My name is Alvin Lim, I immigrated from Malaysia with my family when I was 10 years old. In terms of difficulties in speaking English, I had previously learnt English at school while in Malaysia. My family left for Melbourne during July 2010. My father had left a few months in advance in order to search for a stable job. At first, I was sad about leaving my hometown as all my cousins and relatives live there. My life would be less exciting on a day to day basis.

We left through Penang International airport and did a transfer at Singapore Changi airport. I remembered how grand and modern the Changi airport looked in comparison to my hometown. It was surreal. The 8 hour flight to Melbourne was enjoyable as there was the in flight entertainment system which had many games and movies to keep us distracted. When we arrived at Melbourne, the first thing that hit me was the cold winter air as we left the plane. The weather was extremely hard to get used to as I had acclimatised to the hot humid weather.

It was a very different experience when I saw the Melbourne CBD and I couldn’t wait to have a fresh start. For me, this provided an opportunity to start anew for my education as in my old school, there were a lot of bullies and I didn’t like my experience there. Fast forward to the first 2 months, it was my first day at school at Glendal Primary School located in the suburb of Glen Waverley. At first, my initial response was to be wary of everything as I didn’t want to be caught off-guard on anything as I didn’t know anything about the social norms and culture of Australia. I was caught off-guard, but for a completely different reason. Everyone at the school were so nice! It was nothing like I had experienced in my previous school. I made many friends at this school and it remains as one of my most precious memories today.

After a year, I had grown accustomed to the Aussie culture and lost my accent as well. Overall, I think my transition to the Melbourne life was very smooth since I didn’t have to worry about finance or any of the grown up stuff back then. However, life is Australia also has its drawbacks.

The food here is horrible. Although they say its diverse, many food borrowed from other cultures do not maintain their cultures. For example, the malaysian food we have here can be considered bland when we look at the food we have in Malaysia. Granted that the chances of food poisoning is significantly higher than Australia because of food safety standards.

In primary school, the education was a lot harsher than what we have in Australia. Physical punishments were a common occurrence. Different to the Australian curriculum, our schools in Malaysia provided other co curricular programs such as scouts and programing in primary school. We are also taught subjects like maths and science in 2 languages (Chinese and English).

In the past in Malaysia, my family as well as my extended family usually celebrate many of the holidays associated with Chinese culture such as the mid autumn festival and Chinese New Year. We would celebrate in many of our traditional methods in Malaysia such as eating lots of different food associated with the festival, the adults would be gambling with each other enjoying our time spent together. In addition to that, we would also play with fireworks. But now living in Australia, restrictions are much greater as fireworks are deemed dangerous and therefore are illegal. Gambling is also prohibited in Australia and this limits the families to come here to abandon some of our old traditions. Nowadays, we would travel to Chinatown during Chinese New Years and enjoy the parades and festival there as we didn’t have that back in Malaysia. With the abandoning of our old traditions, we embrace new ones to our lives. Now, whenever I go back to Malaysia, my mindset has changed so much that I think fireworks and gambling is a dangerous and addictive activity and never participate regardless of the pressures placed on me by my family.