We came back up to the top of the Dandenongs where the viewing deck is today. Chris first took me here two years ago during my first visit to Australia with him for Christmas. It was a bit of an overcast day when we came two years ago, but today, it was semi clear despite the threat of rain. We had a clear view of the Melbourne skyline. I looked at the place with a slightly different eye, this time seeing it as a potential wedding venue with its Secret Garden, English gardens, and 180 degree views of the city of Melbourne and the Yarra Valley. When we walked around the grounds and the reception area, I could actually imagine this place as a feasible option for our party. Even the food options seemed like they could be fitting for our multicultural menu desires.

This wedding thing is becoming more and more real each day. I can’t believe this is really happening.

We visited three potential venues today, and something seemed a bit off about all of them for us. The first one was the most naturally beautiful – it was a reception venue in the midst of the Dandenongs built to maximize the beauty of the forest surrounding it. The food menu was a bit lacking, though, and they didn’t allow for outsider caterers. The second and the third were owned by the same hospitality group. The second felt the most staged in terms of photo opportunities but had the grandest entrance and cocktail/bar area. I also loved the layout of the reception room. The third was still under renovation in many parts, but was the cheapest for a venue hire.

The idea of having a wedding in a place that is 100 percent for weddings doesn’t really sit well with me. It seems a bit trite to have a wedding at a place like that to me. I think I’d prefer a place that was a garden or a winery or something specific that also happened to host weddings and other functions; it would have a bit more character.

Today, I finally was able to meet the third of Chris’s best friends. It’s taken over 6.5 years of friendship and almost three years of us being together for this to happen. I guess it hasn’t helped that she has been living across San Diego, Singapore, and now Jakarta and has given birth to two babies since. She’s also never overlapped time with us in Melbourne. We just happened to be at the Gold Coast at the same time and met for lunch with her husband, two children, and mom.

Chris always used to say that when he would hear stories about my mother from me, he would be reminded of this friend’s mother, who had a similar background as my mother in terms of coming from a war-torn country, immigrating to a western country and raising children with those experiences framing their minds. When we met today, it was like meeting someone who actually understood not only how I felt, but also tried to empathize with my situation given she’s experienced most of this, and also tried to see things through my mother’s eyes.

The most memorable moment I had when we were chatting and getting to know each other was when I told her that my mom has repeatedly told me that I need to get married and have my first child by the age of 30. Otherwise, she would forbid me from having children period. When I have told this story to others, it’s usually received with laughs. Everyone just thinks it’s very comical and doesn’t take it seriously. No one thinks one step deeper about what a statement like that says when it’s exchanged from a mother to her daughter. But when Chris’s friend heard this, she cracked not the slightest smile. Instead, her face turned sour, and I could see fiery in her eyes. And she launched in a tirade, saying, “Doesn’t that frustrate you? Who does she or anyone else think she is trying to control your body? It’s not her body. It’s yours!” It was clear she completely understood our relationship because she had almost the same relationship with her mother.

“It’s a really sad and painful thing to know that your own mother will never really know who you are, who you truly are as a person,” she said to me. It’s not that they don’t want to know us… It’s more that they just can’t handle that we are so different than what they had envisioned and hoped for based on different cultural backgrounds and their painful life experiences. “It’s hard, but I deal with it by knowing that I will not be that way with my own kids.”

Amen.

Today, we explored the Daintree National Rainforest, which is the largest rainforest in Australia, as well as the Port Douglas area of Queensland. One of the most striking things we found today was the Four Mile Beach, which was completely empty except for us. Apparently, there was a crocodile warning, so everyone was too scared to come to the beach. We went anyway just to take photos and feel the water for a bit. The sand was scorching on our toes, and as soon as we dipped our feet into the water, the water felt nearly hot, like the temperature you’d want to take a nice, comfortable bath in. The water was far warmer than it was when we were in Maui, which already was impressively warmer than the crazy cold waters I’ve felt at any beach in California, or even at Bondi Beach.

It’s crazy to think that this is the same exact ocean that California, Hawaii, and New South Wales have, yet the water feels so different in all these places. As we walked along the beach today and enjoyed the heat of the sun and the salt water, I kept thinking about how big this world is and how endless the places to discover are. There isn’t enough time to see or do everything. We’re just little people in a ridiculously large world.

