Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  *

  When I look at the finished advertisement I don’t recognise myself nestled amid the beer logos and Japanese text. I smile toothlessly as I recline on the sand, toasting an unseen person, tossing my manufactured beach-hair off my face. I look blandly sexy and completely unlike myself. The photographer has altered my already-augmented breasts even further with Photoshop, inflating them to incredible proportions. If I were built like that in the flesh, I would have been face down in the pristine white sand, unable to get up.

  I get a text message from a male friend who spots the ad on the back of a magazine: Congratulations on setting feminism back seventy years. And then five minutes later my phone beeps again, the same friend: You look hot. I try not to think about these two competing concepts. Instead I think of how the money I was paid will finally get me out of the debt I racked up on an overseas holiday.

  My two best friends kindly wallpaper my house with the ad, posting the torn magazine covers in the most unlikely places. Months later I am still finding them in my sock drawer, in the freezer and behind the washing machine. The longer I look at the photo, the less able I am to see myself accurately. Is that me? Do I really look like that?

  The worst encounter with myself comes when I invite a man back to my house for a late-night cup of tea. This is the first time he’s been in my house and we’re both a little nervous. While I set out mugs and wait for the kettle to boil he idly prowls the kitchen, looking at the family photos blu-tacked to the fridge and the under-utilised cookbooks crammed onto our shelves. When, for some unfathomable reason, he springs open the door to the microwave, I am laying in wait inside, with a smile on my face and a beer in my hand. Cheers. Bit hot in here, isn’t it?

  Three weeks later the boy dumps me for a Japanese saxophonist who can’t speak a word of English. I think of all the wasted conversations I had with him; I feel so spurned I wish I could take all my words back and use them on someone else.

  *

  I wonder what my late Chinese grandfather would have thought of his granddaughter pimping Japanese beer. It’s fair to say Grandpa did not like the Japanese. He was born too late for political correctness and had no interest in softening his opinions for public consumption.

  Every year his grandchildren brought their school report cards to Christmas lunch for Grandpa to read. He would gradually leaf through the stack in the sleepy lull between turkey and pudding, while my sisters, my cousins and I hovered around like mozzies, waiting for his words of approval.

  Every year that I studied Japanese at high school, from Year 9 onwards, my mum would remove the slip of paper showing my Japanese grades before giving my report card to my grandpa.

  ‘It’s easier this way,’ she said.

  And it probably was. The behaviour of the Japanese while occupying China featured heavily in the informal history lessons Grandpa delivered from his favourite armchair after Sunday lunches. He would start calmly enough, leaning forward sagely as he plodded through dates and places, in every way the wise and benevolent grandfather. But his oratory quickly gathered force and speed and spittle; whoever sat closest to him would get sucked in like an unwilling game-show contestant pulled from a studio audience. Grandpa would stab his finger in the air, spit out his words and eventually work himself into such a state that he was unable to speak anymore.

  The lectures were largely incomprehensible; I managed to grasp only key words: Manchuria, Kuomintang, Chang Kai-Shek, Nanking. I would try to pay attention but invariably wound up straightening the laces in my sneakers, pulling at split ends and rolling my eyes in despair. I was always impatient for dessert, which might be angel’s food cake or sweet red-bean buns, or rainbow jelly and ice-cream.

  I couldn’t understand Grandpa’s anger, and his mania made me uncomfortable. War was something that happened a long way away, to other people, a long time ago. So far I had led a happy and sheltered life, and I had no experiences that came close to helping me understand the killing and treachery he described.

  It was only later, after Grandpa passed away, when I began to read about Chinese history, that I began to appreciate what it was that he had been trying to communicate. I understood finally that he didn’t want the world to forget, but I could also see that remembering too much made it difficult for Grandpa to forgive.

