I am writing from another country, far away; I no longer live in Australia. Meaghan Morris is partly responsible for this. Let me explain.
At the end of 2011, I found myself reading the transcript of a long interview with Meaghan conducted by a Melbourne-based researcher, Lauren Bliss. In this discussion, Meaghan comments on the move, in the course of her professional life, to Hong Kong:
What I really wanted to do was what lots of students from Asia had been doing for decades, which is go and just live an everyday life in another country, have a job, and not go and study the society there as an academic specialty. Just go and know what it’s like to live as a foreigner working in a Chinese society.1
For many reasons, my life at that time had reached a kind of dead end; I felt that Australia had nothing more to offer me. Yet the thought of relocating elsewhere had never really occurred to me, or perhaps I had merely been successful in keeping that thought at bay.
Unfamiliar rhythms and the micro-politics of late-modernity: An ethnography of global Hong Kong
