Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  The waitress returned with our meal and plonked it in front of us. We avoided looking at each other. Her tired eyes, her precocious maturity, the slump in her shoulders, gave her away as a first-born daughter. I tried to imagine her life – working at the restaurant at least twelve hours a day, six days a week, looking after her parents and younger siblings. Did she have a boyfriend? Did she go to school?

  Robert played with his food while I tentatively poked at the dry, inedible roast pork.

  ‘Sorry I snapped at you. I was tense.’

  ‘I wasn’t moralising.’

  ‘I know you weren’t. I’m sorry.’

  Robert ate his meal in the methodical, measured way that he did everything. Sipping our tea, we fell into silence. I guess Robert was thinking about all the things he had to do. The ironing he would do before bed. The phone calls he’d have to make first thing in the morning. I stared at my chopsticks, trying to remember when I first learned to use them. A long time ago, in a restaurant just like this.

  ‘We should ask for the bill,’ Robert said, looking down at his watch. I nodded in agreement, although I felt shy about facing the waitress again.

  She came back to our table, took out her notepad and absently began to add numbers. I was trying to work out her age. I’m sure she couldn’t have been more than twenty. As she waited for us to pay, her gaze drifted dreamily across the road to Billboard. The doors had opened, and a wave of youngsters surged into the venue, flushed with the possibilities of the night ahead. It occurred to me that our waitress must have to watch that door night after night.

  She caught me looking at her, and this time it was her turn to be embarrassed, as if I had caught her out. I had an impulse to say something, to touch her, but realised how ridiculously inappropriate that would be.

  ‘Thank you for before,’ I said.

  She didn’t answer. I left her a ten-dollar tip, and spent the rest of that night feeling inexplicably melancholy.

  Afterwards, I realised that what lay between the waitress and me was the silence that is the gap between two cultures. It is neither misunderstanding nor hostility, just the empty noise of two frequencies out of alignment. Perhaps it is possible to be attuned to both, but it was my fate to cross a threshold from one culture and class into another. Once that is done, there is no going back. That other world becomes a series of imaginary conjectures and ‘what ifs,’ a land you can only see if you close your eyes and squint.

  Anzac Day

  James Chong

  ‘He [John Simpson Kirkpatrick, of Simpson and his donkey fame] represents everything at the heart of what it means to be Australian.’ —DR BRENDAN NELSON, then federal minister for education, August 2005

  In high school I learned to play the bagpipes and went on to lead my band as the pipe-major. Every Anzac Day during high school I would march in the Sydney city street parade with my school’s pipe band. It was always a big and proud day, with regiments of decorated veterans marching, some of whom had fought in the country where I was born. I was proud to be a part of this heritage and to pay respect to the soldiers who had served their country in the most difficult of circumstances. I felt at times, though, that because of my heritage and the colour of my skin, I was not allowed to be part of the Anzac tradition, which to many people defines what it is to be Australian. Maybe this was mostly adolescent angst. One year, however, I encountered it in a very public and unmistakeable way. In 1992, a friend of my father gave us a video tape of an episode of the ABC current affairs program Lateline. The episode had aired just after Anzac Day, and opened with footage of the Sydney march. The camera focused on a kilt-clad piper in full highland regimental dress before zooming in on his Asian face – mine! I was intrigued and excited to see myself on television. Then the theme of the show appeared, flashed across the screen in big letters:

  TRUE BLUE?

  I didn’t watch the rest of the show. I was confused and a little hurt. I wasn’t sure what it meant (maybe I should have watched it), but I remember a lonely feeling of exclusion.

