The Do-over

About a year ago, my parents visited us in Sydney for the second time, to meet Chompy*. On their third day, I mentioned to my dad that I needed to go to the laundromat.

“The laundromat? Why?”

At this point, my dad had not yet seen the tiny, off-brand washing machine and broken dryer in the basement. But I described both to him as such and explained that it would take forever to wash all our bedding.

“Who cares?” he said. “Just do more loads.”

I gave him a tired look. Actually, it didn’t matter what kind of look I gave. I just looked tired.

“Bah, I have a three-year old and a new baby. We’re now entering Sydney’s rainy season, so the clothes take forever to dry if you hang them. I don’t have time to be doing multiple loads of laundry.”

My father snorted. “Then maybe you shouldn’t have moved to a place where things don’t work and it rains all the time.”

I rolled my eyes, but his response was entirely expected. My father thinks Orange County, California is, in terms of quality of life, the pinnacle of not just American living, but world-class.

—

When we lived in New York, my parents visited twice in five years. If Tom and I hadn’t also gotten married in New York, I doubt my parents would have visited that second time. For their first visit, we took them to some of our favorite restaurants only for them to complain about how loud it was, how small and expensive the portions were, and how crowded the streets were**. They thought the subway was too dirty*** and the cabs too old.

At the time I lived in a fifth floor walkup, a small but brightly-lit studio, for which my parents generously paid $1850 a month. When they sat on my Target “couch” less than a foot away from my bed, I could see the puzzlement on their faces. How could $1850 a month mean so little square footage and so many stairs? How could I be so happy in a place that had not only, a decade before, made me extremely unhappy, but was also was Orange County’s counterpoint in every conceivable way?

Sure, there was Tom who was clean cut and employed, but wasn’t New York filled with much richer and more accomplished men? And really, Betty. Walking up and down five steep flights multiple times a day?

“I’m too old for this,” my dad said, arriving at the top of the stairs only to discover his daughter lived in a shoebox. He almost never concedes that he’s old.

“It’s perfect for exactly one person,” my mom said, trying to be optimistic.

When my father came out of the bathroom he remarked on its fatal flaw: “You can’t poop without banging your head on the towel rod.”

This was true, but I personally found it charming.

We took them around the city. At one point we walked in front of a Crate and Barrel, and my dad took a photo of it.

“Why in the world are you taking a picture of that? You have those in California.”

“Exactly,” he said. “We have everything in California.”

—

Among the many aggravating insights that parenting presents to you, perhaps one of the most painful is when you realize that your kid doesn’t share your taste, or worse, your lifestyle values.

A mild example of this is that Artie, at age four, is still absolutely in love with the lazily animated “contemptible trash” that is Paw Patrol. If there’s an exposure, he will spend literally every breath that he’s not using to ask for a snack or sleeping to shout “Rescue! Rescue! Ryder needs us!” and rattle off all the pups’ names at the top of his lungs until one or both of us shout at him to “Shut up Artie, Jesus Christ!”

A more serious pain is when your kid, via geographical preference, turns her back on the pleasant childhood and early adulthood you provided.

This existence came tucked away in a leafy, secluded pocket of Orange County, in a spacious ranch-style house complete with pool and view, set back behind a long expanse of manicured lawn and flowerbeds that sloped gently down towards the smooth road of a quiet cul-de-sac. No potholes here.

There were good schools filled with happy kids. Cousins, grandparents and family friends lived nearby (though in California this meant 20-40 minute drives). There were huge family seafood banquets at Sam Woo’s in Irvine and “three-course” steak dinners at Black Angus for $19.99 (if presenting a coupon).

There were weekly trips to Costco in my father’s rumbling SUV and yearly ski trips to Mammoth with the cousins. There was a lot of hanging out at my and my friend’s houses, around kitchen islands snacking on Costco snacks, or in our bedrooms surrounded by posters of various boybands and teen crushes (“Fight Club” was a poster in my room for a long time. I was so cool).

We ate ice cream out of tubs, studied together, and watched a lot of Total Request Live, marvelling at Chris Brown’s dance moves when he was young and fresh and not yet abusive.

There was badminton and Chinese school and, when I could finally drive, many hours spent at various local cineplexes with girlfriends who were just as enthusiastic as I was about the excitement movies like Harry Potter and 28 Days Later brought us in our otherwise un-turbulent lives. Afterwards, we’d often sit eating frozen yogurt in tables that overlooked the parking lots of elevated strip malls with golden-west color schemes, looking ahead to a future I was certain would take me far, far away from this childhood paradise. Even as I write this I’m looking back on it all through the red-orange haze of a California dusk.

In all honesty, I have never thought that my childhood was anything but wonderful. Sure my mom was occasionally scary and my dad was and still can be an enraging person to talk to. I had periods of hating school – turbulence was basically wondering if everyone else was going to Harvard – and many horrible haircuts that made my social life harder than necessary, but when I think about growing up, now armed with hindsight and had kids (and be sleep deprived for nearly four years straight), the negatives of my childhood take a backseat to the overall feeling that life was good, even if in my most angsty adolescent moments it didn’t seem that way.

