Habitus ll

At the start of the semester, I defined habitus as “the economized guide to narrowing down everything into a box.”

While I don’t find that description entirely wrong, I am amused by my grim point of view.

I describe myself as disliking writing that is “heteronormative and conforming, but my style is very cookie cutter.” I describe myself as loving vivid characters, but falling back on old troupes, and that perhaps is where my habitus as mutated the most.

My habitus has stretched and quivered, and still, there’s more room to grow.  I have traveled, but it must be blindingly obvious to some people that my roots are firmly planted in rural country, a place which I disliked writing about for those two exact reasons, the place is a land of heteronormativity and conformity. But like other writers before me, like Tim Winton, the Australian outback can be more than that, it can be whatever I want it to be. It was only limited by my imagination and self-restraint.

The most surprising thing I discovered was not shocking differences, strange practices, and alien views that clash with my own. The most shocking discovery was that the people I interviewed over this semester, who where designed to be ‘foreign’ to me, where extremely normal. These people were almost ordinary even, in a sense that, they didn’t stray far from the people I had already met in my life. They were ‘normal’. They blended in with my idea of what is consistent in a person’s nature. Even their views, which I assumed would be on the other scale to my own more liberal-leaning views due to their more conservative countries, where not dissimilar to views from Australia.

I realized that maybe through media, maybe through easier access to each other, maybe by sheer humanity or DNA, we are more familiar than we are distanced by differences.

We all fell emotions, we all have a grasp on the world around us, and what role we play in it. I feel foolish now to face what my expectations of these people and what their respective home countries would be like. I didn’t expect my HKBU partner to swear. I didn’t expect my partner from the Netherlands to have such strong opinions on social media. Afterward, it made sense to me to view them as their own person first and foremost, and their nationality as secondary. We may have used different words but in the end, we meant the same thing.

From a writing perspective, I felt pressure ease. The characters I’m writing might be from Hong Kong, or Russia, or America, but its still Hong Kong, Russia, and America in 2018, or the future. I’m still writing about people.  Naturally, I’d still need to do research to understand the nuances of particular people, but they can be and should be, painted by their personality first, not by their nationality.