- [Announcer] Please like and subscribe to our channel,
and click the bell icon to get new video updates.
- So, I was five years old when I left Belgrade.
My dad had left a couple of weeks before us,
so it was just me and my mother and my newborn sister.
And we were leaving Yugoslavia and going
to our new home in Australia with a fuel stop in Singapore.
And at the airport, my grandma, Xenia,
held my face in her hands and she said,
"You will never see grandma again."
(laughs) And when my face crumpled at this,
she said by way of consolation,
"That's because I'm very old and I will probably die soon."
(audience laughs)
So, (chuckles) the last time that we had been
at the airport had been under happier circumstances.
We were going for vacation in Croatia,
but now, there were tensions between the Republic of Croatia
and the Republic of Serbia, where we were from,
and some people, including my dad,
thought that there might even be a war,
which is why instead of going for one hour
to a place that we knew and loved,
we were picking up all of our things
and traveling for about 30 hours
to the other side of the world to start our lives again.
And in the plane, I cried a lot,
not just because of what grandma had said,
but because I really liked my life up until then.
Like, I really liked the little communal yard
where I would play with the kids
from the surrounding buildings
and I loved how in the winter,
Belgrade smelled like snow and cigarettes and chestnuts,
and I loved that all our family and friends lived there,
and I was scared about going somewhere new.
And so for the first half of the journey,
I basically cried and vomited
and pulled on my mother's sleeve
while she tried to get my newborn sister to sleep.
And finally, we landed for our fuel stop in Singapore,
and we kind of miserably trudged out of the plane,
and hit this, like we went through this tunnel,
this air conditioned tunnel and suddenly,
we were at Singapore Airport.
And that is the moment that my life
as I knew it completely changed.
So my first five years had been spent
in socialist Yugoslavia, and I had loved it,
but that's because I had never been to Singapore Airport.
(audience laughs)
And it was amazing.
Welcome to capitalism.
I realized that actually, my whole life
up until that moment had sucked.
(audience laughs)
And that this was the best place on earth.
So, I forgot about grandma and Yugoslavia
and all that stuff, and I just started
like taking in all of the things around me,
and my mum said, "Wow, it's as clean as a pharmacy,"
which is what we say in Serbia
when a place is clean.
(audience laughs)
And I had to agree with her,
it was like we had been plopped into one
of the Disney films that my dad used to get for me
on the black market, and then she said,
"You could eat off the floor."
And I had to agree, like I felt like actually doing it,
I felt like getting on my butt and kind of like
sliding across the beautiful, gleaming tiles.
I wanted to jump on the escalators and travel
up and down singing and dancing to the beautiful music
that was playing everywhere that we went.
It was, I was kind of amazed that no one else
was marveling in the way that we were.
And my mum said, "Look, orchids,"
and I looked around and actually,
everywhere, like every few steps
there were these beautiful flowers growing out of planters.
And I realized that my life, you know,
that the world was this big and beautiful place,
and that I had been confined to this small,
gray corner of it up until now.
And everything smelled like perfume
and copying my mother, I put my wrist out,
and this beautiful Singaporean woman
in a suit like spritzed us with perfume.
And we walked around looking at these
like beautiful glass-fronted stores
that had this like beautiful, colorful apparel in them,
and there were these massive screens everywhere,
and on the screens, there were ads for all the latest stuff
that you could get, like entertainment systems
and shoes and Walkmans, and then this ad came up
that just stopped me dead in my tracks.
And on this screen, there was this ad,
and there were these little kids about my age,
and they were like laughing and having this great time
while this tiny, gorgeous, squiggly worm toy
just like wriggles around everywhere.
And I was just watching this ad and up close,
the worm, like its face is really beautiful and pointy
and it has these little googly eyes
and this like soft, pink fur,
and it's the most amazing thing I've seen.
And apparently at that moment, my mother becomes
an immediate convert to consumer culture,
(audience laughs)
because she grabs my hand and we march over
to the currency exchange counter,
and she slams down her Yugoslavian dinars,
gets some dollars, we go into a store,
and she buys me the worm.
Now, this is pretty unheard of.
I know that if my dad had been there,
there would've been like an argument between them,
there would've been a discussion about money
and how we didn't have much,
and how we were moving to a whole new country
that was expensive, but with just us there,
my mother doesn't even look at the price tag,
she just gets the worm and buys it for me.
And on the plane, I'm trembling with excitement.
I'm not thinking about grandma anymore
or any of that stuff that has happened in the past,
I'm just thinking about how as soon as we take off,
I get to open this box, and the worm
comes in this little round box, and I open it up,
and it's kind of coiled inside,
and I touch it, and its fur feels
like the softest feathers, and I whisper to it
in like one of the three English words that I know,
so I say, "Girl, girl," and I expect it
to kind of come to life and start wriggling around
like in the ad.
