Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  ‘That’s right! Liang Liang, you will make our Pan’s family very proud one day.’

  One day. While Daddy mended the fence, I sought a spot free of fresh cow pats. I lay back in the grass and thought about one day. What was my life going to be? I had wanted to be an artist, because I loved drawing, then an author, because I loved stories, then a teacher, because I loved my kindergarten teacher, Miss Yapp. Then Daddy told me that a school teacher was a stupid thing to want to be, because most teachers were stupid, that’s why they became teachers. So I kept this shamefully modest aspiration to myself. Then I wanted to be a ballerina. Preferably Prima Ballerina Assoluta, like Dame Margot. I was shrewd enough to realise that even ‘Prima Ballerina Assoluta’ was likely to get just as cold a reception as ‘school teacher,’ so I held my tongue.

  ‘Cindy, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ Aunty Joan asked.

  ‘A doctor. Or a scientist, like Daddy!’

  This always got a good response.

  In the library at lunchtimes I mooned over ballet books. Margot Fonteyn, Natalia Makarova, Gelsey Kirkland. They were my best friends. I knew them all intimately.

  Natalia ‘plays the piano and always makes a point of procuring the piano scores for all the ballets in which she dances so as to be able to acquaint herself thoroughly with the music,’ wrote A.H. Franks in The Girls’ Book of Ballet. Natalia ‘took all the opportunities which presented themselves to see the Royal Ballet while she was in England and declared herself to be very impressed with what she saw,’ Franks continued. Wondrous Natalia, ‘her friends call her by the charming diminutive Natasha.’

  I decided I would call my second daughter by the charming diminutive Natasha. There was little question as to the name of the first. ‘One can talk and talk about Fonteyn and still not begin to describe or even indicate the reasons for her greatness.’ So wrote A.H. Franks. I thoroughly concurred.

  Margot grew up in Shanghai. Her original name was Peggy Hookham. She must have had it changed by deed poll, I nodded to myself. In her autobiography she described how Dame Ninette de Valois, artistic director and founder of the Royal Ballet Company, initially mistook her for a Chinese girl. Margot wondered if her time in Shanghai had made her look just a little Chinese. I vehemently hoped so.

  Margot admitted that her bête noire was being photographed while performing on stage. She dreaded being caught in an awk ward position and found the flashes put her off. She could not help wondering as each flash went off what image had been captured, and this ruined her concentration to the point that she had been known to walk off stage if insensitive photographers disregarded her wishes.

  So it was with a certain guilty pleasure that I pored over each precious image. Most of the ballets I had never seen. They existed in my mind as a composite of all the photos and all the tidbits I had gleaned from innumerable ballet books from various libraries and classrooms. I didn’t have any ballet books of my own but I started tracing and colouring in the pictures until I had my own lurid miniature photo library. My bedroom walls became a shrine. A shrine to Margot and her princely consort, Rudolf Nureyev.

  I was sure Margot wouldn’t mind. She might feel quite chuffed, in fact. Most of the original photographs were in black and white but I dressed Margot in golds and rich rubies, flashing with opulent oranges, searing scarlets and bleeding crimsons. Her hair was as black as mine. She did look a little Chinese.

  ‘Who’s the best dancer in the world?’ I asked my dad.

  ‘Margot Fonteyn.’

  ‘I mean man dancer.’

  ‘Well, depends what kind of dancing. Ballet, best one is Rudolf Nureyev. Oh he really can dance that one, jumping, wah, really good. Tap dancing … be Fred Astaire, or Gene Kelly.’

  ‘Who’s Jeanne Kelly? Is that a man?’

  ‘Yeah! You don’t know Gene Kelly? “I’m singing in the rain …” – that one, you know – “Singing in the rain …”’ Daddy improvised some odd-looking steps.

  ‘Nuh. Never heard of it.’

  ‘What, you mean you never see “Singing in the rain, I sing it in the rain!” That Gene Kelly, dancing like a wild bastard, jump in puddles. Wah! He really good can dance that little short bastard. Fred Astaire, I like that one better. Not so stumpy one. He more graceful, like you. He dance Ginger Roger. Yeah, that one I must say, very good, that one.’ Dad waltzed around in a jerky fashion, seemingly trying to imitate both Fred and Ginger simultaneously.