  Through my reading I also realised that Grandpa had long left China for Australia when most of these events happened. His passion had been so great, and my grasp of history so poor, that I always assumed that he had actually been there. But Grandpa came to Australia in 1920, when he was just ten years old, before the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. He was so young when he emigrated that he spoke with a broad Australian accent. His assimilation into Australian life was so complete that neither my mother nor any of her four siblings can speak a word of Cantonese.

  In Grandpa’s later years he wore an Australian flag pinned to his jacket lapel every day. I don’t know what had happened to him in Australia that he felt he had to display his allegiance so prominently. I don’t know how this allegiance to his adopted country fitted with the strong connection he obviously still felt to his homeland.

  Grandpa underwent a strange transformation as he went through his eighties; he began to look less and less Chinese. His hair grew pure white like all the Anglo men his age, and cataracts gradually turned his eyes milky blue.

  *

  I often wonder in what ways life would be different if I looked less Chinese. I am the youngest of three daughters and the most Chinese-looking. Both of my older sisters have the same dark hair and eyes, but the overall effect in them is diluted and racially ambiguous. From a very young age I was used to people not realising that the white man next to me was my dad. In shops we would get treated as if we were there separately. Now that I’m older, if just the two of us go out to dinner together, I can see the other diners looking at me as if I’ve landed myself another sort of daddy, the sugary kind.

  I once told a Chinese high-school friend that I really wasn’t that Chinese. ‘You’re probably more Chinese than you think,’ she replied. I agreed with her to be polite, but I wasn’t convinced. Even you’ve been fooled by my exterior, I thought. If I was Chinese I would feel it inside – and I don’t. When I racked my brains for all the Chinese things in my life, the list I came up with was far from convincing: red packets at Chinese New Year, stir-fry for dinner, a wooden chest full of my grandmother’s old cheongsams.

  *

  The band room is crowded and dark, lit fleetingly by dim blue and red lights sweeping across our heads. I’m here with a work friend, Naz, to see an obscure Japanese avant-garde psychedelic-rock band we read about in the street press. Naz is Singaporean so I know she’ll laugh when I describe the crowd as being mostly ‘graphic designers with yellow fever.’ There’s a large Japanese contingent here as well, pressed to the front of the room, against the stage. They’re the real fans, as opposed to the culturally curious; they own the albums and know all the words to the songs.

  I get the feeling the rest of us are here purely on the hunch that if it’s Japanese and rock, it must be cool. It was a relief when all things Asian became trendy sometime during the ’90s while I was at university. We had been unfashionable for so long. In high school the coveted look was icy blonde, the clothes were from Country Road and Esprit; everyone was trying to look like they rode ponies and skied. When mainstream Australian culture decided to champion anime and sushi, when every T-shirt had to feature Chinese characters, I couldn’t help but gloat: our time had come. I was willing to forgive the murky catch-all ‘Asian’ branding just to finally be cool.

  The crowd waits restlessly for the band to come on. Smoking bans have only recently come into place in Melbourne venues and I’m not sure people know what to do anymore with their hands when they’re at the pub, or how to have conversations without cigarettes to punctuate them. We sip our beers and Naz tells me battle stories from her former days as a teenage groupie in Singapore.

  Aft
er a few minutes I notice three guys huddled to our right, conferring quietly and moving closer to us, like they’re playing a primary-school game of statues. They whisper frantically amongst themselves, then turn to stone when I look directly at them. The tallest guy, in a red T-shirt, appears to be receiving a pre-match motivational speech from his friends.

  Don’t do it.

  He does.

  Red T-shirt breaks away from his pack and marches up to us with purpose. I feel the sense of doom that comes with already knowing what he’s going to say. It’s like watching someone trip over their own feet in slow motion.

  ‘Are you Japanese?’ he asks me politely. ‘My friends and I have been having an argument about it.’

  He is earnest, smiling and looking me in the eye, genuinely seeking guidance.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I reply, slowly and carefully. ‘The Japanese girls are shorter and better dressed than me.’

  Red T-shirt nods quite seriously, making a mental note of my valuable insider information. He still looks baffled. ‘We just can’t tell which ones are the Japanese chicks.’

