Divorce

The first time I was in the Sydney Airport – Kingsford Smith – I was just a little girl holding my papa’s hand, a new and daunting but exciting life about to unfold in this not-the-capital city, huge and sophisticated beyond my comprehension.

Papa was austere-looking and tall for a Korean and you could imagine him dressed in green brocade robes and wearing a tall black hat in some medieval court in Hanyang and ordering peasants to be beheaded, but he held my hand with great love and kindness and solicitude. Our farthest ancestor was a carp – that is why we never eat fish and always kept goldfish, mineral in their beauty, in a crystal tank at the residence.

When, in later years, I told people that I grew up during my youngest years in Papua New Guinea they all envisaged squalor and fear and nightly machete murders but the one impression from those years is a glowing image of a great, green space dripping with water and sunlight and the iridescent unbelievable of flashing birds of paradise and my own sweet face lifted enraptured.

‘Rex’, when he appeared all those years later, was more like a bower bird which collects things – businesses, wives – and hangs them around its nest, though I mistook his plumage for something closer to heaven.

Even now, two weeks later, our wedding seems surreal – the thousand guests on the evening ship on Sydney Harbour, the lights, the crystal, the ringing laughter.

A honeymoon in New Zealand seemed eccentric – sheep and hobbits are all very well but not for me – and when, apparently casually but, in the cruel light of hindsight, as he had always intended to do, he suggested that we would make our home in that dreary country – it was then that the illusion revealed itself.

So – full circle: Sydney Airport and a new life to create.



Dhiraja