Compression

How the trees have grown

The shock of return. The first step into the house. How small everything is. The distances that used to haunt me. How small everything is now. The body remembers before the mind does—how the tiled floors meet the soles of my feet, the way my hand knows the doors, the drawers, the shower handles. Memory held in muscle, in the way my shoulders fold as I pass through narrow spaces.

Ellie, the neighbor, calls out and hugs me as soon as I step out of the car. Her body is sweaty; I hug her back. Recognition. More neighbors walk toward me. They recognize me, but it takes a second. "Is that Paul?" They call Baba’s colonial name. "Martin, Martin," the white man next door calls, wanting to know how Florence is. Mama, known only to white people as Florence. Their stance is stiff, arms crossed, distance maintained. Andrew’s father, the Anglicans, does not even look up. He is fixated on pulling out the foreign weeds from his lawn. His garden has not changed in the last thirty years. As if no time has passed at all.

How long have I been away? What have I forgotten about myself? Who does the remembering when others look at me? The glance of a stranger who once knew me. A shock of recognition, confusion, or maybe respect.

Out of Germany. Suddenly, I don’t feel like that kind of immigrant here. I don’t feel like someone using resources that aren’t mine. The suspicion, the necessity of constant self-justification, is suddenly gone. If anything, I’m part of the wave of Taiwanese migrants that joined the colonial project called Australia, living on land that once belonged solely to the Indigenous. Instead, I feel less connected to everything, as if I could disappear into this place and not care.