They sympathized with us up till our engagement in a point of view which made us reoriented and then they treated us as though we were invisible. Tonight as we walk around Chinatown I wonder what had been the attraction when our differences now seem so clear.

Not so much in the normal sense of clear, just more complicated when our new engagement more than partly hinged on the attraction between the two of us. I feel reoriented by an awareness of a new Sydney, look at Chinatown. We woke up, big capital is no longer invisible.

It was my ignorance, not big capital being invisible which retarded my thinking, unable to get clear of the conventional patterns. Remember, in Chinatown that first night, when we said ‘engagement’ but we meant the French ‘engagé’ and implicitly we reoriented ourselves before we were aware of the change and its attraction.

One friend said that for me change itself was the attraction, that I preferred to keep my inability to adapt invisible, also that my fear of rigidity reoriented my whole outlook automatically, to get clear, to escape conventional confines like the ‘engagement ring’ syndrome and this is a reason I like Chinatown.

I wondered about that, eating alone in Chinatown when I first realized what constituted your attraction for me. I knew at first there was a sense of engagement but that a lot of what was taking place was invisible. So much operating under the surface, though it was clear that it was your ideas not your feelings that were reoriented.

Like when you walk along then turn, reoriented. Just a circumstantial event like being here in Chinatown, looking in the restaurant window, the fish tank so clear, the film posters beside the window saying ‘latest attraction’ and me struggling to keep my feelings invisible, convincing myself that this night is worth cancelling another engagement.

Not that the other engagement would’ve been better than a walk through Chinatown but that this is a detour, I reoriented my life because of an attraction as though feeling something was better than feeling invisible.