  Special Menu

  APPETISERS

  Eight cold cuts & assortment of pickled hurts

  Crap sticks on a bed of lattice

  MAIN COURSE

  Twice-cooked bear paw braised in a cauldron of silence,

  red hot to touch

  Fish lips in soup of secrecy, gelatinous and tender to taste

  Tongues sautéed in myths and stories, garnished with

  little white lies

  Bean curd stuffed with inaccuracies, served scalding in a

  casserole pot

  DESSERT

  Dainty spoonfuls of rainbow jelly of hope curdling in a

  swirl of gossip traps

  Sliced jack and star fruits to cool heated foreheads and

  temperamental palates

  SPECIALS OF THE DAY

  Wild hog knuckles red-cooked with hearts of spoiled

  children, drizzled with blackbean sauce

  Hundred-year-old hens drenched in brine of sages, chilled

  and tossed with jellyfish

  CHEF’S SERVING SUGGESTIONS

  Insulted platters of cold cuts laid out on a bed of steel

  Migrants steamed with a pinch of cultural enhancer

  In a bamboo boat of hopefulness

  Sailing towards candied shores

  Mother tongues coated over with sesame-seed oil

  Deep fried in batter, swimming in a sea of forgetfulness

  Married to a marinade of otherness

  Sticky in mouth with aftertaste of bitterness

  Glutinous rice sticking to roof palates

  Gluggy and hard to remove from between teeth

  Proceed to pick away at teeth with toothpick with some discretion.

  —MEI YEN CHUA

  A Call to Arms

  Michelle Law

  ‘You shave your arms!’

  ‘Sorry?’

  It was a particularly humid late afternoon in sixth grade and I had been left for dead at school. Teachers, maintenance staff, even the sanitary-disposal van had left the grounds, leaving me in the company of a peer that I had spoken to only once throughout the entire year (and that was only to ask if she could please stop using my treasured connector pens). She was a prematurely developed, buxom girl who spoke in a deep, husky voice and had sun-bleached hair from over-tanning.

  Let’s just say she was the antithesis of me.

  She repeated her revelation, this time with more gusto.

  ‘You shave them! That’s so gross … I can’t believe you’d do that!’

  ‘I don’t shave them!’

  I tried to explain that I was just born that way, and that most Chinese girls don’t have much hair on their arms, save for a fine fuzz. However, she had already lost herself in a state of cackling delirium – clearly overwhelmed by her own hilarity and the freakish nature of my body.

  I crossed my arms in defiance, but after realising this would probably expose their hairlessness more, made to hide them under my Lion King swimming bag, which contained chlorine-soaked hand-me-down togs that literally hung off me if I didn’t knot them up at the back. It had not been a good sports lesson; once again I was isolated in the sixth lane with a pair of flippers and a kick-board, while my friends mastered tumble-turns and learnt to open their eyes underwater. I watched them through my blurry, steamed-up, over-sized goggles, and saw their hair float-ing around them with an ethereal quality that mine, tightly contained in a cap full of baby powder, simply could not achieve. I had pleaded for hours with my mum about the cap, but she had remained adamant:

  ‘When you put the powder in, it makes the cap come off so much easier! Like magic!’ she explained.

  ‘But it looks like dandruff … or nits.’

  ‘Ai-ya! You know what herbalists say. You’ll get a headache with wet hair. Do you want to get sick from having a wet head all day?’

  ‘If it’s normal, yeah!’

  ‘What is normal, eh?’

/>   Normal was not my swimming cap. Normal was not my hairless arms, scoliosis, myopia, severe middle part, scrawny frame, inability to play sports, excellence in the string ensemble or childhood idolisation of Fa Mulan. Now that I thought about it, everything up to that point in my life seemed so incredibly abnormal compared to everyone else I knew.

  At lunchtimes, my friends chose from a selection of neat and colourful packaged foods, an apple, or a vegemite sandwich cut into little soldiers. I had soymilk, cheong-fun and flavoured seaweed. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my lunches; I just resented the reactions my so-called exotic foods provoked, such as: ‘Yuck! What is that stuff?’ and (this, to the seaweed) ‘Are you eating a piece of burnt rubber?’ While I loosened my wobbly teeth by gnawing on a preserved sea plant, my friends suctioned theirs off with Rollups and Spacebars.

  For Christmas, my teachers would receive boxes of chocolates or bottles of champagne from my friends’ parents. From mine they would receive a traditional Chinese teapot or (if they were lucky) an electronic coffee mug that sang ‘Silent Night’ on nonstop cycle and flashed tiny neon lights until the cup was entirely drained of liquid … or, alternatively, until it was smashed against the wall. The teachers never seemed to care; in fact, they couldn’t get enough of them. But I cared. How could anyone see something as tacky and useless as a carolling cup as quaint and adorable? Surely the novelty would have worn off by the time the flashing baubles began to induce epileptic fits.