  ‘Can you ballroom dance, Daddy?’ I asked cautiously, hoping to catch him out. Of course I already knew. He was a brilliant dancer. In secret, with my mum.

  ‘Oh, Liang Liang, your daddy not like you, good dancer. Your daddy good at many thing,’ he indicated the fence, for example, ‘but dancing, your mummy will telling you, I am quite good at one time, but not my best …’

  ‘But you can do it …’

  ‘Oh, yes! Can doing it. When I am young, dancing, all the girls wanting to dancing with Pan! “Oh,” they say, “Pan, you good dancer.”’ I am not bad.’

  ‘Teach me!’

  ‘Oh, I can teaching you some things I know. I know Foxy Trot. Slow, slow, quick quick slow … slow, slow, quick quick slow … that one easy.’

  ‘Show me!’

  ‘Tsk, ah! We got work to do, Liang Liang, got no time to be Foxy Trot!’

  ‘Please, Daddyyyyyyyy …’ I bent over double, pleading.

  ‘Okay. Okay you twisting my arms. I show you Okay? You holding on like this. You stepping on top my feet I dance with you. Showing you.’

  I placed my two small rubber-booted feet on top of Daddy’s big rubber-booted feet. Dad took off his thick leather fencing gloves and placed my right hand in his left. I put my left hand on his pigou, his buttock, and held on expectantly.

  Slow, slow, quick quick slow. Slow, slow, quick quick slow …

  We siiinging in the rain, we siiing it in the rain!

  What a glooorious feeeeling, we haaappy again.

  We waalking the lane, with a haaappy refrain,

  The song in our heart and all reeady for love,

  Let stormy cloud chain everyooone, to the plain,

  Come on little rain, got a smiiile on my chin!

  We laugh at the cloud, so daark up above,

  We singing and dancing in the rain!

  Daddy whirled me around the sloping paddock and my pony-tail fluttered in the dusk light. The rubber boots made a squelchy, whooshy percussive accompaniment. I held my breath and dared not blink; I didn’t want to miss a thing.

  The cows lifted their heads and chewed their cuds, bemused while the horses hung their heads over the fence and raised their upper lips, entranced.

  Humans did funny things.

  Papa Bear

  Chin Shen

  My dad grew up in Shanghai and was raised by his grandparents. His parents worked (and still do) for the Communist government. His dad had taught himself Japanese and plagiarised entire Japanese articles, translated them into Chinese and passed them off as his wife’s work. She won some prestigious national award and dined with the political elite. They were shit parents. AND they had plastic fruit in their fruit bowls.

  In primary school, my dad would coat his daily homework sheets in a thin layer of wax so he could scrape off the teacher’s big tick and hand in the same sheet again another day.

  He started smoking at about fourteen and sold cartons to his mates at school. (He became asthmatic a few years ago, but decided he didn’t like the puffer so he quit cold turkey.)

  He fought in street gangs until someone drove a six-inch blade into his left buttock. So he became a pacifist and a negotiator between gangs and bought off thugs with smokes and booze.

  In the last year of high school, he had a relationship with one of his teachers and went to live with her in the countryside. (I don’t know if this is actually true or the greatest rumor my mum has ever spread).

  He made it to university on average marks. Mum was a genius and borderline Martian but she missed the las
t page of her exams and ended up at the same university as my dad.

  Some crafty college slut was keen on Dad and gave him two movie tickets, naturally assuming that he’d take her. He took my mum instead. Burned.

  Considering my dad looked like an anorexic Chinese mafia messenger, it’s a wonder he pulled at all. Mum says she saw a kind heart. She wears glasses.

  Four years later they got married.

  Two years later they held hands.

  I arrived in September of ’86.

  Dad says that when I was born they had just $200. He decided the best thing to do would be to leave their engineering jobs and start afresh in Australia, because obviously they’d have a better chance of success if they couldn’t speak the language and had no recognised qualifications.

