ANGELICA G WRITES

I am what many would call a ‘halfie’, meaning that my mother is from one ethnicity and my father from another. In the past, when people asked me about my nationality, I never liked saying that I was half Armenian and half Russian because it seemed strange that you could be half an ethnicity, when ethnicity is such a complex and multifaceted concept. But that is what I told people while growing up in Australia because I didn’t want to offend either of my parents who stayed very loyal to their roots after immigrating and changing their whole lives. My father is quite a proud Armenian man, so he enrolled my brother and I into a local Armenian school during my elementary years where I didn’t ever have much trouble fitting in. Lucky for me, there I wasn’t the only ten year old girl with a dark monobrow and hairy arms. This changed drastically when I switched to a mainstream high school where I soon became known as ‘caterpillar eyebrows’ by some disagreeable teenage boys. Although painful, this was the beginning of what I like to call my quest for belonging.

Some years later I left my comfortable life in Australia for a taste of the expat life in Europe and at the age of twenty three I settled in Portugal, a country that strangely yet so nicely felt like home. Here, when people asked me where I’m from, I no longer described myself based on my parent’s ethnicities but instead as Australian. Firstly because it was too lengthy of a response to say that I was half Armenian, half Russian but raised in Australia, and also because I soon found out that people were intrigued by Australians. Perhaps because of the geographical distance from Europe, or perhaps because there aren’t that many Aussies living in Portugal nor that many portrayed in the media, compared to lets say Americans or British. I kind of liked my new cultural identity and I started trying to live out more of the Australian values I so often ignored while growing up in Australia. Isn’t it interesting how living in another country can bring that out of someone. Broadly speaking, and in my personal experience, Australians are known to be friendly, laid back and somewhat carefree. I liked my new cultural identity. I also really liked living in Portugal because I felt so comfortable here and aligned to the Portuguese culture, and so I felt like Portugal’s newly adopted child.

Less than one year after having moved here, the Covid 19 pandemic swept across the globe and I found myself having to make a tough decision – stay in Portugal, where I wasn’t yet a resident, or return to Australia, where I was a citizen and where my family were. I decided to stay put because I had my partner here and back then, many of us naively thought that this pandemic would only last a few months. Also I wasn’t ready to pack up my bags and return to Australia, I loved living in Portugal so much and had so many exciting things planned. Six months into the pandemic, things were clearly not improving and I began getting awful homesickness and worrying about the future. The uncertainty of it all was dooming on me with each passing day and I began fearing the worst – what if I never saw my family again. So in October of 2020, I booked a one way ticket to Australia for January 2021, a flight which never ended up taking me home. The airline I initially booked with was just selling flights without any consideration of Australia’s constantly changing international arrivals regulations. Australia has been widely known to be one of the ‘success cases’ in dealing with this pandemic due to it’s extremely low case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths. If you’ve been following Australian news, one way they’ve been able to achieve this is by shutting down borders very early on. Until today, the country is closed and it’s extremely difficult to get in, so difficult that even as a citizen, I haven’t been able to enter the country. The government has been helping desperate people with repatriation flights, but I haven’t been as desperate as many others are. So I’ve stayed put here in Portugal and am awaiting my new flight which should depart Portugal at the end of this month.

After three flight cancellations and being apart from my family for over two years now, I am left feeling quite discouraged, but this isn’t a story about despair. It’s true that so many Australians have described themselves as feeling ‘stuck’ abroad and abandoned by their own country, and I’ve heard so many heartbreaking stories about this. But I want to shine light on a realization that has been a profound one in my experience. Not being able to enter the place I had always called home has made me realize that perhaps I don’t belong to Australia, perhaps I have always belonged everywhere. And maybe where we are born, or where our parents are from, or even where we hold citizenship isn’t always the place we feel a sense of belonging to. I will continue to navigate the obscure labyrinth that is cultural identity and the confusing notion of belonging. But right now, belonging for me is simply sitting around a table with the people I love and feeling safe, seen and loved. There’s a beautiful quote by American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, that beautifully encapsulates what I have felt during this pandemic and actually without my knowing, long before that too. She says:

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.”

I have never felt like I belonged to my Australian identity, neither my Russian nor Armenian identities. In Portugal I am a foreigner and in Australia I am the daughter of immigrants. But I suppose most importantly, I am free.

This was written 2 weeks before my flight to Australia which was on July 29^th 2021. I am glad to say that i’m currently completing the 14-day mandatory Australian hotel quarantine.