JULIE LEUNG

She/her)
Actor and hospitality worker

24 November 2020
Boon Wurrung Country

My name is Julie Leung, and I am from Vancouver, Canada. I’ve been here in Australia for about three years or so. When the pandemic hit, I lost both my jobs. I worked in the arts as well as hospitality, so both of those industries were just done. I haven’t been working since March of this year. Luckily my partner has been working full-time from home, which is great. But this pandemic brought on this resurgence of the patriarchy where he’s the one that has to take care of all the bills and all the groceries, whereas before we did things by what I like to call a ‘patriarchy calculator’. He makes more than [I do], so he would normally pay a bit more than me, and we would divide up [costs] in that ratio. Now he has [had] to take over all of the finances, so I’ve taken up a lot of the domestic duties just because I have the time. And that once again perpetuates these stereotypes, which I’m trying so hard to break out of.

My family live in Canada, so when we were in lockdown, things were pretty much normal back home. It was summer there [while] it was winter here, so they were having a perfectly normal Vancouver summer. Things weren’t shut down, masks weren’t mandatory. The cases were very few. But now that we’re out of lockdown and things are slowly starting to go back to normal, they’re shutting down. Their cases are in the hundreds. I think the last time I checked it was five, six hundred [per day]. So now that they’re going through all of that, the tables have switched. It’s just really hard to see the people I care about go through that now because we’ve just been there, so I know how difficult it is. It’s been over a year since I’ve been back home. I really miss my folks and my friends. Hopefully we get to go back there next year.

One of the harder things that came up during this pandemic is [that] I’ve been really questioning what I want to continue to do. I was in the arts, I trained in theatre. But with [the] pandemic and what’s going on with the arts, I don’t know how that will turn out. So, I am questioning my career path and thinking about going back to school, but once again, that’s a whole other hurdle, especially as I would be considered an international student at this point. That makes it quite difficult financially. There are all these big bumps in the road that I’ve come across. It was interesting [that] JobKeeper and JobSeeker [were not] available to people that aren’t citizens or permanent residents. Especially because Australia is such a multicultural country. There are many people from other countries that make this city and this country thrive. If I didn’t have my partner here, I probably would have just gone home.