(You can also listen to this story in the link above)
I was in Woolworths late last night. I picked up a few items for today’s breakfast and stood absentmindedly beside the conveyor belt. My mind is a conveyor belt, I thought wearily. I just have to put more whole foods on it - and avoid the confectionery aisle, I proposed to myself.
For some reason, the green badge pinned to the collar of the cashier woman caught my eye. It identified her as ‘Chodn’.
She was in her mid-50s and wore a relentlessly chirpy smile for that time of the day.
I asked her how to pronounce her name, to which she looked down at her badge and tapped it disapprovingly. She explained to me that her name was in fact, ‘Choden’ - the Tibetan word for “devotee” - but management had forgotten the ‘e’ when the badge went to print.
She didn’t mind though.
Having fled Tibet, she felt lucky to have escaped when she did, even if it meant settling in a country that couldn’t pronounce her name.
As a young 23-year-old refugee, she worked her way through northern India, the Philippines, and Fiji - eventually getting an immigrant visa into Australia just over 30 years ago.
I asked her the same question I always ask fellow threshold dwellers, which was whether she missed home. She replied with the words; “Every day.” Her parents, aunties, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters were all still there, and it was impossible to keep in touch with them because of the communist-enforced media blackout.
Her eye caught the big supermarket clock above me as we were chatting and she suddenly placed the ‘closed’ sign at the end of the belt and locked the till in a hurry. I thanked her for her story and grabbed my bags.
On the way out, she ran passed me and called out to one of her colleagues. She explained to her co-worker that she was late and would not have time for tea tonight - that she would be staying longer at her community center art class.
Her rush wasn’t so much about her lateness but more about her excitement. Because tonight they were drawing a live, nude, male model, and she was very eager to get a good spot.
…
We all feel like we’re missing something.
Sometimes it’s the ‘e’ in our name that someone else forgot - and we just have to live with it.
