The Bureaucracy

I have been filling out forms, lately.

I am terrible at filling out forms. Especially important ones that relate to me. I am very good at filling out forms for other people. After all a lot of my daily work involves form filling. (The life of a lawyer is a glamorous one, my friends.) From when I was young, I filled out forms for my parents and translated for them: Social Security forms, mortgage forms, citizenship application forms, medical forms. You name it and I have probably filled it out.

The form currently occupying my time is my "Becoming a UK Lawyer" form. It has more illegible crossings out on it than any I have filled in so far. I peer at the question and think: What do you mean? Does that apply to me? I recall having similar difficulties when applying to become an Australian lawyer. Perhaps it is the last way the system can weed out the unsuitables: If you cannot fill out this form, buddy, you're probably not cut out to be a lawyer.

The section on forms in the UK that bother me the most are the 'diversity' questions. A limp appendage to the rest of the form, this part comes last. There is a tick box (yes/no) for whether one has a disability and then a blank space where one can be artful in the description of one's deviation from the able-bodied world. Next, is my favourite question:

Please describe your ethnic background.

Instead of a few blank lines, like the disability question, there are 8 or so tick boxes.

They are:-

1. White / Irish
2. White / British
3. Indian
4. Pakistani
5. Bangladeshi
6. Chinese
7. Mixed Race
8. White / Other

I am flummoxed by these choices. I am exceedingly reluctant to tick the "White / Other " box. So I don't. I'm not white. But I do fit into a lot of 'Other' categories. Instead, I write in the empty space: Vietnamese. There, I am recognised. That part of my form will probably just be discarded as it cannot be inputted into a database and will therefore count as "no response".

I love the Mixed Race choice. You just tick it and then there's nowhere for you to say what mixture. It is as if, once you are a mongrel, the ethnic heritages that go to make up YOU are irrelevant. Mixed Race is a category of itself. And perhaps it is: an additional layer that is more than its composite parts. Nevertheless, I expect the parts that make up the whole are important to the individual. Important enough to be put on a form, anyway.

Ghosts - A film review

This is an excellently made film, telling a very sad story.

I think the IMDB plot precis is quite amusing: "A young Chinese girl is smuggled into the UK so she can support her son and family in China" and it does not, by any stretch of the imagination, capture what the film is actually about.

The film is a fictionalised drama based on actual events that some of the actors, including the lead "young Chinese girl", experienced. The official website has a better synopsis, but still calls the lead a "young Chinese girl". I don't mean to go off topic, but honestly, the lead - Ai Qin - has a young son - aged about 3/4 years (but maybe older as she takes him to school) when she leaves China at the beginning of the movie - and about 5/6 years at the end of the movie. She can't be a girl. She just can't. (here I stamp my feet - that's how good my argument is)

Ghosts is about Chinese illegal immigrants in the UK, brought sharply and shockingly into the news when 23 Chinese illegal immigrants drowned while cockle picking in Morecambe Bay on 5 February 2004.

The film opens with a van full of Chinese people, driving across a grey beach, they pick cockles and the water swirls around them until all are stranded atop the van, dark waves menancingly rocking the van side to side. A shivering few use a mobile phone to call their family, and the "young Chinese girl" sings a song to her son, which segues us to the beginning of the story. We follow Ai Qin from her negotiation of her fare and passage in China, through her six month smuggled transit to UK and then in her housing and factory and farming jobs with a fake work permit, culminating in her work cockle-picking and its fatal consequences. These Chinese immigrants have indebted themselves to their smugglers, and must work to pay back their debt, send money home and cover the cost - usually exhorbitant - of their accommodation. At the end of the film, we are told that many of the families of the Morecambe Bay victims are still repaying their debts, and there is a fund that one can donate to, to assist the repayment.

There are a lot of illegal immigrants in the UK. At the moment, there seem to be a lot of concern about Polish immigrants. The newspapers reported recently that there were probably twice as many Polish immigrants in the UK than the authorities were aware of.

