We hardly recognize ourselves. We aren’t mall people, and we’ve actually already visited malls in both Thailand and China. Needs for a pharmacy, an English bookstore, clean socks kept pulling us magnetically toward malls the past few months. In today’s case, the pull is Christmas shopping, and it is an odd, disorienting dose of reverse culture shock. “Frosty the Snowman” pipes through speakers, shoppers wobble with stacks of bags on each shoulder, and Santa perches on his throne parked in cotton-candy snow and surrounded by disgruntled elves. Christmas is in the air, and yet the air-conditioning blasts and the crowd is in shorts. I detest shopping in any season and my feelings on the matter are heightened this time of year, but I am determined to find things I can wrap in paper. They must be lightweight and small enough to cram in our packs. I am limited by our backpacks and by the stores’ ransacked shelves.
I wander into a department store and am disoriented, like a girl on the wrong aisle who’s lost her mom. My current personal belongings consist of a laptop and a converter for electrical gadgets; my current wardrobe consists of garb fit for washing elephants in Thailand, hiking in the Queensland bush, and, eventually, shopping in a Moroccan medina. Brushing past womenswear while George Michael sings about his last Christmas causes dizzying culture shock. The toy section is completely picked over, so I leave.
I find a craft store, disheveled from harried shoppers. An idea has hit me. I find everything I need but Scotch tape, and I ask for its whereabouts.
“Sorry, love, we sold out of Scotch tape weeks ago.” The employee walks off. I shrug and opt for green painter’s tape from a nearby kiosk, and decide this will work even better.
I find a Target at the end of the mall and shuffle through its remains to unearth a few workable gifts. They’re nothing I would buy in our normal life, but life isn’t normal right now. I add a roll of pink-and-gold wrapping paper and a tin of obscure-brand chocolates.
Three hours later, we walk through the front door, and I toss bags of leftover Lego kits and multicolored pens on the bed and close the door. I empty my bag from the craft store on the dining table and call out, “Kids! Come here!” I spread out the construction paper, markers, and painter’s tape.
“What’s this for?” Tate asks.
“We’re going to decorate the house. Starting with giving ourselves a Christmas tree,” I answer.
The kids slice green paper at sawtooth angles, cut out mismatched circles of red and blue baubles, a janky yellow star. I return to the bedroom and wrap the gifts, then set them under our two-dimensional tree, which Kyle has taped to the wall in an outline of green tape.
We watch A Christmas Story tonight, eat popcorn for dinner, and cover cereal boxes with the remaining construction paper to transform them into makeshift stockings. The kids tuck into bed, each in his or her own bedroom—a luxury. Kyle and I sip late-night cups of tea in the backyard under the stars. The neighbor’s sprinkler comes to life, sputters its cadence. A nearby kookaburra laughs. It is summer solstice: the longest day of the year.
O holy night, indeed.
Australia, like the United States, is a country of natives overtaken by its European immigrants. Its origin as a penal colony is widely known, having started as a dumping ground for Britain’s worst of the worst (meaning, typically, nine-year-old chimney sweeps and Irish women caught stealing butter), and the original Aborigines have struggled to reclaim—and maintain—their identity. Sydney is where this British colony began, and until 1971 the government restricted immigration to white settlers only in order to preserve a British ethnic identity. Since 2005, however, it’s estimated that 40 percent of the population has at least one parent born overseas, and as of a few years ago, over a quarter of Australians were born overseas, most likely in Africa or Asia. It is still a country of immigrants, living among the 3 percent of the population hailing from Aboriginal tribes.
If you weren’t born here, statistically you were most likely born in Britain, New Zealand, China, Italy, or Vietnam. But around ninety thousand immigrants are from the United States. This includes my friend, Adriel, who lives in Sydney. She is a native Bendite, which means she hails from the small Oregon town from which we left, and married an Aussie several years ago. I met her months ago when they were in the Pacific Northwest visiting her hometown while we were packing up our life to begin our trek.
Here, they live in a ninety-five-square-foot travel trailer with their two small boys. We invite them to come see us and to park their home in the driveway for a few days.
They have recently relocated to Sydney from Queensland, and with this decision they have taken on a sizable increase in expenses. Sydney has the fourth highest living expenses in the world, and they have channeled their limited funds into a thirty-year-old renovated trailer. With a few refresher coats of paint and a spark of creativity, they have made a tiny home. Two days before the New Year, Adriel and her husband, Ryan, pull an orange extension cord out from the side of their home and plug it into the McAlarys’. (We asked first; they gave hearty permission. See, supra, the Westbrook Effect.)
Their two boys scamper to the backyard to meet the chickens and trampoline, and Adriel invites me into her home for the grand tour. To the left of the door are folding bunk beds for the kids; to the right is a bijou swath of kitchen counter space with a miniature stove and fridge. There is a dining table, which also serves as office, art station, and living room, and behind a kitschy sliding door, their master bedroom miraculously houses a queen-sized bed and corner closet. I flash back to our first guesthouse in Beijing.
We sit in the dining room/living room/office, and Adriel confesses, “Just a few months here and I’ve learned so much about myself. I know what I’m like when I don’t have a place to call home, how I feel out of sorts. And yet I have a liberation and freedom from the burden of those things that come from a real house. They sometimes get in the way.”
Like me, she is in her late thirties and feels misplaced. She is a fellow nomad; her travel trailer is the same as my backpack. I tell her about Kate, a fellow American mother I met in Thailand, who with her husband is taking her ten-year-old son to every continent this school year, including Antarctica. Kate also confessed that stripping away the idea of home feels like swinging midair on a trapeze with no net.
Without a foundation underneath four walls, we identify with everywhere and nowhere. We notice with razor-sharp clarity that grass is generally the same across the planet, and yet each country has its own variety of green turf, its own type of light switch, its own method for storing knives. Adriel calls Sydney home, but she perambulates with her walls every few weeks. My walls change every few weeks too. So do Kate’s. So do thousands of other earthlings, scurrying like ants across grass to movable homes, to tents and nomadic dwellings. Some of us have chosen this temporarily; others choose it indefinitely. Many don’t have a choice.