  The differences did not stop there. While my friends drank Coca-Cola at home, my siblings and I were provided with a suspicious black-coloured concoction my mum branded ‘homemade coke.’ We would guzzle these treats down happily and never once questioned what exactly the ingredients were. It was not until my mid-teens that I discovered homemade coke was an infusion of various toxic-looking herbs packed with a ton of brown sugar. I felt gypped by years of lost obesity-inducing and teeth-rotting sugar trips; the fact that the herb drink was absolutely delicious was beside the point. My siblings and I seemed to be working alone together, teetering between our Chinese heritage and our incredibly Australian upbringing. I had never felt alienated by Australian culture, but I was certainly aware of not fitting in.

  These cultural differences were only reinforced by a trip made to Hong Kong some years later. I had been to Hong Kong once when I was four, but nothing could have prepared me for the cultural revelation I was about to experience. It was as if I had stumbled into a kind of extended Chinatown. Everyone behaved the way my family and I did (washing cups, plates and chopsticks with boiling tea at yum cha, and, like my father, spitting phlegm balls and shooting hardened snot into gutters and rubbish bins), meaning these actions no longer incited automatic embarrassment. Instead, I felt something I had never experienced before, and something I had certainly never consciously been seeking: acceptance. I could completely lose myself in a giant swarm of people; the anonymity, which was something I had never dreamed I might value, made me feel euphoric. The ‘stand out from the crowd’ mentality had hitherto been deeply ingrained in my mind, but for the first time I was happy just to disappear … to be invisible. However, it was purely physical appearance that allowed this; my Western side still exposed itself in the most mortifying forms possible.

  Let it be known that I am terrible at Cantonese. I can understand it for the most part when spoken to; it’s just the responding aspect I’m particularly shocking at. Considering I once asked my grandmother for a glass of spicy water (how was I to know that in Cantonese there are two words for ‘hot’?), it came as no surprise that when I tried to order at a McDonalds in Hong Kong, things were destined to end horribly. I asked the person serving me if I could please have an ice-cream and something unexpected happened: she asked me something back. I was not anticipating this and began to panic.

  ‘No, just an ice-cream please,’ I reiterated.

  She repeated her question (‘Cone or cup?’), this time visibly confused.

  Thank god my mother intervened.

  ‘She wants a cone, thanks,’ she answered for me.

  I wondered if my mum was embarrassed by me like I had so often been by her. In Hong Kong she was in her element and for once I was able to see things from a less self-centered perspective. The locals could probably smell my foreignness and in some bizarre, ironic twist I began to feel self-conscious about being Australian. I felt ashamed that I did not know more about my heritage, and even more ashamed at being embarrassed of my Australian upbringing, something that has significantly shaped my identity. I began wondering what life would have been like if I had been raised in a place like Hong Kong. Perhaps my natural talents would have flowered and rendered me popular among my peers, rather than securing my reputation as one of the token Asian girls in the class, interested in reading club and drama.

  To this day I am to some extent confused … am I more Asian or Australian? I am still taken aback when addressed by an Asian-Australian who speaks and acts like me. Following these types of encounters is a mixed sense of shame (at having been surprised) and curiosity (about whether they felt the same way). Nonetheless, having just graduated from high school and being on the brink of entering the ‘real world,’ I have become acutely aware of two things when it comes to being Asian-Australian: first, that I count myself incredibly lucky to have grown up with, and been influenced and enriched by, the best (and worst) parts of two cultures and second, that at age seventeen my arms still remain hairless, eating seaweed has now become chic, and I still cannot master a tumble-turn – a fact that I’ve finally learnt to embrace.

