Day 28

A common experience of having been an immigrant kid is that you don’t feel at home in the new country nor in your home country. I am no exception to this phenomenon. However this post won’t be about the sorrows of the immigrant kid. In fact, I bring good news! Today, I realised that a particular place makes New Zealand feel like home. And that is malls! Quintessential New Zealand malls you can find in any reasonably-sized cities.

I should have figured. I grew up going to malls with my mum from the very beginning of my life here in New Zealand. When I grew a little older, my friends and I always hung out at the mall, especially after the Christchurch earthquakes which destroyed the city centre. I simply have so many good memories in malls. Basically, a huge part of my childhood and the majority of my late teen years can be said to have happened at the mall near where I used to live in Christchurch.

I have been working at a pharmacy in a large mall for the past few days. And as I walked into the mall for a shift, I felt a strange, warm, fuzzy feeling despite the fact that I’m going to work. Usually, I’d feel a subtle sense of dread and gloom. But I was unusually feeling comforted and a little giddy. It was only on my second shift today that I realised it was the mall itself that was making me feel this way. The familiarity and the positive memories with friends and family associated with malls were making me feel a little better about going to work.

The pleasant familiarity of the usual mall brands, the food courts, the blinding fluorescent lights, the not too flash, not too extravagant, just your humble, ordinary suburban mall was what my heart welcomed.

I took note of what looked like two sisters and their mum in the mall toilet. The girls looked like they were having so much fun even while doing something so ordinary and what I, (an exhausted heartless and soulless working person in her now late twenties, so I might be wrong on this and the kids, right) consider unremarkable which was hand-washing and then drying. The mum was asking the girls if they used soap. They said yes but the mum glanced at them skeptically. So I said to her “They did! I saw!”. and then she chuckled a little and said thank you and walked off. It was a late-night shift, and I was drained, but my heart warmed a little. Why? Because I was reminded of when I was 9, or 10, me, my brother and my mum, having just arrived in New Zealand, not yet in school, not much to do, walking over to the mall and spending what felt like the entire day there. We were them. I saw us in them today.

I miss those times. I miss those times very much. So, malls it is! I finally recognised a part of New Zealand that is home to me. It’s not fancy, not some epic adventure, so ordinary and perhaps unremarkable, just as I consider hand-washing to be. But no, it’s not actually. The effect those memories have on me, even to this day as I walk through the buzz of the mall, is very powerful, and I believe it will last a long time, if not a lifetime. So there is nothing ordinary and unremarkable about that. It is unforgettable. I now wonder whether I am forming those kinds of memories as I live through my twenties. I hope I don’t look back and feel nothing or wish to forget. I hope I feel something about this period I am going through now.

I’m working hard, and I dare say strategically, weighing up different options to optimise a few factors that I need to maximise in my life right now. The more responsibility I take for my own life, the more unstable it feels, but more free at the same time. I feel powerful when I feel free. Stability that comes at the expense of freedom kills my soul.

Anyways, malls, I love malls still. I have one more shift left at the mall pharmacy tomorrow. I’ll try to savour the atmosphere as best as I can tomorrow. My extraordinary ordinary mall.