  There are other things I want to say on this subject, but I don’t. I’m still not over the saxophonist incident and I’m brimming with prejudices of my own. I turn my back on Red T-shirt. Naz looks like she might want to punch him; I just roll my eyes. It’s a relief when the band finally walks on stage.

  *

  If I sound bitter or paranoid, then it’s because I am. I’ve heard most of it before, in venues across Melbourne, from men in varying states of drunkenness.

  ‘I love Asian women.’

  ‘You’re really exotic.’

  ‘Are you on the Malaysian swimming team?’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  I live in perpetual fear that I’ll get caught out by a serial Asian fetishist. I snoop through photo albums to find out if lovers have dated many Asian women before me.

  I don’t know why I expect others to immediately understand who I am from my appearance, when I have never been able to draw the connection myself. I’m like a perpetual toddler batting away at my reflection in the mirror, unable to comprehend that what I see is myself. I have little hope of understanding who I am by looking at photos of myself as a Japanese pin-up.

  *

  A very odd thing happened to me when I visited China for the first time: I felt at home. It wasn’t a homecoming of the soaring-violin-soundtrack sort, but a sense of quiet comfort that I felt as I walked the streets of Shanghai and Beijing. I don’t speak a word of Chinese, but everywhere I went I could make myself understood. After months of travelling on my own in India it was a relief at least to look the same as the throngs of people around me.

  It was a surprise and a contradiction. To feel at home in a place because of my appearance, without being able to feel the connection between the person I am and the way I look. It was the strangest thing.

  Silence

  Tony Ayres

  Robert and I had an hour before the film started to find something to eat. Our favourite Italian restaurant was packed, so we drifted with the sidewalk crowd down Russell Street, past buzzing games arcades and hooded-eyed junkies. Across the road, teenagers were queuing for Billboard, where some band I’d never heard of was playing. A huge fluctuating insignia cast neon blues and reds onto shiny faces.

  We passed a little Chinese café where a few people sat mournfully over bowls of steaming noodles. My first ten years in Australia were spent in the backs of places like this, and a rush of sentimentality prompted me to stop.

  ‘Let’s eat here.’

  Robert looked dubiously at the filthy laminex tables, the plastic Hong Kong lanterns, the window display of headless and roasted red ducks hung on coat-hanger wire. How many times in the many years we’d been together had I insisted on eating at places like this, hoping to rediscover some elusive memory of childhood? How many times had he good-naturedly conceded, preferring the threat of salmonella to my ill-tempered pout?

  A girl led us to a window seat, tucking a stray edge of lanky black hair behind her ear, her teenage face shiny with perspiration. She placed two plastic-coated tomes on the crimson laminex. I was dismayed by the size of the menu. From previous experience I knew that too much choice was not a promising sign.

  The girl set a teapot, two small teacups, two bowls and two sets of chopsticks before us.

  ‘We’d like to order. Something fast, we’re going to the movies,’ I said in precise Australian-accented English. I always made a point of speaking first in Chinese restaurants, to avoid the embarrassment of having to explain that I didn’t speak Chinese.

  ‘All fast.’

  I nodded. Another bad omen. I glanced at Robert, already apologetic. Was it too late to go to McDonalds?

  We ordered roast pork, roast duck and Chinese broccoli, which is about as imaginative as asking for spaghetti bolognaise at an Italian restaurant. But after a lifetime of reckless gambling on ducks’ tongues, pigs’ ears and every variation of offal imaginable in the mistaken belief that it was my cultural heritage, I had finally learned some circumspection. At least on the first outing.

  The waitress scribbled in her notebook without glancing at either of us, then hurried back to the kitchen, where she barked out our order in high-pitched and dissonant Cantonese. Someone in the kitchen answered back, and said something that made her laugh. For a moment, her face became animated, and I realised that she was really quite pretty.