  Chinese Dancing, Bendigo Style

  Joo-Inn Chew

  The hall was silent. Two hundred blond and brunette heads angled attentively, ready to hear us play. Four hundred round eyes blinked expectantly. My little sister and I sat on the unfamiliar piano stool, our feet not quite touching the ground. I adjusted the sheet music that had been chosen for us. We raised our sweaty hands and launched into our duet, ‘The Asian Waif.’ Plaintive notes filled the room, along with some clumsy plonking from my sister’s left hand. The audience seemed rapt, gazing at our bent black heads, our small brown hands. They applauded warmly at the end, smiling and nodding at each other. How cute! the smiles seemed to say, as they took in our dark eyes and straight-cut fringes. A faint wave of humiliation broke over me. We had played badly but they loved us. I didn’t know exactly what an Asian waif was, but I realised it was something to do with a Chinese kid everyone felt sorry for. And that that was why it fell to us, the only Asians in the competition. We shuffled off stage. In the hallway mirror I caught a glimpse of my poo-brown eyes and flat yellow nose; then I just looked down at my feet as they slunk away.

  We were half-Chinese, growing up in a paddock in central Victoria, surrounded by fifth-generation Australian farmers. My parents had moved to the country to live out a counter-culture dream. They had met at uni, married despite the dismay of both their families, and given their kids Chinese names that only Dad knew how to pronounce. Dad had stopped hanging out with overseas students, and Mum had stopped going to church. They had new friends who talked politics and drank red wine, who experimented with nudity and curry and communal living. In this spirit Mum and Dad decided to give up their city jobs and move to the country to make a living from the land, growing organic vegetables and selling them on the highway. We moved into a mud-brick house twenty kilometres out of Bendigo. Goats were bought but escaped; the tractor failed to start; rabbits and slugs ate the vegetables. When the veggie plan fell through, Dad started importing crafts from South-East Asia and selling them at local markets. Over time he built up a jewellery business, cheap plastic earring by cheap plastic earring; Mum sold them in a shop in Bendigo, and in this way there was brown rice and curry on the table.

  We didn’t seem to belong anywhere. The kids in my country primary school had sandy hair, pale freckly skin and blue eyes that could read the board from the back of the room without corrective lenses. They drank red cordial and ate white-bread sa
ndwiches. The girls played Barbies and netball and had names like Debbie and Michelle. The boys rode BMXs and kicked footballs and were called Craig and Derrick. All of them knew the difference between the Hawks and the Magpies, and between a Ford and a Holden. They got pocket money, watched commercial TV, and had parents who made chocolate crackles for the school fete.

  My siblings and I had dull black home-cut hair and glasses that got broken when we failed to catch balls that were thrown at us. We ate wholegrain bread and drank boiled tank-water. We lurked at the edge of the playground and ate our lunch in the library, where we read the Guinness Book of Records for the tenth time. We sometimes forgot to wear shoes or undies. We drooled over everyone else’s lollies, and were perplexed by TV references, given we only watched the ABC and SBS. We dreaded school sports day, when we knocked over multiple hurdles in a row and were the only kids not sunburned at the end of the day. At the school fete we tried to bargain with the other kids, like Dad encouraged us to, but at the end of the day we took home our plate of organic fruitcake. It would be untouched, except for the missing three slices where each Chew child had dutifully eaten one before bingeing on fairy bread and toffee.

  It was hard to know if we were the odd ones out at school because we were half-Chinese, or because we had middle-class urban-hippie parents. Did we feel grimy next to the clean white girls because we had olive skin, or because during the drought we only had a bath once a week in water from the dam? Were we hopeless at sport because we were Asian, or because our family thought it was competitive and meaningless?

  We were peculiar hybrids, all three of us different blends of Eurasian, with Aussie accents and Chinese names. ‘Where are you from?’ people would ask, and it was hard to know how to answer. Melbourne? Malaysia? Here? I remember meeting Dad’s family from Malaysia. My cousins lined up, neatly dressed and fully Chinese-looking, chattering together in Mandarin and Hokkien (and possibly other languages I didn’t know), switching politely to English when they remembered us. They all pronounced my name the correct Chinese way, which I couldn’t do. At dinner they speared slithery noodles and ferociously hot chilli with expert swivels of their chopsticks. They had aced their concert-piano exams and it was clear they were going to be cardiologists or very good accountants. I sprawled on my chair with my spoon, my scabby knees poking out of faded shorts, and my woefully inadequate single mother-tongue. I suddenly remembered how I’d messed up my piano rendition of ‘Run, Sheep, Run!’ at the Bendigo piano competition. There was no way I was Chinese.