A warm and gusty afternoon in Sydney’s Chinatown. Todd Sampson is looking for a restaurant that no longer exists.
“This is roughly where it was,” he says, gesturing at Dixon Street, where he and his future wife, Neomie, went on their first date. It was a dumpling joint. The waiter described one particular dumpling as a “combination”, he recalls.
“A combination of what?” Sampson wanted to know. He smiles and shakes his head. “Her reaction was basically, ‘I don’t know about this guy.’”
Neomie is Burmese, Sampson is Canadian by birth but has lived in Sydney for more than 20 years carving out a career first in advertising, then television. Their children, Coco, 19, and Jet, 16, are, he says, “50% Canadian, 50% Burmese and 100% Australian”.
“They love coming to Chinatown,” Sampson says. “But they prefer it at night; and they’re not telling me what they are doing.”
Chinatown is quiet in the afternoon. A few tourists drift past; a delivery trolley rattles over the paving. Decorations for lunar new year are going up. A noble-looking horse rears up on its hind legs (a light fixture) for the new year of the fire horse, and multicoloured lanterns sway overhead in the wind.
View image in fullscreen Todd Sampson walks through Chinatown in Sydney, where he and his future wife
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