archangel: they should have just gotten rid of this plot since they didn’t have enough time to develop the father/son relationship.
- Female characters.
I hated the Jean Grey/Phoenix character and in fact all the female characters. They’re all weak and submit themselves to dominant stereotypes of what it means to be a desireable woman.
JG/P – Is the most powerful creature in the world but doesn’t manage to control her power and ends up killing “the man she loves” etc… At first I thought, ‘okay I don’t want to read her as typical of the archetypal villainess who is too [sexually]powerful etc..fear of female sexuality ” because at the moment I’m trying to avoid theoretical jargon. But how could I not read it this way when everytime she goes “psycho” she turns red, the oceans rise, men stand up -rise to the occassion and then get incinerated when she unleashes her full power. She’s a cliche. Also why didn’t Wolverine just inject her with the “cure” instead of sinking his knives into her? All 10 of his digits.
Okay and even if I am getting all undergrad cultural studies student-esque about this – the poor actress didn’t get to talk much. Though she did get to do her famous scissor thing with her legs.
Rogue – Pathetic. Another female who is so powerful she can’t touch her man without killing him. So she gets the cure. For herself – she says…and after she loses her powers, the boyfriend comes back to her. Otherwise he spends most of his time with Juno.
Juno – plays a pre-pubescent character – kitty. So she doesn’t count. She wants her parents more than she was a man.
Storm – the only woman to keep her super powers and remain relatively happy. And she takes over from Xavier. But notice in the film she doesn’t get to fight the really powerful mutants. Her main nemesis is another woman of colour. “no no…enjoy the film,” I said to myself…”Don’t read the film, just enjoy it for the narrative” – but I couldn’t. The characters were so crap. Also Storm is asexual and has absolutely no love interest. I was hoping she would develop something with Wolverine – but that would involve miscegenation and that’s pretty rare in mainstream blockbusters. Though Kevin and
Whitney did alright in the 90s in The Bodyguard.

And even if I didn’t hate the female characters so much, the narrative was clunky.