Bizcuits | Expatriates over hemispheres

Leanda Lee

Father Christmas – as he is known in some older subcultures of my Australian home – took to the waves on a surfboard in 1977. At that time, an awareness of the religious/secular divide, the seriousness of the symbolism on Christmas stamps, and the Australia Post’s role as a custodian of our historical cultural record were completely beyond my grasp. Apparently, it was a controversial move and quite alien to the traditional nativity scene customarily depicted. It was also fun and witty, and made me, as an Australian, feel a little special.
We have blistering sun, flies, and sand between our toes to contend with as well as the heat of the kitchen – if the turkey, chicken and ham are to be delivered hot to the table with the roast potatoes and steamed plum pudding served with the mandatory brandy butter. We get to go swimming in our togs/bathers/swimmers/cossies after Christmas dinner just to cool down.  Santa riding those waves was as much a statement of a transitioning cultural identity as is cold lobster or blue marron and umpteen salads followed by pavlova for dessert as an acceptable alternative to the more solid northern hemisphere fare.
I’ve always felt that the pull to return home for Christmas is stronger for Australian and New Zealand expatriates. Granted, from Macau the ‘Antipodes’ is paradoxically closer than European and the American continent destinations that so many expatriates call home, but it’s also a matter of timing. Apart from Christmas, December and January bring the summer holidays, or rather, what’s called the Christmas Holidays. It’s the space between the end of one academic and calendar year and the next. If companies have mandatory shut down periods, it’s now. It delivers a full stop. It’s the time to breathe, to relax, sleep, gorge on good food, wine, beer and company. We reconnect with friends and family and move our bodies in surf, sand, parks, rivers and lakes. The feeling is easy: it’s Summertime.
Maintaining connection with family at “home” is a very important part of an expatriate family’s sense  of  identity  and well-being. Although home-
based family members may not completely understand what we go through in our Macau second-home lives, they help to keep us grounded, lend an ear and remind us what is normal elsewhere. Sometimes it’s easy to go native – family brings us back to our old value systems. Sometimes we lose sight of who we were – family response is a litmus test of what we stood for. Sometimes we like to tell our foreign Macau stories – family lends an incredulous ear. We need to be given sufficient time to reconnect.
Never have I heard it remarked upon, and I’ve often wondered if Macau employers realise that Oceanian expatriates get the short straw when it comes to family summer holidays that the northern hemisphere compatriots so typically enjoy. If lucky, we get a week or so to pop back to join holiday-mode families at Christmas: work and school in Macau await our return.
In the northern summer during the mass exodus from Macau when activity slows and banks empty of Euros, for those of us who go south, unless we like a skiing holiday (yes, even in Australia) and have an occasional workday lunch in the city with friends, or offer to run younger family members to and from school, there aren’t a lot of kin and kindred available to play with.
If you’ve ever wondered why your Aussie and Kiwi colleagues can be so accommodating and helpful at work during the Macau summer, it’s because it’s not ours. Ours likely includes sweaty Santa Claus’s who arrive on Country Fire Authority trucks with lollies for the kids and a view of the sea or the smell of the gum trees.