Surviving Down Under

June 18, 2008

Twelve years ago, when I was sixteen, I went away to Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane in order to study that unstable art or science, whichever it is, that goes by the name of International Development Management (IDM).

IDM.I liked the sound of it. It felt roughly formed and accessible, tactile and breathing. It opened doors in the corporeal world that were logical, quirky, arcane, and sometimes whimsical. Sex and economics lay at the bottom of it, and also the collapsing edge of elaborate amorality. It seemed to me that IDM is a kind of poetry, a way of guessing at the links between pragmatic and reaction, and furthermore, no one else except my family and closest friends knew that I was doing it. The rest thought that I was in Rouchard, France tending to the winery and the vineyards on weekends while keeping up academically in a ‘provincial’ university.

I come from a family of farmers in Davao City. My father is a retired neurologist that in his later life went full time plowing the ricefields, growing bangus fries and feeding them with algae and planktons. Mum is an anaesthesiologist who ran her own Bali-inspired wellness center while trading copra in some of her time. Growing up, my siblings and I were taught to literally plow the field not with a tractor or any machine but with a carabao. On summers while our classmates were traveling or just plainly lingering around the game arcade, my brother and I had to earn our keep for the coming school year. At one point, I felt a grave injustice was being committed against my trivial interests. All came reasonably, when I lived alone in Brisbane to study. My parents, well my Dad, was teaching us the value of painstaking labor and the pleasure of a hard-earned keep.

I lived alone for the first time in Brisbane at sixteen in a cramped apartment on a short dark street near the main campus. It was a frightening but joyous experiment. I learned how it was possible to stretch a small sum of money, over the exigencies of rent, food, clothes, books, and movies. On a daily basis, I survived on a Aus$ 30.00 budget. Each meal cost me 8.00$, and it consisted usually of a platter of pasta or some Vietnamese Pho, and of course a can of root beer. McDonald’s had a value meal that cost 5.00$, and it consisted of a large fries, a large burger and a large Coke. Ronald McDonald became my bestfriend, hence.

On my way home from school, I usually took a long walk passing through Queen Street Mall. Just right across the Moddle Café was my favorite spot. I would sit there for an hour or two, with a BigGulp from Cole’s for a brainfreeze and get drowned in the flux of dizzying individuals that passed me by. I’d get entertained with a whole bunch of eccentric individuals that hawked the mall. There were emo and gothic freaks in visually bewildering outfits, lesbian Koreans kissing publicly (a lot of them!) and the artsy-fartsy indies which lured you to toss in a dollar for a foolish street magic. At this period of my life I also found myself several afternoons a week seated in dark boxlike theaters where I drank in the dappled images and subtitles and nuanced exhortations of foreign-film makers, always, afterward, re-entering the clean sun-specked streets of Brisbane full of cheerful skepticism and surprise at where destiny had thus far delivered me.

I took up cycling and then fencing, gave up red meat, smoked small amounts of hash with a wide spectrum of friends, a few of whom I am still in touch with, and once or twice became dismayingly, bone-shakingly drunk on cheap wine. I was cheerful more often than I was sad, and was prideful about my discovery that happiness was a kind of by-product of existence and not an end in itself. Wearing flip-flops, I sat in various Brisbane coffee shops talking and being talked at and laying to rest such issues as the evils of imperialism, the menace of nuclear arms, the weight of patriarchy and the old uncharitable persistence of spiritual belief. I learned, sitting cross-legged on my bed, to play a few chords on a guitar and to sing mournfully to myself, relishing this self-image above all others. And at the end of my course, a few weeks after my twentieth birthday, I was awarded a bachelor’s degree on IDM.

I survived it all.

Francis