ISSUE Nº

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?

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 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.

Everyone’s coping mechanisms and responses to trauma are different – not everyone becomes a super-saver with a home to call their own. In fact, many people experiencing trauma or poverty are funnelled into prison, without access to the mental healthcare or housing support they need.

Saving on its own is not a solution to poverty, nor a possibility when living in poverty. It would be a capitalist lie to share this story as though it were.

Poverty is not a choice – I know that to my core. Property prices continue to rise to such extremes across Australia while wages stagnate, and our workforce becomes increasingly casualised. Public housing units continue to be sold off all over the country and turned into luxury apartment blocks for millionaire investors to profit from. The working class continue to struggle through this pandemic as rent steadily increases and government pandemic support for workers and the unemployed remains laughably minimal.

THIS IS NOT a rags-to-riches, hustle-culture think piece.

I am a trans person of colour and a survivor of family violence. My family home was a war zone in which I constantly awaited another barrage of attacks. In one of the last emails my brother sent me before he passed away from cancer, he fondly remembered how we learned to solve Rubik’s cubes together. It breaks my heart to say that Rubik’s cubes only remind me of the time he threw one so hard at my head that when I avoided it just in time, it shattered into dozens of pieces, leaving behind a dent in the wall.

It took me years to realise how unsafe my childhood home had been, and many more years of therapy to finally experience the emotions I had buried to survive. Living without a safe place to rest and grow, with no financial safety net, is a trauma that will always be with me.

It is a stark truth to me that people need permanent, safe, free homes. To thrive, everyone deserves the reassurance that they won’t end up homeless in their old age, or be forced to live in a volatile, violent place. They need to know that their gender identity and their culture will be respected at home with people they have chosen to live with. I just happen to be one of the lucky few people to have found this reality for myself.

THIS LUNAR NEW YEAR, I

forgot to organise anything. There were over 10,000 new cases of Covid-19 that day, my family was interstate and time had lost all meaning. I was only able to gather, at short notice, my housemates and some takeaway food. When I got home with an inordinate amount of dumplings, my best friend had decorated our little dining table with red paper aeroplanes.

“They’re not exactly traditional, but they’re the only red thing I had.”

It was a delightful touch to an unplanned Lunar New Year celebration. It gave me the sense that this home had more to offer than I could ever have imagined. A place to feel emotionally secure and tethered. Space to grow, as a person, as a family, in whatever direction I like. Somewhere both physical and emotional, both present and future.

I guess I’m finally putting down roots in one place instead of getting ready to jet off to some new city like I do every other year. I am reminded again of my Pappou’s garden: a beautifully cultivated veggie patch surrounded by flowers, with vegetables growing in perfectly plotted rows. Trees that have been cultivated for years in order to fruit regularly. A tiled patio surrounded by re-used household items masquerading as flowerpots – gumboots, a motorcycle helmet, a fish tank.

All acquired in different parts of life, by different people, with a renewed purpose. It’s all still there, thriving, in a new light.

BRIDGET HARILAOU is an agender freelance writer living on Wurundjeri land. They write extensively about politics and race. You can find more of their work in The Age, SBS Voices and Overland.