Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  Francis Wong became one of Sabah’s leading architects and a minor public figure. He played a role in the establishment of the Sabah chapter of the Malaysian Institute of Architects (Pertubuhan Akitek Malaysia, PAM) and served as its founding chairman. After practising as an architect, he became a property developer, a local government councillor and a lecturer at the Sabah Institute of Art. Reflecting later in life, he said, ‘The influence of my university professors towards the value of education has come one full circle. It is now my turn to prepare the younger generation for globalisation. Without my professional training in Australia, I would not have achieved as much as a citizen of my country.’44

  The lessons he drew from his Colombo Plan scholarship included the transformative effect of education, harnessed to a strong sense of obligation to hand on its benefits – to make a contribution. The beaming boy in the photo had grown into a man who believed in the generosity and essential goodness of Australia. Of the discrimination he suffered under the Malaysian constitution, he felt it was a matter of ‘whatever it takes to keep the peace’. Wong remembers her father remarking that soon there would be no racism, because ‘everyone will marry each other’. He was convinced of the benefits of globalisation and encouraged his children to think of themselves as citizens of the world.

  Penny Wong’s ability to take on her father’s sunny optimism was challenged by the racism she suffered when she arrived in Australia. For much of her childhood, she was embattled and hypervigilant.

  But on Anzac Day 1992, when Wong was twenty-three, prime minister Paul Keating gave a high-profile speech in Port Moresby about Australian identity and our place in Asia. He declared that the fall of Singapore was as important to the national story as Gallipoli. He spoke of the soldiers whose bodies lay in France and Belgium and the countries of the Middle East, but noted that Australia’s war casualties ‘also lie in Singapore and Malaysia, Burma, Borneo and the other countries of this region’. Those who fought in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam did so to secure a place in the Asia-Pacific for their country and its ideals.

  Keating ended his speech with an appeal to a vision of modern Australia:

  Ladies and gentlemen, these days there is a relatively new memorial to the Anzac legend in Australia. Sitting on the hill near the new Parliament House, it is a modest monument inscribed with these words: ‘Look around you – these are the things they believed in. In the end they believed in Australia – in the democracy they had built, in the life they had made there, and the future they believed their country held.’45

  That same year, Wong took one of her regular trips to Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, to visit her father. She returned to Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport on a hot summer day. When the wheels hit the tarmac, she thought, This is my country now. This is my place. ‘It was the sense of a national identity that contemplated me that made the difference,’ she recalled.46 Penny Wong was now an Australian, both in ancestry and in the way she saw herself. Whether she realised it or not, she was the embodiment of and an agent for the broadening of Australian identity.

  2

  BUTTERFLIES AND BULLIES

  There is a story Penny Wong tells – or not so much a story as a memory from her childhood – that evokes what it was like to be brought up in the tropics in a rapidly developing nation.

  She was about six years old, playing in the double garage of her home in the new suburb of Friendly Garden, in Kota Kinabalu. Her younger brother, Toby, was with her. The house, newly built as a result of her father’s improving fortunes, was on the edge of the city. Behind it was what Penny thought of as ‘the jungle’, although her father said it was merely the remains of an abandoned rubber plantation, rapidly being cleared to make way for new housing.

  As the children played, rain began to fall. Tropical rain is a deluge. It slammed down. Amid the noise, something made the children look up at the ceiling to find it transformed into a jewel box of wall-to-wall butterflies – all sizes and colours. They had come in from the jungle for shelter. The image has never left Penny Wong. Today, she tells this story to her daughters.

  Penelope Ying-Yen Wong was born in Kota Kinabalu on 5 November 1968, the year after her father’s degree was awarded. Tobias To Pen Wong, always called Toby or Tobe, was born three years later. Her earliest memories are of Toby crawling across the wooden floors of their living room in an airy house on stilts – what Australians would call a Queenslander. This was where they lived until the move to Friendly Garden. She remembers Toby leaving a trail of dribble on the floor. Lai lived with them. Penny’s father was working for a modest public service salary. It was her grandmother who looked after the children, together with a series of amahs, or nannies.