  His right forearm was crushed in a machinery accident after a year down under. With micro-surgery and skin grafts from his foot and buttocks, they stitched it back together. He’s got a metal rod in there but it still looks gimpy … kind of like the ‘strong hand’ from Scary Movie except it’s not strong, it’s weak as balls. So he writes with his left hand now BUT ONLY IN CAPITALS. And he eats with a fork.

  After calling himself John for a year, my dad realised he needed a name that symbolised something more than the average white Australian male. Something strong and heroic – something that embodied the promise and hope of his newly adopted home. But instead of looking through the phone book or a book of names for potential monikers, he took a trip to the local shopping complex. That’s where he laid eyes on the brightest, reddest sign he’d ever seen:

  TANDY ELECTRONICS

  My father named himself after an electronics store.

  Seriously, what hope did I have?

  This is the same man who used to mix a little whiskey with my milk to pacify me.

  The same man who recorded me snoring when I was six and played the audio every day like it was a Top 40 CD.

  The same man who Googled Eva Green as soon as he got back from the cinema.

  The same man who doesn’t believe in power naps and can drive home asleep.

  The same man who can play mahjong asleep. And win.

  The same man who chirps, ‘Honey! I’m hooooome’ as soon as he steps in the front door.

  The same man who can’t wait to become senile so he can watch Tom and Jerry cartoons every day.

  He’s the same, yet he continues to surprise me.

  He’s my dad. And I want to grow up to be just like him.

  The Hots

  ...................................

  Towards Manhood

  Benjamin Law

  There are some men in the world who are unambiguously male. Unquestionably, identifiably, inherently male. It’s not uncommon for teenagers I encounter on public transport to be twice the size of me, twice as physically developed, even though I’m actually twice their age. These creatures – who apparently share the same XY chromosome pairing as my own – are tall and broad-shouldered. They have feet the size of concrete slabs, five o’clock shadows, legs like carved tree trunks, and sport hair on their chests and arses. One assumes their genitals swing between their legs like anvils, and their shit stinks like the wet earth. They are, undeniably, men.

  When it came to me, it’s as though my mother’s uterus had several moments of hesitation in deciding what it’d produce. After coming up with Andrew – my veritable giant of a brother – then having to endure the horrors of a miscarriage in 1981, Mum’s womb was exhausted and indecisive throughout 1982. ‘Well, the baby should definitely have a penis,’ the uterus thought. ‘Yes: a penis. Slap one on. Should we put hair on its forearms? Maybe hold back on the forearm hair, I don’t know. What about leg hair? Yes: leg hair. Actually, no: stop the leg hair. Oh no, wait: PUT IT BACK.’

  The result of such indecisiveness was me: this Asian hybrid man-child thing. Someone with a 27-inch waistline, hands like a well-manicured woman, unsightly and improvised leg-hair growth and – inexplicably – a baritone voice which can sometimes sound like a gay James Earl Jones with a cold. Despite my skinny frame and Asiatic eyes, I also have sensual full-bodied lips, not unlike those of an African-American woman. It is a confused and strange body to inhabit.

  For the majority of my life, I’ve worked against the outcome of this genetic lottery. I’ve tried bashing shit, listening to different music, gaining weight, building muscle, slouching, pretending to like girls – but nothing’s really worked. Now, at the age of twenty-five, I’ve given up trying. Yes, I’ll swear like a stevedore, but I refuse to heckle; I’ll belch in public, but will refrain from farting; I grow hair on my abdomen, but not on my calves; I’ll eat your meat pie, but not your vagina. I’m a compromised failure of a man.

  *

  My siblings are fond of reminding me that the signs were there from the start. There is an infamous family video we sometimes bring out at Christmas. It shows my four siblings and me, between the ages of two (Michelle) and fifteen (Candy), holding an improvised fashion parade through the living room. My mother never got rid of clothes back then. Pantyhose, old bath-robes, hideous socks with ruined elastic – she kept them all. They simply went into a massive plastic tub, and voilà: Jenny’s Bucket of Fun was ready. When you’re a mother of five, you need cheap entertainment.

  Much of the home video simply contains incomprehensible screaming and shrieking; we were laughing so hard the whole time. At one point, Candy – dressed like an abomination from a medieval fete – comes close to the video camera and crosses her eyes. ‘I’m a lesbian!’ she declares. Delighted, six-year-old Tammy screams with laughter, and starts calling after her: ‘Darling! Darling! Darling!’

