The children of two cultures
Farah Farouque; 5/7/08
Growing Up Asian In Australia; Edited by Alice Pung; Black Inc, 351pp, $27.95
Everyone has battle scars from primary school. One of my worst was turning up at my school, a newly arrived child-migrant, attending her first sports day. My problem was sartorial - I wasn’t wearing shorts like everyone else in grade 3. My mother, in the Sri Lankan style, had insisted I wear a lovely short smock - garish green for my house - with a matching set of (handmade) knickers. It was the Age of Aquarius - the mid-1970s - but it wasn’t exactly the outfit to perform the mandatory somersault in.Of course, I couldn’t get out of it. The public humiliation lingers. Enduring such schoolyard challenges, as well as the much bigger ones (language barriers, discrimination and a motherlode of parental expectation) forms the basis for a new volume exploring what it is to grow up Asian in Australia.
See: The Sydney Morning Herald; No Internet Text
Despite the shrill call of some politician under the spell of elections, Australia has absorbed successive waves of migrants for more than 200 years. Asians have come in large, different waves after the white-Australia policy was phased out through the late ’60s and early ’70s. Yet there’s been a paucity of voices from Australians who claim an Asian background. Too many, perhaps, were being channelled into the doctor-dentist-lawyer and IT pathways to afford much public introspection about simply “being”.
It’s an expression of assertiveness and confidence when the experiences of a group - hardships as much as triumphs and easy self-deprecations - are shared broadly. Surely, if you’re going to be empowered as a community, isn’t it as important to migrate into the public space as much as the surgical suite?
In this anthology, editor Alice Pung has marshalled more than 50 people - some known, most
not - who grasp the ambiguities, conflicts, gastronomic delights and, yes, parental missteps that come with having a dual cultural identity. These writers engage in the realm of the profound as much as the everyday: from one living above a Chinese restaurant, another aspiring to be Wonderwoman in a super-modest Indian dress, to someone else escaping from the trauma of family violence.
There are more confusions than most for the gay-Asian contributors - Benjamin Law puts a wonderful wry perspective on his coming out and his mother’s take on the revelation. Xerxes Matza, a bloke boasting Philippine and Turkish descent, might even be the most “exotic” of the collective writers.
Celebrating “exoticism”, of course, is not the preoccupation of this project. It’s really about “us” in the universal sense: capturing an Australian-ness that is rarely reflected on TV or radio but is seen on the train, at schools or next door.
This book is more heartfelt, however, than statistical. Pung, a fine writer (Unpolished Gem) who fulfilled the destiny of an accomplished Asian by completing a law degree, sounds a warning in her introduction that none of it is meant as sociological exposition, these being “deeply personal stories told with great literary skill”.
On the writing side, this is too ambitious a claim - some of the prose is excellent while other parts are more pedestrian. A portion near the end featuring question-and-answer interviews with select tall poppies - Melbourne’s Lord Mayor, John So, and actor-comedian Anh Doh are among those featured - might be consciousness-raising but feels structurally uncomfortable.
But the selection, because of its sheer diversity, succeeds in cataloguing the not-so-linear trajectory of growing up Asian in Australia: the schoolyard bullying for the shape of your nose; the toll of high academic expectation; and the nether-status of not knowing how to communicate with your non-English-speaking grandfather. Or, even, wearing a dress to sports day. The shared experience is solidifying.