Writing connects your eye and mind to perseverance, creativity and memory
Connections, likes, friends, followers and other measures are driven by quantity. Going for broke on social media is all about numbers and the assumption that bigger equals better.
Yet, is it? Surely an expectation of quality also helps us decide what to read, watch, listen to, who to talk to, and for how long? Perhaps we recognise the writer’s name or empathise with the topic or trust the link. If so, how much of the embedded thinking will we absorb and how much should we absorb?
Memory is a bugbear when it doesn’t work to our advantage, but it is hard to avoid until, in an ironic twist, we begin to freak out that we are losing it. The journey is far from inevitable, however, and we have years of remembering, of stockpiling the moments that consolidate our life.
Every time I make a connection with a person, or a past conversation or article written or edited, I am caught in the cycle of memory on which writers thrive, whether the memories make us cringe or glow with joy.
Looking for connections
I always look for links between ideas and the people I have interviewed over the years or read about or seen on some visual media or other. These connections may be fleeting, or searing. Either way, they will remind us of times that meant something to us, personally and culturally.
The summer of 1976 to a generally sun-starved Britain is now short-hand for ineffable heat and blue skies and little rain, in the years before draught was a tangible fear. I was on summer break from the London School of Economics, between second and third year, and had signed up with numerous temp agencies.
One found me a spot at a Pontins holiday camp in the south of England. I worked as a chalet maid, improving my bedmaking and cleaning skills massively under the tutelage of a matter of fact, spry woman who had done this work for years. “You’re pretty hopeless,” she said when I began but, to my delight, she later noted that I had become quite nimble and hawk-eyed.
I also spent most of my free time sunbathing on a pebble-beach and admiring how bleached my hair (recently permed on student discount) had gone. This was all well before I emigrated to factor 30 Australia and covered up. But I will never forget it as an ongoing anecdote to adapting to an unfamiliar environment, climatically and socially, and connecting with new people and subconsciously readying myself for several years of travel and work overseas.
Asking questions is a serendipity of the mind
Questions begat questions and encourage talking. At one architecture group I go to the host’s only request is that we all “speak to someone new tonight”. And we do. However short the interaction, it helps our psyche, our wellbeing, and our creative knowledge bank.
I think of it as a serendipity of the mind, started by pure chance but developed by linking back to previous conversations, people, places, the stuff of life. It is a living, breathing example of what architects call “the bump factor”; open-plan atriums and offices, with zig-zag staircases dissecting several floors, staff and managers going to and from appointments and nodding impromptu hellos.
The hope is that these will develop into collaborations and the start of start-ups. Of course, it does not always work like this. A bevy of research shows that the lack of privacy can stifle conversation between colleagues who often have to scuttle off with their mobiles when calling family or friends.
Breakout areas, meeting rooms, study rooms, even phone booths, and a scattering of high-backed, wide-sided acoustic chairs and sofas compensate but only go to show that communication is far from inevitable. It needs nurturing.
Remembering faces for classic re-meets
I am a sucker for ceramics and have a sake vial and five delicately swirling pink, purple and grey cups perched on corner shelving in my living room. They are my main forever artisan souvenirs from my time in Hong Kong.
The set has since followed me to London and then Sydney, but I had not thought about the potter in years. She had belonged to a craft group, mainly expatriate Americans and Australians, who met at Hong Kong’s Arts Centre. Almost 40 years later, idling through a craft market run by the Australian Design Centre, I spotted some bowls, plates and cups of a different hue but similar gentle, sensibility to that set.
When I found the owner of the stall, I knew she looked familiar but could not think why. Somewhere along the line we spoke about where we had lived before Sydney. Hong Kong, in the 1980s, cropped up. I realised in a flash that I had commissioned her (my one and only commission) to do the sake set. After a few more questions, she began to recognise me. It fell into place.
I sent jpgs of the vial. The final extra that convinced her it was her work was an image of the insignia on the bottom. Yes, that’s mine, she emailed, a memento of changed locations but abiding interest.
Funnily enough, a few weeks later at an art fair in Redfern, I recognised the journalist/author/academic whose room I had rented, again in Hong Kong, when she went to work as a correspondent in Taiwan. Even though her hair on this occasion was turquoise, Linda Jaivin was unmistakable. I could not resist describing the large, white-washed timber desk that she had bequeathed to me. She remembered it fondly and though it was too high for me and wrecked my shoulders and wrists, I had to admit it had gnarled character and nowadays would be heralded for its recyclability.
Naturally, coincidences like this do not happen every day, but they are so uplifting when they do.
Letting pictures trigger memories
While I realise digital outlets are cram full of travel images, it is the ones in paper versions of the weekend newspaper travel sections that resonate most with me. Talk about memory triggers. One weekend I was taken back to Berlin and the Trabie (Trabant) museum, showing those infamous metallic box-on-wheels from the communist era.
The museum also has traffic lights, from the former East Germany, portly men in red or green representing stop or go. Dresden Specs, an optometrist in Newtown (Sydney), which makes and sells glasses, and lets you bring your own frames, also has these lights, conjuring memories of Berlin’s streets, buildings, gates and granite memorials.
Another weekend, there was New York’s Grand Central Terminal, reminding me of its concourse throughways to120-plus tracks, the most efficient station signage I have ever experienced; Hong Kong’s rickety but operational trams; and Berlin’s doner kebab bars, whose bar heaters kept me warm during one unexpectedly perishing April. A few weeks later, Japan’s basement food halls, which blew me away on my first afternoon in Tokyo almost 40 years ago, cropped up, and Manchester’s Curry Mile of Indian restaurants, which were on the bus route to my parents’ home, and has fabulous food.
Reworking a story from a different angle
Stories to tell can arise in expected ways. Having background information on a person often reminds you of other people. Go with the flow. There’s almost definitely a connection. For example, an interview for a story on stakeholders (OK, it was for a project management magazine) referred to a project I had already written about for another publication. So, a design story on a leisure centre in south-west Sydney became the basis for a story on innovative tendering.
Keeping your eyes and ears open
Ask the way at bus stops, for instance, and you never know what may follow. The latest impromptu example for me was after a university event. Talking to a couple led to an unexpected overlapping of professional and personal interests and connections; not bad for a few minutes of mental alacrity and plain-old curiosity.
The trail has never been longer and more circuitous, however, than the one I innocently began for Ben Law. It has grown like topsy as his writing, broadcasting (radio and television), festival panel, speaking, and editing outlets have expanded. He covers so many up-to-the-minute topics — Chinese migrant families, growing up gay in regional Australia, discovering gay life in Asia, living in the city, diverse representation of Asians in the media, commenting on politics, society, education, and writing essays, weekly columns, scripts for groundbreaking series (think Family Law) and generally popping up, all over the place.
I was not surprised he was named as one of the 40 (aged) under 40 most influential Asian Australians. It seems a long time ago when I first heard him speak at Ashfield Library during Mardi Gras and used to say hello at the NSW Writers’ Centre, but I remember speaking to him about being a brand. “I’m happy to be boxed in as long as I am boxed into a lot of different of boxes,” he said. Well, yes that has happened.
Contacts, friends, memory, all reinforced by trust, show that if your gut says, this is familiar, it almost definitely is.
