By Ri Guang, Vision Times
On Christmas morning, 1989, I stepped off a crowded flight into Melbourne feeling exhausted, disoriented, and thousands of miles from everything I knew. I had narrowly missed the visa window before the Tiananmen crackdown, but became one of the first to receive a student visa after Australia’s consulate resumed processing in its aftermath.
From the plane window, I watched dawn break over a city of orderly streets and neat houses, sunlight glinting off swimming pools I didn’t yet recognize. I knew almost nothing about Australia; my geography textbook had devoted less than half a page to it, describing only an “agricultural and mining nation.” In my mind, shaped by China’s own rural poverty, that phrase meant one thing: Hardship.
At customs, my suitcase sprang open, spilling rolls of toilet paper across the counter. Family friends had warned that everything in Australia was expensive, so my relatives had stuffed my bags with what little they could afford. Outside the airport, the heat and impossibly blue sky hit me like something from another planet, nothing like the smog-grey skies of my native Guangzhou.
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Australia was combating a recession when waves of penniless Chinese students began arriving in search of new opportunities. I walked from shop to shop with nothing but a bottle of water and two slices of bread, asking in broken English: “Are you hiring?” Rejection after rejection, I was faced with nothing but closed doors. I began questioning: Am I just another version of the migrant laborers I’d once looked down on in Guangzhou?
Still, I refused to go back home. “I will never turn back,” I told myself. “Even if I die, I’ll die in a foreign land.” It wasn’t that I didn’t love my country; I had simply never felt loved by it. My parents had been labeled rightists; I was born a “class enemy’s offspring,” my childhood spent in a dark, foul-smelling warehouse where my parents worked, watching them paraded through the streets with placards reading “counter-revolutionary.”
Two days into the new year, a factory hired me for the afternoon shift. I was paid the same wage as white Australian workers, with the same leave and entitlements. For the first time, I understood what it meant to be “equal under the law.”
In November 1993, Australia granted permanent residency to Chinese nationals who had arrived before June 4, 1989. In 1996, that protection extended to students who arrived after. An estimated 200,000 Chinese students and their families gained residency this way, and I was among them.
A new sense of purpose
Now, 35 years later, I hold a master’s degree funded through Australia’s HECS loan program, a career as an accountant, and children who grew up in public schools and graduated university. My elderly parents were welcomed here too. When my father was dying of cancer, he was treated in hospital without paying a cent—a far cry from the struggling migrant laborers sleeping in Guangzhou’s train station.
Australia isn’t free of prejudice, but its laws, institutions, and free press have largely kept bias from curdling into harm. Here, I found dignity as a person, and I’ve tried to repay it by voting faithfully, filing my taxes honestly, and believing in a system where public money serves the public, not the powerful.
For years, my only tether to Chinese culture was the free Chinese-language newspaper I picked up weekly. After the pandemic thinned Melbourne’s Chinese press to a single surviving title: Vision Times, founded in 2006 was the last remaining publisher. I found myself drawn to its voice: Unsentimental, unafraid, and unbiased.
In 2024, an essay competition notice caught my eye. With my mother gone and my children grown, I finally had time of my own. Writing in a mix of pinyin, English, and half-remembered characters, I produced my first essay in over three decades, and it was accepted. Two more pieces then followed. Seeing my name alongside writers I admired, it felt like a homecoming.
A second exile
At a community gathering, a well-connected Communist Party member warned me: “Vision Times is an unpatriotic, reactionary paper. Writing for them will get you blacklisted.” I replied with, “This is Australia, a country of free speech. I haven’t said anything bad about China. There’s no reason to blacklist me.”
Later, friends encouraged me to apply to a prominent Chinese-Australian writers’ association. But my application, two published works as required, went unanswered. When I called, a polite voice explained: “Your work was published in a media outlet with political leanings. We don’t accept applicants with political inclinations, or who are unpatriotic.”
I hung up in stunned silence. The label “unpatriotic,” it struck me, had been placed on me not in China, but in Australia, and even more shockingly, by an organization that likely accepted local government funding while acting as another country’s mouthpiece. That sleepless night, I asked myself why a meaningless rejection could wound so deeply. The answer surfaced slowly: Because I was once my homeland’s discarded child, and now its proxy had rejected me again.
But then came a clarifying thought: A nation is not the same as the regime that rules it. My childhood suffering came not from “China” the country, but from the political power that once held it hostage. And for the people so eager to police my loyalty from Australian soil, living on its freedoms and public resources, weren’t they actually the ones being disloyal to the nation that had taken them in?
I’ve lived on two sides of the world now: One heavy with old pain, and another that never asked where I came from. Australia didn’t just give me somewhere to live. It gave me somewhere to stand. Now, with Vision Times’ 20th anniversary , I open my laptop once more, letting the words come as they will — unguarded, at last.
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