It was a moment of sheer relief for me when, after seven years on the priority disability housing waitlist, my family were finally able to move into a small public housing unit that was accessible for my mum as a wheelchair user. Suddenly, all the money that I’d been saving to pay for their rent in retirement was no longer necessary. Now they had escaped the private rental sector, they would live comfortably on their pensions and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It was only then I allowed myself to think about what to do with the money. It was all supposed to be for my parents, but for the first time, it was mine. It was the money I had made teaching piano as a teen. The few thousand dollars my dad gave to me when he set up my first bank account, which I knew would have been incredibly hard for him to save. My Centrelink payments and the wages I earned at a tutoring centre while I was a student. My scholarship money from university. Exactly half of all Maybe it’s Chinese-Indonesian culture or the way I was raised, but there was never a question in my mind of who would take care of my parents when they were elderly. I would make sure they were looked after. The fear I held of my parents’ situation as pensioners with no super, no savings and no home gave me the only financial motivation I have ever needed: save them from homelessness. I still remember how my mother cried every single time she saw me after I moved out of home because my brother needed their only spare room. I didn’t want her to have to face the devastation of not being able to provide housing for our family ever again. Thoughts of their housing situation weighed on my mind. What would they do if they could no longer afford Sydney’s skyrocketing rents? How would they survive?
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my wages for the last five years, from full-time jobs in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. I had never spent anything on myself other than what I needed to survive, moving every year to a new city, following my career wherever it took me. I indulged in one international holiday every year, because travelling is the one thing I love doing that costs a lot of money. Not everything went into my savings. I paid for my mum’s medication and a trip to Perth for her friend’s wedding. I was always generous with my community. I paid off car fines, bought people tickets to see Lizzo (back when music festivals were a thing) and shouted endless coffees and lunches. When my friends needed money, I just sent it, and never asked for it back. When the pandemic first hit, I set aside $500 to give to people in need. Through my work with the Anticolonial Asian Alliance, which builds relationships of solidarity between Asian and First Nations communities, the money ended up going to a First Nations family. I’m not writing this as a selfaggrandising treatise about my spending habits. I want to explain that the way I spend money is shaped by my experience of familial poverty. My trauma response to poverty was to save my house deposit.