  There is a photo of a young Penny Wong – perhaps three or four years old – with Lai. She is serving her grandmother tea. Penny wears a pink ruffled dress. She is kneeling on a cushion in front of the old woman, a tray solemnly extended. Lai is sitting ramrod straight, with a stern expression, her head inclined to the little girl. As Wong remarks, it is a moving picture because of the combination of Lai’s pose and her obvious focus on the child: ‘You can see she loves me, even though she is being strict.’ Today, Wong keeps this image on her phone.

  Penny Wong first visited Australia with her mother, Jane, on a three-month holiday in November 1970, arriving on her second birthday. They stayed with her Aunt Alison – Ally – in North Adelaide.1 Penny was just beginning to speak, using a mixture of Chinese – probably Hakka dialect – and Malaysian Bahasa. Jane had to educate Ally on the words that meant a need to go to the toilet. But by the time Penny reached school age she had switched, apparently without difficulty, to speaking English. Her father was keen for her to do so. He wanted her to speak without an accent, which for him meant ‘not like a Malaysian Chinese’. For Francis, English was the language of education and opportunity. Today, Penny Wong speaks very little Chinese. She says, ‘I can’t get the tones right.’ She can understand parts of Bahasa – a unifying language of the region – but is not fluent.

  Penny and Toby were brought up in a cultural, religious and ethnic melange. Her grandmother, unlike many Hakka, was Buddhist. She maintained a small altar and said a prayer before meals. ‘It was nice, it grounded her,’ says Wong. Her father identified with Catholicism, largely because he had attended Catholic schools and associated the religion with the opportunity for education. Her mother was not a believer but had been brought up Methodist. In their wider circle there was every kind of religion. They had friends who were Muslim (the family kept a separate wok to prepare halal food on social occasions). They also had friends who were Dayak, the indigenous inhabitants of Borneo, some of whom were Christian or Muslim, while others practised ancient animistic traditions. In this mix, Penny grew up with a strong sense of God – she says she has never doubted the existence of a divine force – but without any conviction that there was a single path to his favour. ‘I always felt there were many paths to God … I didn’t have the sense that other faiths were inferior.’2 The family celebrated Christmas, Chinese New Year and some Muslim religious festivals. The diversity did not seem unusual. She was used to hearing her parents rib each other about the cultural differences between them, but this was in good humour. Differences of race and culture carried no negative connotation in diverse Borneo, despite the discrimination written into the constitution of the new nation. Difference was simply part of the texture of everyday life.

  Jane Wong, as she was now known, embarked upon her new life in Sabah with a fascination for Chinese culture and an openness to new experiences. She and Francis forged close links in particular with the Chinese and indigenous Kadazan communities, and Jane learned basic Cantonese. She embraced the close family dynamic. She and Francis mixed with members of the expatriate community, which included the foreign wives of other returned Colombo scholars. Nevertheless, it must have been challenging to establish a life in a new country.

  Jane considered herself a feminist. On one of her journ
eys from Australia to Malaysia, she carried a copy of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch through customs from Australia to Malaysia. The cover featured a naked female torso hanging from a clothes rail, with handles on the hips – as though it were an item for male use and handling. The customs officer scratched out the image on the cover.3

  Today, Wong says of her mother that she has an instinctive habit of taking the perspective of the person with less power. When her professional life developed after her return to Australia, she became known among campaigners for social justice in Adelaide – but she did not want her daughter to enter politics. Why? Because she feared the invasion of privacy that would result, says Wong. Jane did not want to be interviewed for this book.

  Jane was in the public gallery when Wong gave her maiden speech in federal parliament in 2002. Wong looked up at her as she gave her tribute. ‘Your intellect, mischievousness, sense of humour and unfailing love sustain me,’ she said.4 Others who know Jane emphasise her sense of humour, her quirkiness and her commitment to social justice. Later, Wong’s stepchildren were to refer to Jane by the nickname ‘the Goddess’.