I had great friends, good teachers, a large loving family. I had the simple yet immense privilege of optimism, the very specific type that can only come from growing up in such a bubble. I never felt trapped, only impatient to leave and do my own thing.

I wanted to get away not because I hated it, but because I knew I could always go back. It was the most secure base from which I could explore the world. And really, I should be so lucky to be able give my kids the same thing.

—-

When we first announced that we were moving to Sydney, my dad was sixty-nine, about to turn seventy. We made the move just after his actual birthday and since then, I’ve replayed in my head the conversations we had leading up to our departure with a mixture of guilt and amusement.

“When uncle Louis turned seventy your cousin Andrew moved from San Francisco to be closer to him,” my father had said. “I’m turning seventy and my daughter is moving to Australia.”

A little over a year later, we had Artie. I was still unsure about Sydney. Aside from a couple we already knew, I had yet to make any friends. But during our early days here, it didn’t seem to matter: in addition to being new parents, we hosted a steady clip of visitors, my parents included.

They visited Sydney for the first time about a month after Artie was born, unfortunately in the midst of some of Australia’s worst bushfires. Each day the sky was an apocalyptic blend of red and orange dimmed only by the ash of millions of burning eucalypts. We mostly stayed inside, with four air filters running at top strength. When the skies finally cleared a bit, we took my parents to our favorite beach, Coogee, where my dad stopped in front of a seagull. He zoomed in and took its photo.

“Why the heck are you taking a picture of a seagull, Bah? They’re in California too you know.”

“I know,” he said. “We have everything in California.”

—

If I pause and consider his and my mother’s life trajectory, you’d expect them – my father most of all – to understand. After all, he left his father and brothers in Taipei to start his own family and business in the U.S., at a much younger age than Tom and I are now.

But even for most people today, their motivations made more sense. Back then America was seen without question as a land of more opportunities than there were in Taiwan. Especially for a property developer. The air was cleaner and with my brother’s asthma, leaving the smoggy basin of Taipei for the more dissipated smog that hovers over the suburbs of Southern California seemed like a no-brainer. Besides, anyone in Taiwan who wanted the best for their kids planned to send them to the States for college anyway. Why not give his own children a head start?

My mother grew up poor in Taipei, and leaving Taiwan was not something she thought was in the cards for her, never mind America, where it seemed only the most competitively educated people went.

“I didn’t even dream about it,” my mother said, it was so out of reach. She didn’t do particularly well in school and besides, “We were children who got only a whole egg and an orange once a year on our birthdays.”

They would probably have understood more if we moved to Sydney because Tom or I got the job opportunity of a lifetime, or if Tom had grown up in Australia. But we both left good jobs and close friends in New York and moved without jobs lined up simply because we both agreed it would be pretty cool. So my parents were understandably baffled. Why not California? Or Virginia, even where Tom’s family was?

They were, all in all, so utterly happy with how their lives in Southern California turned out that it was inconceivable to them that one of their children might want something different. But it’s also because of them – Tom has his parents to thank for this as well – that these things even seemed possible, or maybe inevitable.

Five years later my children and I are Australian citizens. And even though we are planning to return to the States sometime this year, we still don’t know where we will be in the next five, ten, or fifteen years. There’s no point planning so far. Staying put in the OC is entirely possible, but so is returning to Australia. So is exploring elsewhere.

Whatever we do, wherever we go, Tom and I are presenting our kids with the possibility that they can do the same. The world is wide and wonderful and I am bracing myself for them to one day up and leave us, for life in a faraway city or country that’s better in some ways, worse in others, simply because they’re curious and they can. It’s the risk we parents run for being who we are, for living how we want.

—

In the end, it was my father who accompanied me to the laundromat. We left my mom at home with the baby, and I walked with my dad to the shiny, newly-opened self-serve laundromat on Bourke St. aptly called “Foam.”

“Isn’t it nice?” I said, as we walked in.

“It’s nicer to just have a laundry room at home with a working dryer, like we do in California.”

I sighed because I agreed. I had spent my fair share of hours at a laundromat in Hell’s Kitchen during our time in New York, and dreamed about the day Tom and I would have in-unit washer/dryer. When we moved into our first Sydney rental, I was ecstatic that for the first time ever, I could pick out a washing machine of our very own. But we had to move and give up our washer and dryer for worse ones at the new place.

“I never thought I’d still be going to a laundromat at thirty-six,” I said.

My dad shifted the giant blue Ikea bag higher up on his shoulder. He had insisted on carrying the bag for me, even though none of the laundry was his. He looked around for a free machine. “I never thought I’d be hauling my daughter’s dirty clothes to a laundromat at seventy-four,” he said. “In Australia.”

We had a good laugh. “You can write about this,” my dad said.

I nodded because my dad was right. I could.

*The unfortunate nickname of our second child whose real name is Andrew.

**The streets are pretty dirty, though you see less trash in the streets of OC because you tend to be driving right past it.

***The subway is also very dirty. Though at that point I had yet to see someone shitting on the platform, and I’m glad my parents hadn’t either.