My presentation to James was not much of a sympathetic encounter. We were teenagers, working in a Bankstown mall. I was prone to complaining (I didn’t know what it was then, but I did know it bothered me) and I was late for work every day.
I was a terrible salesman, prone to telling customers where they could find cheaper things. But I was the darling of our entrepreneurs because I arrived on time and had a predilection for cleaning the store.
It was February 2005 and the neighborhood was still receiving for the racial defamation that had affected its community after the group rapes in Skaf on September 11 and the Bali attacks.
He had just moved to the multicultural southwest of Sydney from the more culturally homogeneous southern highlands to live with his grandparents. I had lived in “the area” all my life. Each of us was the strangest thing the other had ever encountered.
I was a Lebanese girl who had gone to a totally Lebanese school and was still in a state of culture shock a year after high school. Although my circle of friends now included some Asian friends I made in my first job, James was different: not only was he white, he was a child. And I didn’t know how to behave with the boys, because the Lebanese boys who had known me all my life saw me as a “marriage material,” to keep me safe on the shelf while they planted wild oats.
My jokes about being invisible started to go down smoothly when it became apparent that James could definitely see. What we were missing at the meeting, we made up for with the slow-burning chemistry. Within weeks, we were chatting on MSN Messenger and texting about footy results. Within months it became clear to everyone who knew us that there was nothing remotely smooth in our flirting. But we were in denial.
Until we were. The moment I found out I was in love with him was a weekday group dinner for his birthday.
Good Lebanese girls were supposed to marry good Lebanese boys and deviating from the narrative was beyond doubt Sarah Ayoub
It was a clear, warm November night and we were under a tree across the road from the Italian restaurant. I hugged him good night and felt it: that strange shake that propelled my whole being. We had hugged before, of course, when we were out of work or saying goodbye to the holidays, but that night was completely different. It was the first time I didn’t want to let go.
That hug threw a thousand fights with my parents. He threw out a hundred warnings from my cousins and friends. Good Lebanese girls were supposed to marry good Lebanese boys and deviating from the narrative was beyond doubt.
I was told I was throwing away my entire identity. Was it worth it for this guy I had only met a few months ago?
Two weeks after the hug, a horde of young Anglo-Australians came down to Cronulla beach in the hate show we have known as the Cronulla riots.
Settled in the safety of my home in west Sydney, devastated because I seemed to have lost my place in my father’s heart, but desperate to be able to have a “normal” relationship, I received phone calls from friends. What was happening on the beach was one more opportunity to warn me of an interracial relationship. James made me feel the kind of value that all teenage girls should feel with their first love, but our partner was still so in her childhood that she hardly deserved attention.
All my life I had been respectful of the rules, obedient, likely to bend to the will of another person.
But this time, I didn’t hesitate. I stood firm. And I am incredibly grateful for that strength of character more than a decade later, because it allowed my parents to see me as an adult for the first time and paved the way for greater self-confidence.
Since then, James and I have been married and traveling the world. We made memories with three lovely kids (plus a lizard and a dog).
And it was all thanks to that hug.