  It was Francis who pushed his children and had high ambitions for them. Coming from poverty, he was driven. He urged his kids to study and encouraged them to pursue excellence in all they did. He was later to recount that he told them success meant ‘doing positive things to the limit of one’s potential’. He would not give them money, but would give them all that he could in the way of education.5 Jane was more relaxed. Penny Wong thinks today that her mother recognised her daughter’s natural determination and adjusted her parenting as a result. ‘She would talk to me about other measures of worth, rather than success. She would talk about my heart, or my spirit … she wasn’t didactic, and she wasn’t pushy at all.’

  Cooking was important in the Wong family home. Chinese families often weren’t physically demonstrative, so food had a special place. Preparing food, her father used to say, was one of the ways in which you could show others your love. Almost all of Penny Wong’s significant relationships seem linked to stories about cooking.

  Little Penny liked superheroes. She had a Superman suit she wore frequently. She learned to read early – long before she started school – and had children’s versions of Greek and Roman legends. When she wasn’t Superman she was Perseus, slayer of monsters, or Theseus, founder of Athens and the great reformer. Penny was less interested in Hercules. She found him boring. One day Jane came home from work to find her young daughter perched on a windowsill of the stilted house, dressed as Superman. ‘What are you doing there?’ her mother asked. ‘I’m going to fly down,’ said Penny. Looking back, Penny regards her mother’s response as restrained and wise. ‘She knew me. She knew that if she told me I couldn’t do it, that would only encourage me.’ Instead, Jane suggested the flight should be delayed until after dinner. Food won out.

  From the age of five Penny attended Kinabalu International School, established only three years before her enrolment to provide a British-style education for expatriates and the emerging middle class. The ethnic melange continued there. The schoolyard had faces of every colour. Penny’s best friend was white. The school motto was ‘nurturing global citizens’.6 The children were aware of the ethnic and cultural differences among their friends and family but it was, Penny remembers, ‘difference without connotation. Nobody ever suggested it meant that people were lesser. It simply never occurred to me that race was an issue in that way until I came to Australia.’

  *

  In 1976, Penny’s parents told her and Toby that they were separating and that the siblings would be moving to Australia with Jane. She can’t remember now how she felt about the move beforehand, or how long it was between the announcement and their arrival in Adelaide. It seemed fast, as though within just a few days they left normal life and crashed into this new, colder and unfriendly place.

  They stayed with their aunt Ally, until Penny’s mother bought a cream-brick triple-fronted house in Coro Crescent, Coromandel Valley, in the Adelaide Hills – just a few kilometres from the farm that her grandfather and great-grandfather had once owned. Coromandel Valley was largely orchards and market gardens, but suburban Adelaide was rising up the hills to meet it. New housing subdivisions were being created, though it still felt like a country town.

  Jane had limited cooking skills. Instead of the aromas and sounds of carefully prepared meals, it was sandwiches for lunch, meat and three veg in the evenings. The children didn’t like it. Penny and Toby taught themselves to cook at an early age.7

  The children weren’t to know it, but the year after their arrival – 1977 – was a turning point in Australian migration. The year before, the first boatload of refugees from Vietnam had arrived. The last vestiges of the White Australia policy had been swept away by the Whitlam government, but Whitlam also cut immigration. It was therefore the Fraser government that gave multiculturalism form and definition. The government announced its decision to welcome many more refugees, and allow family reunions. By 1979 Asia had become the largest regional source of migrants, at 29 per cent, forever changing the nation. People of Asian descent now make up about 16 per cent of the population.8 But when Penny and Toby were getting to know Coromandel Valley, theirs were the only Asian faces in the suburb.

  When Penny went into their backyard one evening to call Toby in for dinner, the neighbour leaned over the back fence and shouted, ‘Go back to where you came from, you slant-eyed little slut!’ Wong still remembers her face, distorted in anger. Sometime after that Penny came home from a visit to Malaysia to find her mother and aunts scrubbing at the driveway. Anti-Asian slogans were painted on the footpath outside their home. The police were told, but if any action was taken the family never heard about it. She has since been told that the police suggested that the best solution was for them to move house.

