Everything and Nothing

In this post Wei Jia recalls some of her first impressions of Melbourne and explores her views on the personality of the city itself.

For me, the thing I enjoyed most about university was participating in field trips.

A ‘field trip’ is a kind of assignment that students are required to do whilst studying Urban Design at the University of Melbourne. Put simply, a field trip is an activity where you go out to visit a place and then write a report describing how you felt about the experience.

My first urban design studio was quite out there. We were asked to assume that, as a result of global warming, the sea level would rise by 6.096m over the next fifty to one hundred years, covering a huge area of Melbourne and creating a new coastline. Along this coastline, we were asked to design something. Our first step was to take a field trip in order to analyze the breadth of this new waterfront. I teamed up with two other classmates during this image collection stage.

On the first day, we cycled together from the CBD to Docklands. This was my first impression of Melbourne, a place of many high rises with glass walls here and there, the sky reflecting off the glass giving the impression of a blue saturated world, dry and almost devoid of greenery. When we arrived at Docklands, everything seemed to become compressed, merging into a singular flat scene. Here it was industrial and dusty. Here the metallic-sheen left one feeling more than a little uncomfortable. So this is Melbourne, a monster with a great collage of imagery. It is not Europe, not America, not Asia, not the Middle East, neither classic nor modern. It is nothing, but in other words, it is everything. Melbourne, much like the people who inhabit it, is a city full of stylish conflicts.

This first field trip was a tiring experience for our group. We found that it wasn’t very smart to do everything together and so we split up. Williamstown was to be my next destination, another beautiful but disastrous field trip for me. But, I will talk more about that later.

To be continued…

Something to talk about

In this post, Wei Jia talks about some of her experiences of working in Melbourne.

When I first arrived I worked in a Chinese restaurant. The wages for working in a Chinatown restaurant are pretty low, and to make matters worse the work is usually really laborious. These days I occasionally work in a Sri Lankan take away place where the wages are OK, the work is not as strenuous and the boss is not too bad. Actually, I am quite happy when I’m doing this job. It is sort of like a break from study and my real job, which is working part time at a landscape architecture company.

I feel that language is still my biggest obstacle to truly fitting in with my workmates. Also, I’m still not 100% familiar with Australian culture and that makes it really difficult to fully integrate with my work colleagues. For example, everyone at the landscape architecture company loves to go fishing, but I don’t know how, so it is really hard to find something to chat about with them. But, on the whole, I’m really pleased to have this opportunity.

Building a platform for the future

Soy Sauce talks with Wei Jia about her take on life and study in Melbourne. Wei Jia has lived here for over two years now and I have had the pleasure of meeting with her on several occasions as she was a classmate of my girlfriends at Melbourne University.

My name is Wei Jia and I come from Guangzhou. I arrived in Australia in late 2006. At the time I had just graduated from University and hadn’t any work experience. As for why I chose to come to Melbourne, to be honest it wasn’t my first choice. I was more inclined to work for a couple of years in China and then go to America but my family were more familiar with things here which made it easier I guess.

Students from China leave home to pursue advanced studies for lots of reasons but I think the three most important ones include the desire to study more things which gives them greater opportunities for the future. Immigration is also a popular reason along with dodging the pressures of sitting either the national university entrance examination or the exams for entering a graduate programme. As for those students from China who don’t come overseas, I believe their reasons would be things like a lack of funds, or they think China is fine. Many probably plan to accumulate some more work experience in China before looking for opportunities to go abroad.

On the whole I don’t really believe that Chinese overseas students are happy with the study environment in Melbourne for the simple fact that there are just too many Chinese people here!