No Foreign Lands

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” — Robert Louis Stevenson¹

It took me a long time to name the feeling that had lingered in my heart since I arrived in Sydney: grief.

I remember the first time I watched a queer theatre performance: Queer Revue at USYD. I didn’t know if there were any other queer Asian international students in the audience. That kind of uncertainty is something I’ve grown used to over the years. I watched silently while the crowd laughed, failing to catch the context of their punchlines. When the performers stripped down, the audience cheered and broke into applause. For a moment, that sound, the clapping, my own heartbeat, was all I could hear. Afterwards, a middle-aged white man next to me asked if I’d enjoyed the show. I smiled and told him, “Yes.” Why not? I asked myself.

Then I walked out of the theatre with the crowd, who were laughing, chatting, some whispering quietly to their friends. I crossed King Street, where the sounds of bars in Newtown drifted behind the pulse of passing cars. I walked slowly through Victoria Park. The moon was nearly full that night. Everything shone faintly under its light. That’s when tears came to my eyes. I thought of my peers in China, how they would probably never have the chance to perform a queer revue like this on a university campus, to tell jokes we all understand. There was a university in my home city, just miles from my high school, that used to be a centre for LGBTQ advocacy. Queer societies existed there before 2016.² Once, I met a graduate student who told me he had chosen that university for his postgraduate study because he’d read their student publication and been deeply moved. “But now it’s all gone,” he said, with bitter sarcasm in his voice. “You know, it’s all written in another style now.” I know what that style is: a style where people like us no longer have a place.

When I first met my friend Leon, I asked how he felt about Mardi Gras. He paused for a moment, then said, “It feels like something that is so irrelevant to us, a history we never took part in, and yet we’re somehow here, in this place, at this time.” That feeling of displacement, or whatever one might call it, can strike me at any moment. Sometimes it comes when I walk beneath the bright summer sun, or right in the middle of a conversation at the pub, or as I sit in a cinema watching people slowly leave after the credits roll. My time here feels borrowed, as if it could be taken back by someone, or something, at any moment. Even the past itself doesn’t feel stable. That realisation leaves me in an almost permanent state of anticipatory grief.

Both locals and migrants might find it tempting to frame migration as a kind of “liberation”. Once, a colleague, herself a migrant, asked during a work lunch if I regretted coming to Australia, having had to stay for over three years without returning home because of the shutdown policy. I didn’t really hesitate to reply: “No.” In my mind were the shadows of wire bars affixed atop the walls surrounding my friend’s university campus in China. And the silent bodies. My friend once told me that a student in the dorm across from hers had jumped during lockdown. And those silenced in jail, some of whom we may never know for certain whether they’ve been released. For a brief second, my mind was soaked in that silence. Then I heard my colleague respond, with what could possibly be called a smile, and with a kind of certainty in her voice, “It’s more free here, isn’t it?” The waiter arrived with our salads and pasta. My fork struck the plate with a brittle sound. Again, I heard my own voice, “Yes, it definitely is.”

But the word liberation fails to carry the weight of my experience. As much as I want to frame my journey as one of seeking freedom, I cannot say I left for it. I left my home city at eighteen, out of fear, disillusionment, and perhaps a quiet sense of despair. I carried only a vague hope that I might find belonging in another city, another country, a foreign land. It felt more like exile than pursuit. I even made a promise to my eighteen-year-old self that I would never return. And even here, what I live carries a complexity the word freedom cannot hold.

I went to Mardi Gras that year, sometime after that talk with my friend Leon. On the train to Central, the carriages were packed with cheerful queers, mostly white. I stayed in a beer pub to watch the parade. At one point, I asked the owner if I could bring a chair outside for a better view; he refused. Another group of Asians asked too, and he refused them as well. Then two white women made the same request, and that was when he finally agreed. Maybe he was just tired of people asking, I tried to tell myself. But was he, really? Later that night, as the parade crowd made their way back to Central, migrant shift workers boarded trains heading in the opposite direction. They were the ones who would clean up the mess left behind.

My friend Jessy told me that gay and lesbian migrants they knew often waited longer for partner visas than straight couples. They also had their wrist scars inspected during a visa health check and, ironically, avoided a follow-up psychiatric evaluation afterwards because lockdown rules in China made in-person appointments impossible. Another friend, Leah, who was working at a refugee legal centre, told me how queer people seeking asylum on the grounds of criminalised homosexuality in their home countries often had to endure invasive scrutiny of their sex lives.³ During a university project, staff from ACON visited and spoke about how migrants living with HIV can face a difficult and uncertain path when applying for residency. Even my psychologist, when she suspected I might have ADHD, advised me to first check whether a formal diagnosis could affect future skilled migration applications.

What I didn’t say to my colleague that day is that freedom on this land has limits. It has boundaries, just as the nation-state has borders. What is freedom, really, for someone like me? As Agamben⁴ once put it, “the separation between humanitarianism and politics we are experiencing today is the extreme form of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen.” One of the deepest ironies I’ve found in this land of freedom is that migration law is exempt from anti-discrimination laws.⁵ Here, freedom often feels more like a gesture than a guarantee for a temporary queer Asian migrant, someone foreign, someone marked as an alien. Freedom becomes something awarded only after the right number of points is earned on a migration visa. Sometimes, it essentially demands that one unbecomes queer⁶: to become employable, fluent in English, not disabled. To be young. Straight. Healthy.

During my first two years in Sydney, I often wandered around Darling Harbour, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. We sat together on the waterfront platform, watching ferries come and go. There were many long conversations between us: about politics back home, about corruption, war, and nationalism, some of which I still remember. Others, especially the drunken ones, I’ve forgotten. Sometimes we talked about trauma, and the slow, uncertain work of discovering who we are. Sometimes we cursed Peter Dutton and the Sydney trains. There was laughter. And there were silences, too.

Later, I moved to another part of the city and visited Darling Harbour less often. The last time I went, a friend asked, “Can you see who you’ll become ten years from now?” “I don’t know,” I said. “If you end up as a portfolio manager living on the North Shore,⁷” he joked, “I’ll kill you.” My voice came out just as dry: “I would’ve killed myself long before that.” The breeze felt endless that night, the cool scent of seawater trailing through the air. Above us, the sky was thick with stars. Seagulls circled low over the harbour. A ferry passed, echoing with distant voices. I looked up, trying to find the North Star, only to realise it wouldn’t be there.