As part of our Cairns trip, we took a snorkeling cruise today to see Michaelmas Cay and Hastings Reef, two reefs that are just tiny smidgens of the absolutely enormous and striking Great Barrier Reef. I’ve always been terrified of deep ocean water; drowning is something that really scares me. I took swim lessons when I was in high school and learned to swim and tread water, but I’ve always hated the feeling of not being able to breathe through my nose, and I never quite mastered the breathing technique during the free-style stroke. Swimming under water and not at the surface also makes me very uneasy, so I figured snorkeling would be a safe choice for me to see the reef.

I was scared initially, but I realized how easy it was to snorkel and get carried away by following different fish. We saw so many different types of bright and neon colored fish of all different shades – a greater variety than I could have even imagined that went far past just the Nemo/clown fish variety I was already imagining. The coral reef itself was vibrant and of colors I only dreamt of seeing. It felt so calming and surreal to just swim and feel like I was one of them in this vast, deep sea. While snorkeling and snapping pictures with my underwater digital camera, I just felt that this was one of the best experiences in my life — to be in the middle of the ocean with my flippers just like a fish. I kept looking down to the bottom of the ocean floor and thinking, wow, I’m really swimming in the ocean where in certain parts, the depths are so far down that my naked eye can’t quite see the bottom. It made me think more about how vast and complex the world is, and how little of it I have had the chance to see in my life to date no matter what anyone thinks or says.

During this trip, Chis mentioned that all of our trips are not genuine “holidays” in that we are never really sitting back, relaxing, and just letting time slip away. We’re always on the go, with a list of things we want to see, do, and accomplish by the time we leave our destination. The closest thing to a “holiday” in this sense for us is when we come back to Melbourne and are spending time with his family and friends… or at least, it’s relaxing for him. For me, it’s a lot of need to be “always on.” It is a bit more relaxing than hiking up mountains and trying to find the next restaurant in a language we can’t understand, but it’s still not complete “zone out” time for me.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy kicking back and relaxing. It’s more that I feel like time is limited. I won’t live forever, and even if I did, I would not have enough time to see every inch of the world that I want to see. So when I am not working and am away, I want to be able to explore more, to see and experience new things that I don’t always get to do.

It’s for this reason that whenever we take trips, we rarely spend any time just lying on a beach or back stroking through our hotel’s pool. In Rio, one of the beach capitals of the world, we were only on the beach twice and spent about five seconds in the water. But this trip, we decided to spend the second half of our first day in Cairns relaxing in the water at our resort pool, which was gorgeous and mimicked a real beach with its white sand “shore” and clear water setup. It was by far the nicest hotel pool I’d ever been at. It was a great feeling to not feel like we had anything we had to rush off to or be at afterwards. I felt calm and happy, swimming on my back and feeling the sun beam down on my face and body.

I still think I would get bored if that’s all we did for a week anywhere, though.

Whenever I see Chris’s grandmothers, I always feel a tinge of sadness knowing that my own paternal grandmother didn’t get to live to see me do things like graduate from high school or college, get engaged, or even just reach a double-digit age, as she passed away when I was just nine years old. We went to visit Nana at her house today, and she talked about the blessed life she’s had – the happy childhood, the loving marriage to Appa, and the constant help and love she receives now from everyone, from her family, friends, and even neighbors. Every time we see her, she always has us do a short group prayer, where she thanks the Lord for all the blessings of her and her family’s life. This time, she asked the Lord to bless our engagement and marriage, and I could feel my eyes starting to water when she asked this of Him.

I’m not used to people being so accepting of me, of asking to bless anything I do or wish me well from a higher power. I’m honestly not sure what I ever did to be accepted to the degree I have been, or to be loved by people I don’t spend much time with, but it’s a very surreal feeling.

This is my third trip to Australia and my third time spending Christmas in Melbourne. Despite the last two trips, I realized I’d never had good aerial view of the city. I got it twice today, once at Vue de Monde with Chris and his parents, and the second time on the Melbourne Star, Melbourne’s equivalent of the London Eye. It moved far slower than I thought it would, and we probably spent about thirty minutes on it. We saw a gorgeous sunrise and great colors reflected off of the skyscrapers of Melbourne.

