I finished the first season of "Emily in Paris". No matter how cliché others laugh at it. I think it looks good. It is like a lighthearted and humorous sketch, with everything you expect: romance, art, fashion, food, wine, love, perfect sex, Parisian arrogance, American ambition. My God, if this is my life, I can't ask for it. It is precisely because of the unavailability of demand that this dessert-style plot is even more seductive.
When I made up my mind to come to Australia 6 years ago, I expected that my life might be as shown in a TV series: fresh, exciting, energetic, and full of drama. I was more passionate at the time and felt that I was unique and confident. I believe that my personality will be appreciated in foreign countries. I can make many lovely and interesting friends. I can travel to different countries. I will meet handsome and charming Australian sunshine boys. Most importantly, I can realize my self-worth. . (Now speaking, there is a sense of fearless joking of the ignorant).
It turns out that Australia is not France, and I am not Emily. "Emily in Paris" is what I can imagine is the high-profile life of a single woman living abroad. And I, at this moment, rented an apartment in a suburb of Melbourne with no aesthetic layout, and lived the life of an ultra-low version of "Emily in Paris".
There is no beautiful view of the city, the riverside scenery, but the endless performances of various birds can be heard all the time, and there is also the huge noise of the rumbling trains on the opposite side. There is no big wheat-skinned boy here who will take the initiative to strike up a conversation with you, asking when you can meet again, and you happen to fall in love with him at first sight. But if you sign up for a dating app and put in a few pictures that you think are cute and playful, you can get a vote of "likes" from men of different colors and races. You find that those people are most likely to be disliked by you, so you can only swipe left until you feel that all this is particularly boring, and you are too lazy to return a single message, and finally delete the app altogether in order to be clean. Your neighbor is not as handsome as Gabriel, and will make you an omelet, allowing you to borrow the bathroom, drive you on a motorcycle, and solve work problems for you. On the contrary, your next door may be the Indian housewife who looks pleasing to the eye, her husband with a fierce face written on her face, and a particularly noisy little girl. You can hear them in the apartment every day or two. There is loud noise, speaking Hindi that you don’t understand. Several times, you doubted whether it was domestic violence. Thinking of the low status of women in India, you even had the urge to call the police. Later, you still felt that more is worse than less, so you have to give up.
You won’t have someone come to help solve the siege because of poor English when buying flowers, and she will naturally become friends with you, and she will easily draw customer resources for your work. Similarly, you will not meet a rich second-generation Mindy who "escaped" from China just because you sit in the park, and then you can talk about everything to help each other's love life and ideals.
The first two years and the sixth year in Australia felt completely different. At the beginning, everything is very novel, you are willing to try a lot of things, and at the same time be swallowed by a lot of things. You go to nightclubs, go to parties, get touched up in bars, take part in language exchange programs, make friends, discuss homework with students of different races, date, travel, bungee jumping, and be a sofa guest. You go to a coffee shop to work, you are exploited by your boss, you try to apply for a variety of legal jobs, and you get rejected, rejected, or rejected. In the end, you have changed from an authentic tourist, an international student, to a resident who will live here for a long time. Your identity has changed, your perspective has changed. You have become a taxpayer with rules. You work, save money, and want to buy a house of your own. However, you don't think that you really belong here.
You don't know how to describe Australians. After all, there are "ghosts" from all over the world. White people who have lived here for generations will use words like "laid back, chill" to describe themselves. You can say that this is indisputable in the world, or it can be said that it is not enterprising, or somewhere in between. For a Chinese who has been carrying the will of his parents since childhood to become a dragon and a phoenix, here, it is not a relief.
So far, you have not become particularly good friends with a young Australian. You always feel that their bones are cold, lonely, and even fragile. They have a strong sense of self-awareness and borders. Such self-awareness and borders are enough for some people to find no spiritual sustenance and true connection. In addition, Australia is really too free, and success does not need to be defined. Free enough to have no established rules, such an environment can cause people to get lost, depressed, and even commit suicide. The beautiful set of benefits derived from capitalism has turned freedom into: one can live securely without having to work, and one can have many children without having to get married. There is no need for involution, no competition, no success, and government welfare can feed generations. As a social work practitioner, your experience is that the vast majority of people receiving government relief are very unhappy.
In China, women basically live in a male perspective, while men still have to comply with the cruel elimination mechanism of the "survival of the fittest" in society. In short, that society does not encourage you to jump out of the inherent perspective and mechanism and think independently. Relying on the existing rules and regulations, concentrating on scrolling and living in mediocrity is enough. Excessive unfreedom makes people unable to breathe, and Australia's "excessive freedom" that "does not need to be defined by anyone" is difficult to touch its borders, and it is equally easy to panic.
And you are a more marginalized existence in such an alienated society. Your skin color, your upbringing background, and the embarrassment of being a non-native speaker are enough to repeatedly hit a wall on the job search road. If you are just a simple traveler, you can laugh at what happened to yourself. But, hey, you live here, your name is not Emily, and you don't have any protagonist aura. This is the life you, an ordinary person has to face. Think about it, an Emily who can’t speak French can actually be so smooth in an environment where everyone in the company speaks French. If it’s not for the protagonist’s aura and the cultural confidence behind it, you don’t know what else. Can let this dessert show go on. And as a "non-mainstream" group of people in this country, you should do no less effort than a small-town girl in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Of course, you have not yet reached the level of desperate scrolling. This is what makes Australia happy. Work and life are 100% separated. You don't need 996, and you don't need to please your boss, it's enough to do your job well.
Australia is certainly not in touch with fashion. You are delighted with your freedom of dressing and the conveniences it brings. Occasionally, you also want to dress up well, but it is really unnecessary. Even though you are almost on the run, you will still go to work wearing the plus size sweater that you gave when you were a school or volunteer. You just feel good. Sophistication has nothing to do with you, just like Tuao has nothing to do with Paris.
You are not Emily, nor glamorous.
But you are the protagonist in your life, you hold a right to speak, and you can interpret yourself in a way that is closest to the truth. This in itself is a kind of meaning and great freedom.
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