(audience laughs) And my mum's kind of looking at me
with this weird expression 'cause I guess
she thought that I was smart.
(audience laughs)
As she explains to me that the worm isn't in fact alive,
but that it has this little invisible string
that's attached to it and that's how it moves around.
And so once I get the hang of this,
it does actually move around in this adorable way
that it had done on the ad.
And when I get the hang of it, I kind of get the attention
of this little boy across the aisle in the plane,
and I stick my arm out and I make the worm crawl up it,
and he watches very solemnly, suitably impressed.
And I think, "This is pretty, pretty amazing."
Like I decide I'm going to carry this little worm around
in my pocket like a gorgeous, fuzzy secret.
I start to think about my life in Australia and I think,
"Maybe the kids will love me."
Like I imagine this beautiful classroom
with these little kids and I imagine them
saying to each other, "Wow, did you see
"that new magic girl?"
And I'll be standing there with my worm,
the new kid on the block.
(audience laughs)
And on the plane, I practice the three English words
I know, so girl, and hello, and tomorrow,
and I think, "This is the start of my new life."
And I think we can agree, it's a pretty good start.
Meanwhile, my mother, she puts her arm around my shoulders
and she wipes tears from her eyes
and looks out the window as we travel further
and further away from our little world.
Cut to the present day, I'm in my new home in New York,
pregnant, having another consumer experience
in which basically I'm being sold things
left, right, and center, and I'm panicking,
'cause I think that I'm not going to be a good mother
in advance, that you know, if I don't buy
like a machine that heats up butt wipes for babies,
(audience laughs)
or if I don't buy this special mobile with elephants
that speak in French and sing,
and the more I'm stressing about this,
I suddenly remember the best toy that I ever had,
which was the worm, right?
So while I've got my computer in front of me,
and I Google magic fuzzy worm, and it comes up immediately.
(audience laughs)
And so remember when I first saw this worm,
it was like the best thing that I had seen
in my entire life?
And now, I feel very confronted
because this image that has come up in front of me,
the worm looks really crap.
Like it just looks like this piece of matted fuzz
with this piece of fishing wire coming off it,
and these little eyes that are stuck on
with like bits of glue coming off the side of them,
and the image is so disturbing to me
that I kind of don't even know what to do with it.
I'm really upset by it, so I immediately pick up
the phone to call my mother in Australia,
even though it's the middle of the night,
but this is an emergency.
(audience laughs)
So I call her up, and she picks up and I say,
"Hey mum, do you remember that worm that you got me
"at Singapore Airport?"
And she says, "Of course I do."
And I say, "Well, I have just found it on the internet,
"and it looks really terrible
"and I can't believe that I loved it so much."
And my voice does this involuntary wobble
because I'm thinking about how much I loved the worm
at the time and how pathetic it all seems now.
(audience members chuckle)
And there's a little pause, and my mum says, "Impossible.
"The worm that we got in Singapore was wonderful.
"You must be looking at a completely different worm."
(audience laughs)
And then I think back to that time
and I remember me, you know, crying,
and then Singapore Airport and how impressed I was
by this worm, and for the first time,
I think about what it would've been like
for my mother, and I realize that she was also leaving
her whole world behind, and we were traveling
to a whole new country, a whole new language.
She was leaving behind everyone,
grandma, who happened to be her mother,
and it must've been really frightening for her as well,
but she didn't let on.
She kept it together, and even more than that,
she managed to offer me a distraction
and make me less scared in that moment.
And for some, and like even now,
you know, decades later when I have called her
as this distressed adult who's waddling around
on the other side of the world, my mother is still
trying to protect me by keeping the myth of the worm alive.
(audience members chuckle)
And for some reason, I think of that Belinda Carlisle song,
"Somewhere in my heart, I'm always dancing
"with you in the summer rain,"
and I remember me at the airport,
and my young mother holding my hand,
and I think about how when we got to Australia,
the kids didn't actually love me, like those three words
didn't really help me out much,
(audience laughs)
I got laughed at and I got bullied
and kids called me stupid and dummy
and things like that because I couldn't speak English,
and I know that I can't actually protect
my future kid from the world.
Like I'm sure that he'll get teased,
because maybe he'll have big ears like his dad
or he'll have a big nose like me,
and there are plenty of far worse things
that he's going to have to learn about
in the world that I can't protect him from,
but what I can do is offer some sort of protection
in the form of that magic that my mother offered me,
a way of seeing the world as a wonderful place
instead of just a frightening place.
And I know that it works,
because somewhere in my heart, that worm
is still dancing like it did that day,
and it is still the most magical thing that I have seen.
Thank you.
(audience applauds and cheers)