  My older brother Andrew and I refuse to be outdone. We know we can be more entertaining than a medieval dyke in rainbow glasses. We find old, saggy brown pantyhose, and pull them tight over our genitals, past our navels, and into our armpits. We strut down the makeshift catwalk made of sofa cushions and headrests, hands on our arses, blowing kisses to the camera. Tammy laughs, scandalised and confused. Two-year-old Michelle, not really understanding what is going on, simply screams and screams and screams.

  Things get out of hand, and Andrew cruelly tries pulling off my shorts, laughing as I stumble over the cushions, still in pantyhose and high-heels. Siblings start running into each other like idiots. Costume changes behind the sliding doors become more violent and frenzied. We scream and scream. Dad, who works hid eously long nights at the restaurant, comes into the scene, looking disoriented. ‘Darling, darling!’ Tammy screams at Dad. ‘I’m a lars-bian!’ screams Candy again. Inexplicably, I spontaneously start humping the cushioned catwalk violently, moaning, pretending I’m a woman orgasming. ‘Urgh, urgh, urgh!’ I grunt. It is chaos. Then Andrew comes bursting out of the doors –

  The video camera cuts out to black.

  When we return, Andrew is on the floor, bent over and howling in pain. Someone has kicked him in the balls. Actually, from what we gather watching the video, it mightn’t have been a kick, but a punch. It seems Tammy had just balled her fists, aimed, and – without reason – cushioned them straight into his testicles.

  Andrew crouches, keeled over, crying his guts out.

  Behind the camera, Mum sighs. ‘Michelle, give your brother a tissue.’

  Andrew continues crying, and Michelle waddles over and gives him a Kleenex. It’s a touching moment. The mood has definitely changed from unhinged frivolity to sobriety. But watching the video now, I know that without a doubt, somewhere in the background, my ten-year-old self is sitting around, out of frame, happily oblivious, still wearing his dress and pantyhose, examining his nails in the sunlight.

  *

  Around the time of the fashion parade, I’d been having a successful run in childhood gymnastics, and was featured in the newspaper several times for my sporting prowess. After a while, however, the bars started hurting my hands. The exercises and demands became increasingly excruciating: 180-degree, full-circle rotations on the high bar; support
ing my entire body-weight in a 90-degree L-shape on the rings; spinning my legs around a pommel the size of a shetland pony. I was experiencing the painful transitionary period where male gymnastics suddenly became less about nimbleness and agility, and more about brute strength and courage. Lacking both of those qualities, I quit. People told me it was a girly pursuit anyway.

  Andrew recruited me into the decidedly more manly sport he was pursuing: karate. None of this cartwheel, leg-splitting crap. Now I was moving on to a sport that involved bashing the living shit out of people, which was as manly as it got. During one of my first lessons, our sensei – a white dude called Eddie – told us how in shopping centres, he always kept an eye out for potential attackers by watching his reflection in glass store entrances and shopping-centre window displays. He always kept his hands in fists, just in case.

  ‘You just never know,’ Eddie told us. ‘One of the main ways people get attacked is from behind. They never see what’s coming. Sure, you might call those attackers cowards. But calling them names won’t make any difference when they’ve slit your throat and you’ve got blood all over your shirt. Newsflash: you are now dead. So do what I do: watch for people in reflective surfaces. Stay alert. And when those bastards attack, be ready to smash their faces in.’ He punched the air in front of him. Everyone nodded sagely.

  Eddie’s presence made karate a more frightening prospect than it had to be. Even though I was fond of the kata routines, which seemed like a choreographed dance, I sucked hard at the actual bashing component of the sport. My gymnastics training afforded me the flexibility to kick a fully grown man in the head, but there was no strength behind my knocks. My frail little boy-bones meant that you could probably have broken my collarbone by tapping me on the shoulder. The freestyle sparring sessions were the worst. ‘Green-belt,’ an orange-belted girl said to me one night, beckoning me with her finger. ‘You’re with me.’ One well-aimed kick to the gut later, and I was winded. I may have wept.