Room For A Stranger by Melanie Cheng
Room For A Stranger (2019) is the first novel by award-winning Australian author, Melanie Cheng. It follows hot on the heels of her popular short story collection Australia Day from 2017. It charts the “win-win” scenario of Meg and Andy joining a home-share program where Meg, a retired white Australian, takes in Andy, a Chinese university student who is looking for a way to reduce his living costs in Melbourne. As part of the arrangement, Andy must help Meg with ten hours a week of chores and housework. It’s a deal that shouldn’t involve too much drama.
Cheng uses the coming together of these two characters to go deep into two distinct narratives, often relegated to the periphery of our social communities. She creates two very authentic characters, each with their particular concerns and anxieties, whose lives end up weaved together in small yet pronounced ways.
Meg, now in her seventies, has forfeited much in life to care for her family and has always lived in her family home. Now the only surviving member, she has a handful of friends and an African Grey parrot named Atticus for company. Through Meg, Cheng offers us more in-depth insights on what it means to look back on life and realise what’s important:
“Looking back now, Meg wished she had talked to people more – not small talk but proper conversations. Discussions about life and death and God and the universe. Instead, she’s spent her entire life doing what everyone else seemed to be doing – what she and Helen had, in turn, spent years teaching Atticus to do. Talking without really saying anything.”
Andy, conversely, is pursuing a pathway dominated by family expectations. He is a struggling 21-year-old biomedicine student, whose parents live a troubled life at home in Hong Kong. Andy is trying to create a life in Australia that will ultimately see him support them but the challenges of fitting in, meeting his study demands, and being “seen” for who he really wants to be, begin to lead him down an unintentionally destructive path.
Australia-side, he has his aunt, who is married to a white Australian with two small children. While she is understanding, she is also facing her own challenges of fitting into the life she has made in Western society. Cheng shows us the complex expectations of women living in this intersection of society, quietly highlighting the cultural divide that can exist within a home.
The casual racism that exists across many Australian communities isn’t something Cheng turns a blind eye to: she covers it with admirable subtlety. In one short scene, she reveals how often racism is felt to be a routine, and often unremarkable, sting to those who are not at its receiving end. As Andy and Meg take the tram home after sharing a meal in a Chinese restaurant (an adorable scene if ever there was one), a fellow passenger hurls racist insults at a group of Chinese students, unsettling everyone on board. When the passenger in question exits the tram, everyone continues on their journey, other passengers alighting and exiting; the experience is quickly washed over. Except, of course, for the students:
“Only the Chinese students remained shaken – their heads hanging, their shoulders collapsed, their chests caving inwards. Meg knew that look… the look of someone willing the earth to open up and swallow them whole.”
An interesting theme Cheng covers is the myriad ways we feel guilt and responsibility in relation to our families. Andy is wracked with anxiety and guilt over his home life and the pressure of studying. He is pursuing his studies far from home in a degree he has very little interest in because it is the “right” thing to do by his family. He is constantly pulled between the life he wants and the life his father tells him he needs.
Meg is also carrying around the burden of guilt from an incident in her childhood. An accident left her sister wheelchair-bound for her entire life and led to Meg relinquishing a full life of her own to care for her. Both characters keep their battles bottled up inside, the real tragedy being that neither of them is responsible for the events they had no control over. There’s a suggestion that if they confided in each other, we know what comfort it might bring them both.
Despite the vastness of the cultural and generational gap between our two main protagonists, they slowly build a bond that sees a knowing connection develop. The deep sense of loneliness that can grow in those who are often invisible in our societies is covered with heart and empathy.
I loved Cheng’s easy prose, and the subtle, fast pace of the story, which kept me engaged and invested in the plights of both Meg and Andy - both characters are well fleshed out. It is a read I found both moving and thought-provoking: a strong testimony to the shared humanity we all have within us.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