Being up on the Melbourne Star, I realized how much my perspective on this city has evolved since the first time. The first time I came, I was a wide-eyed American, finally in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time and seeing this great Down Under country. The second time, I was a bit jaded. I thought, well, I’ve already been here before, and I was saddened at knowing that this was the first Christmas when my brother would not be alive. I felt bits of misery on and off throughout the whole trip. This time, it’s like I am seeing it with a new eye from literally a new perspective. I’m noticing more and more the beauty of Melbourne and how livable it can be (despite the subpar public transit system). It really is like another home for me.

Chris and I went to dinner with one of his best friends and her husband tonight, and she announced to us (by not drinking) that she is eight weeks pregnant. She said that ideally, once the baby comes, she would no longer work and would be a stay-at-home mother and wife. “I just think that it’s better to have one parent home to keep an eye on the kids to see what they are doing and thinking every day,” she said. She also said she had no attachment to her job and industry, anyway.

For the longest time, because I came from a family where both parents worked, and my mother has rammed into my head that no matter how much money my future husband makes and no matter how secure his job is that I absolutely need to work and not depend on him for money (in the event he either leaves me, or tries to “control” the money in the house), I was very resistant to the idea of women continuing to stay at home and be full-time mothers and wives. It wasn’t just about my own upbringing; it’s about how hard women before me have worked to gain gender equalities in today’s society – the fact that it still hasn’t been a century since women gained the right to vote in the United States (and similar timelines in other developed, westernized nations), the fact that women on average still earn only 75-80 cents for every dollar men earn in the same professions, the fact that after getting married, women for the most part are still expected to relinquish their family names in favor of their husband’s family names and become a “Mr.’s.”

There have been moments where I have been frustrated because of my gender, particularly at work, when I have been called “difficult” or “bossy” by both men and women, in situations where I know that if I were a man doing the exact same action or using a similar tone of voice that no one would ever pass the same judgment. In these moments, I’ve thought occasionally, it would be so much easier if I just “gave up” – left the industry to take on a more traditional gender role because in that realm, I wouldn’t have any glass ceiling to try to break.

But then I think of my mother and how hard she has worked despite her lack of education to make sure that our household income included money that she made. My mother never even had proper primary school education, yet I’ve completed tertiary education at arguably one of the best colleges in the world. Despite her lack of formal education, she still found a full-time white-collar job in San Francisco and stayed there for over 26 years, while others in similar situations went to work in sewing factories or doing minimum wage jobs. I think of the freedom I have in earning my own money and never having to ask or get advice from anyone on how to use it for the things I want. I also think of my future daughter and the message I’d be sending to her if I didn’t work. I’m not trying to do anything revolutionary by wanting to continue to work, but I want to have an identity that is outside of just the labels “mother” and “wife.” I want to be seen as an intelligent woman and human being outside of domesticated duties, and I want to make sure that my daughter sees that she has every opportunity in the world available to her through my own life examples.

Once I reached college, I did think more about how the “women’s revolution” was about having choices – the choice to work or not work, and I became more and more accepting of highly educated women deciding to leave the workforce to become full time stay-at-home mothers because I can see why women would want that. In this friend’s case, she has no attachment to her job. Parents may want one parent to be fully aware of what’s going on at every millisecond of their children’s lives. Not everyone can afford hired help or have the luxury of having healthy, physically capable grandparents nearby. But I have realized in myself that I don’t think I can ever shake the initial invisible “slap” I feel every time I hear someone around my age say that she wants to be a stay-at-home mother. As hard as I try, I’ll always have to force myself to bite my tongue to not question it or say anything remotely judgmental. Women will always judge other women and oftentimes be the reasons other women fail. But I guess this is how one feels when she has very strong opinions about certain issues when she knows that gender stereotypes regarding societal roles are nowhere near dying in this lifetime.. or even in the next four.

I’m at my home away from home away from home. There’s the home I have in New York City that Chris and I share, the one that I’ve spent the most time in during the last 2.5 years. Then, there’s the one I grew up in on a hill in foggy San Francisco, the one that has a mix of both bitter, angry, and sweet memories. It’s the one I go back to and always feel conflicted about because I’m convinced there is too much negative energy that persists there, an energy that almost prevents happiness from existing.

Then, there’s my third home in the opposite hemisphere, the one that I first came to about two years ago in 2012, where Chris’s parents live and where Chris and his brother lived for their late teen years onward. It’s the home that is always decorated full of Christmas ornaments and wreaths and trimmings each December, with a big, open kitchen and lush gardens. It’s a place that feels more and more like my home each time I come back to it. And this time, it felt the warmest.