  Adjacent to us were three young Chinese men speaking in staccato Cantonese. They were in their early twenties, and each bore some mark of imperfection. One had big buckteeth. Another had raging acne scars, which he tried to cover with wisps of half-formed beard. The third was plump, with an auburn-coloured perm. They wore a mismatch of loud designer rip-offs with labels such as Versace and Dolce and Gabbana prominently featured. My guess was that these were restaurant boys, probably from Hong Kong, possibly illegal. They worked slavish hours cleaning dishes and chopping vegetables in Chinese restaurant kitchens, or hauled crates at 5 a.m. at the Victoria or Footscray markets. In their spare time, I imagined, they learnt martial arts, drove hire-purchased cars, drank cheap brandy and gambled at the casino, desperate to grasp some vestige of their own potency, to feel, through the drudgery of spattering oil and endless labour, the shiny promise of their youth.

  One of them, the bucktoothed one, caught me looking and I turned away, embarrassed, wondering what he saw in return.

  Meanwhile, Robert was watching the gathering crowd outside Billboard. He glanced at me, and indicated with his eyes to two handsome skinhead boys sauntering along our side of the street.

  I watched them swagger past the restaurant, with their matching crew cuts, bovver boots, tight jeans, braces and tattoos glowing on oily forearms, arrogant and charismatic in a loin-stirring way.

  ‘Very cute. I think we’ve got their movie,’ I laughed, referring to a recent porno we were both particularly enamoured with.

  I turned for one final ogle, only to see the taller, more muscular one staring at me angrily. A thick gob of mucous landed with a smack and oozed down the front of the restaurant window.

  ‘Fucking poofter!’ he yelled, leering into the glass. I blew him a kiss and immediately regretted it. It was the kind of thing I used to do when I was younger, mistaking it for some kind of gay activism.

  The skinhead’s face turned a low, angry mauve colour as he swung open the restaurant door, letting in a rude blast of summer-night heat. His equally indignant but somewhat mystified companion stomped in behind. Before he could reach our table, though, he was intercepted by the waitress.

  ‘You want table?’

  ‘I want to talk to that poof over there!’ he said loudly, pointing to me.

  Robert, who had not seen the kiss, was ready to spring to my defence, but I grabbed his wrist protectively. His smaller, office-bound frame didn’t stand much chance against the two skinhead thugs, whose physical charms were diminishing by the moment.

&n
bsp; ‘If you don’t want a table, you have to go,’ the waitress said defiantly and calmly.

  ‘Don’t fucking order me, slope.’ The tall skinhead loomed over her.

  ‘If you don’t want a table, you have to go.’

  She repeated each word slowly, as if to a child, as the skinhead puffed out his chest inches from her face. Without flinching, she pointed to the door.

  ‘Go!’

  The commotion had attracted the attention of everyone in the restaurant, and some of the kitchen staff had come out to join her. Outnumbered, the skinheads backed down.

  ‘Come on,’ the taller one said, grabbing his mate awkwardly by the elbow.

  With a parting stab of hatred, the skinhead glared at the waitress.

  ‘Bitch!’

  She stood her ground until they were out of sight. Then her shoulders sagged, she sighed into her chest and began to tremble. She turned towards our table. My attempt at a smile of solidarity was cut dead by her stare. I felt a flush of shame. For inciting the incident. For not standing up for myself. For letting a teenage girl defend me.

  Without anyone’s comfort she pulled herself up, straightened her spine stiffly and held her head erect. She saw the mess on the front window, angrily grabbed a handful of napkins and went outside. On the pavement, she wiped furiously at the spit, smearing it into a slimy film, then rubbing and rubbing until her intensity scorched the taint away. Watching her from across the road were a couple of bored, curious teenage punk girls.

  ‘What happened?’ Robert asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I lied.

  ‘Those idiots–’ he said angrily, and was about to continue when I snapped.

  ‘Don’t go on.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, offended.

  ‘Nothing happened. She handled them better than we could. Let’s not moralise.’