PHOTOGRAPHY: Maddy Watson 41.
The Distance Between Jessica Liao It had been one of the words I had studied in my Chinese script lessons, with red brush strokes gently carving the translucent parchment paper.
‘Jiā’ Home. As my fingers traced and drew the word, I noticed the small horizontal stroke at the top enveloping each edge of the bottom section. A little top hat, I thought to myself, a tiny roof for a home. Inside and underneath it, the family unit stood protected and embraced. I imagined each of the delicate brush strokes stemming from the vertical stroke to be like the venetian pattern engraved on a fallen leaf. Each connected and protected; they gracefully stood together. I held tightly onto the word in my heart when the real estate agent first showed us into our two-storey house in the south of suburban Sydney, complete with four bedrooms and three bathrooms. It even had a backyard with neatly trimmed hedges and a front yard lined with magenta geraniums. The yellow sunlight shone through, radiating a warm lustre and reflecting the beams on my Ma’s face. The house echoed the clamour of our clumsy footsteps. After having lived in a tiny government owned apartment for the first ten years of my life, this would be the place where we would build our own first home. Together. As the days swung merrily by, the unfamiliar spaces grew to become more normal, more ordinary. We grew into the new space quickly, like an old musky couch furrowing deeper back into the walls. My parents were too focused on working, finding a way to make ends meet and keep the family alive. This in combination with the lack of garden space they had known growing up in a run-down apartment in crowded Shanghai, meant that the flowers were never tended to, nor were the bushes trimmed. Often, I’d cry out in frustration to my Ma Ma, and demand to know why we never took better care of them or gave them the attention I thought they deserved. “Why can’t we keep the flowers alive?” “Can you even keep yourself alive?” my Ma would snap back in response. I think now that they simply never had the time to worry about frivolous things, like adorning their life with beautiful geraniums. They had, after all, grown up in Mao’s Communist China.
