Last Saturday morning, when I was hanging the washings up outside, I heard someone saying “hello” to me. I looked away from my laundry basket and saw an Asian lady coming up and before I decided that she could possibly be a Chinese, she started to talk to me in Mandarin, “ni shi zhongguo ren ma”? I nodded and instantly realised what was going on here—someone from the same background was approaching me and wanted to make friend with me.

I was thrilled, as normally we don’t see many Chinese in this town. Queanbeyan is not a place where can attract lots of Chinese. As far as I am aware of, there are only no more than 70 Chinese people living in Queanbeyan. The stat of poor 0.2% of Chinese population makes the chance of coming across a Chinese in this town a bit slim.

Then we had a chat outside. She told me she’s a new tenant of our next door neighbour John, a strange artist, who doesn’t own a car (very unusual in this country) but owns a big studio table where he paints and makes different sort of craft things in his place. John moved in probably 2 years ago after Michael left. My husband gave him a hand on the day he moved the stuff in, but since then, the neighbourhood relationship between us and John has never been warm.

John had never complained, neither had he friendly greeted us when we bumped each other off the street. I just feel awkward to see things turning out like that, even though there has never been any actual dispute between us and John. Sometimes I feel that deadly silence could be worse than a loud argument. We guessed that probably because we have been so noisy that had pissed our artistic neighbour hell out of that.

The new meeting-up with this Chinese lady, further proved the reason why John didn’t want to talk to us. At the first night when the lady moved in, she heard us talking in Beijing dialect coming through the wall, so she asked John if we were Chinese. John said “yes, very nice people but a bit of noisy” ….Well, this was it…..our guess was right. We should be shameful for what we have done and especially my husband, he should be responsible for most of the consequence of our neighbourhood relationship

So, we have a new neighbour, who came from Brisbane and has been there for more than 10 years. She works across the road in an arcade of QBN main road, right opposite to where our office is located. She was brought up in Beijing, and guess what, she was from Haidian District…or more detailed, Bei Hang. She graduated from Tsinghua U and she had been teaching in Universities for many years. She has a 21 yo daughter who speaks Authentic Aussie dialect and play the piano. I couldn’t be more thrilled. But more importantly, she cleans the house, cooks Chinese cuisine diligently and seems going to visits us very often. I already heard her vacuuming on last Sunday morning and burnt some food this evening.

She came in then the era of the old cold war is over. The new balance needs to be re-established and will be established quickly anyway. We are already considering organising a BBQ lunch or beer drinks to catch up with John and our new neighbour one day to at least say “sorry” to our poor artist.