Finally a serious post

Immigration is serious business. I don’t mean in a financial sense, but that too. You pay the Aussie government AUD2,000+ for an average visa (they raise the price quite frequently too). While my ex-colleagues were splashing their year end bonuses on Gucci watches and Dior saddlebags, I was paying off my processing fee.

But I digress. Asians in general, tend to be attracted to cities. I myself am no exception but have decided to let the heart preside over the head. Yet even in Gold Coast, we are abundant. This was especially apparent at a party I attended yesterday.

X was invited to a “work party” of sorts and brought me as a guest. We drove to Varsity Lakes, a new-ish community nearby Robina, its cramped roads and shiny new cookie-cutter residences reminiscent of upper middle class Subang Jaya.

The hosts, his employers were a lovely Taiwanese lady and her Chinese husband. As it turned out, the room was filled with Orientals. X was relieved to find company in the form of a cheerful Bogan, whose claim to fame involved a self-pierced nipple (“I blacked out, you know, and when I woke up, I thought, what the hell, might as well finish the job!”).

Everyone was really lovely and welcoming. A past time for immigrants here is guessing where the other party’s origins. Upon finding out I’m Malaysian, the Taiwanese and Chinese started testing my ability to speak Mandarin and Cantonese. I falteringly obliged, having grown used to (not to mention extremely fed up of) Sino-Malaysians doing the same.

It was exhausting. Most of them couldn’t speak English and if they did, their accents made it incoherent to my ears. I tried keeping up conversations in Chinese the best I could and eavesdropped on the Japanese chatter, picking out familiar words to guess the topic du jour.

The atmosphere was lively, but there was an apparent underlying sense of displacement and somehow, loss. Everyone reached for their beers too quickly, too frequently. Several flushed boozy red within half hour into the dinner. A girl to my left told me of her complicated visa woes and of several Malaysians working illegally on a farm in Caboolture. Another guy related his story of having to work 14 hour days, 7 days a week in Melbourne, for a miserable AUD1,100 monthly. X confided how several of these people were stuck in jobs or studying courses they confessed not to possess an affinity for, but had no choice if they wanted to remain in the country. Most of them were here on Working Holiday visas and were forcefully extending their stay with student visas. After that, they’d continue studying a hodge podge of cheap courses, renewing their visas whenever it expired.

This sort of strategy is obviously not a viable long term solution. “I have permanent residency,” I replied when asked about my own status. Their eyes glowed in misplaced admiration. And of course then someone asked when X and I were getting married (by the way, the answer to that question is, not in the foreseeable future).

On a road trip last year to Sydney, X and I stopped at Paramatta. The area was buzzing with life; yet the empty shop lots and Vietnamese in their ill-fitting dime store clothes, clutching their pathetic homemade sandwiches lent it an air of desolation. These people seemed so sad and out of place. “I never want to be like that,” I whispered to X, “what if I do? I’m sure when they first arrived, they had this great Australian Dream… look what they’ve turned into.”

He dismissed this, “They’re refugees. It’s different.”

Are we so different? I count my blessings how it so happens my mother tongue is similar to the national language. It so happens my career option is in demand, lending me the few extra points necessary to get my visa. I have X, who is willingly sheltering and feeding me, while I pick and fuss my way through job offers. I also have my family back home, who protected me from financial commitments at personal cost, so I currently still have sufficient savings to allow for weekly shopping (or at least window shopping) trips or indulge in cafes once in a while. All this no doubt part of some great divine plan. I am one very lucky girl.

Visa issues aside, moving to another country isn’t as simple as it seems. This extremely basic knowledge is often completely ignored. In my two year long journey here, you have no idea how many idiots I’ve encountered online (and sometimes offline) whose sole impressions of Australia comprise marsupials and a weird accent, having never even once stepped into the country. Yet they are determined to come over, naively assuming their being officer manager at some national company will allow them to find work of similar status, in spite of their broken English, xenophobia and restrictive culture. Reality check: Most will end up being kitchen hands or factory workers. Technical skills are what may keep their resumes looking pretty.

We have to undergo medical check ups to avoid taxing the Australian government with expensive diseases and defects. For their own sakes, the applicants should have their states of mind tested too.