  Today, Coromandel Valley Primary School is part of an ordinary outer suburb. The orchards and farms have long since been built over. It is not a school with a deep sense of its own history. There are no old photos, or school annuals, or teachers still in touch who remember Penny and Toby Wong as children. The current teaching staff are aware, from comments she has made in interviews, that she wasn’t happy there – but the school has changed dramatically since, they say. Some years ago European languages were dropped from the curriculum in favour of Japanese. In the library and in every classroom there are signs about how to demonstrate the school values – which include resilience, kindness, tolerance and embrace of difference. Penny Wong has been back in recent years to give a speech. She was moved to see, looking out at the school assembly, that the faces reflected multicultural Australia. ‘It was a nice thing,’ she says, ‘hearing about the values they teach. And I thought, things have changed. It was quite healing.’

  But as a child, school was a nightmare. The verbal bullying was constant, and sometimes turned physical. She approached each day as though going into battle, bracing herself mentally and physically. She learned to fight: ‘I gave as good as I got.’ If the teachers took any action to protect her and Toby from bullying, she doesn’t remember it. They felt entirely alone. She coped by trying not to respond or show her hurt. ‘It was, “I’m never going to let you see, in any way, that this gets to me. I’m never going to let you see that I feel upset, or lonely, or shy.”’ She began to suffer from vicious migraines – so debilitating that she could barely stand and often had temporary losses of vision. Her mother took her for every kind of test, with no explanation to be found.

  Jane tried to help with the bullying, offering one-line rejoinders. The aunts, particularly Ally, were a constant loving presence. Perhaps it is thanks to this support that Penny did not internalise the abuse, that her response was to deny her persecutors power over her. She learned to control her emotions and fiercely protect her thoughts, not to let those outside her family see what was going on inside. She found a steely resolve.

  Jane began a bachelor’s degree, followed by postgra
duate qualifications, in social work. Meanwhile, by 1978 Francis Wong was at a turning point in his career – expanding from architectural practice into property development.9 Their divorce was civilised; both parents worked hard at remaining on good terms. Whatever anger or hurt had caused their break-up, they did not allow it to affect their relationships with the children. Penny Wong says today that both her parents are remarkable. Not only did they marry at a time when much was against them doing so, but when they split they never argued – or at least not in a way the children were aware of. Neither ever criticised the other in front of the children. Penny and Toby flew back to Kota Kinabalu regularly to spend school holidays with their father. Penny remembers that her grandmother, Lai, used to kill and cook a chicken to celebrate their arrival. Francis took the children hiking up Mount Kinabalu, and on travels throughout South-East Asia.

  A photo from 1983 shows Penny and Toby serving tea to their grandmother on the day of her seventieth birthday. Again, there is the tray of tea, and the diminutive grandmother. This time, though, something has shifted. Penny, now fifteen, meets her grandmother’s eyes. She is clearly on the edge of adulthood. Toby stands slightly behind her, hands clasped behind his back. The old woman remains as she has ever been – strong, stern and loving, her back straight, her head inclined slightly towards her grandchildren.10

  Francis Wong remarried to a Malaysian woman, Loris Lee, who had three children by a previous relationship with a New Zealander. In effect, Francis adopted them, then went on to father another two with Lee – a son, Wong Kein Peng, also called James, and a daughter, Wong Ying Soon, also called Jessica.11 Today, Penny Wong considers herself one of seven. In the family, they don’t parse between the steps and the halves – they are all brothers and sisters. There is an online family chatroom where they interact and share their news. She also remains in touch with her uncles – the two surviving children of her grandfather’s first wife – and their children and grandchildren. A few years ago Francis moved to Australia, and Jessica is here as well. James runs an architectural practice in Kota Kinabalu.