The use of the term "illegal immigrant" is interesting of itself. The people depicted in Ghosts are not, to my mind, illegal immigrants. They are trafficked persons. They have been misled, misinformed and are treated as no more than commodities; this is neatly symbolised by their passage inside the hull of a shipping container. They are exploited by the persons who have brought them to the UK, and by the persons who 'look after' them in the UK. I was very impressed with Nick Bloomfield's representation of Mr Lin - the head of the Chinese workers that the lead character is placed with. He is exploiter - but he, too, has his own difficulties in the UK. He swaggers when we see him first, but his eyes cloud over and his shoulders droop as he struggles to find work for himself and his fellow immigrants.

The film touches upon a number of issues, which provides a real-ness to the experience of Ai Qin. There is racism, of course, but there are also moments of fun and camaraderie: although I am not so persuaded that a day apple-picking is actually fun. Racism is depicted in many forms: from the mundanity of Ai Qin's fake work permit bearing the picture of a another Chinese woman, to the neighbours who spit on the ground as the Chinese immigrants walk past, to the group of English cockle-pickers who assault the Chinese immigrants for picking in "their spot". The film title is also apt - and with myriad interpretations: coould it refer to what the Chinese immigrants themselves call white English people, or does it refer to their unseen status as illegal immigrants?

Underlining Ai Qin's precarious position is the constant threat / offer of prostitution. There is another woman in the illegal immigrant household: she is Mr Lin's lover and she does not like manual work. She may also be the lover of the white English landlord, who comes by in a doof-doof car, with swinging gold chains to collect the rent (in cash of course). She giggles and pouts, in a cheong sam, on his lap at a party. You wonder who is exploiting whom in this interchange, and how neither of them will budge any stereotypes about the other.

There is also the very interesting depiction of the inhumanity behind factory processed meat: Ai Qin works in Sainsbury's packing duck and maybe chicken too. Ai Qin is not involved at the killing stage, but even the treatment of the duck meat is disturbing. It is strange to use the term 'inhumane' because the animal is not, obviously, a human and yet it is inhumane treatment. The duck meat is no more than a commodity, and it is mass produced. I am not articulating myself very well here, about this. I have long been concerned about the mass production of meat, the way the end product is so divorced from its living reality. The mass production of food leads to inhumane conditions for the humans involved in the production, and for the animals, too. This is another blog post, however.

Not long after I saw this movie, I read an article in the newspaper about Vietnamese illegal immigrants who worked inside homes owned by Vietnamese gangs looking after crops of cannabis.

Two things leapt out at me when reading this article. The first was the awareness that the poor illegal immigrant (probably trafficked person) left to mind the crop would be the one who took any punishment meted out. The second was this paragraph:

The police have become so concerned about the criminal gang connection that they have warned landlords and letting agencies of the dangers of renting property to apparently innocent Vietnamese people.

In fairness to the article, the following paragraph warns about potential breach of anti-racism laws. But that's a bit scare-mongering, isn't it? Yes - there are Viet gangs in London (and probably elsewhere) producing drugs. But you know, some of those apparently innocent Vietnamese people are innocent Vietnamese people. And some of those apparently guilty Vietnamese people, like the people the subject of Ghosts are not as culpable in their own misfortune as they would appear.

Xenophobia (please explain?)

I do like the UK. I really like London. I'm glad I don't live in London, but I love its buzz, the tube, its architecture, museums, galleries, and its diversity. Just in small doses because I surprise myself by preferring rural things.

In any event, one of the lovely things I had noticed about UK - in general (and not just London in particular) - is that it is reasonably diverse. When we touched down at Heathrow I was gobsmacked. It might have been the jet lag but I felt as if I could stand in the middle of that ariport turning around and around, just to watch it all. There were so many people of apparently different ethnic groups, cultural groups, religious groups, disparate social classes - it was wonderful. Of course, security would have moved me on so I diligently queued, answered Her Majesty's customs' questions, grabbed my bags and then went wandering through tunnels covered in those HSBC 'what's your perspective?' ads to catch a bus to my ultimate destination and new home in the UK (which I like to think of as the Mother Country - but then I grew up on a diet of Shakespeare, John Donne and Chaucer, and I can sing William Blake's Jerusalem with frightening gusto).

But in diversity, there is ugliness. Which leads to some wonderful examples of unique and innovative legal reasoning, balanced with wise judgment (I can hear you cheering):-

In the case of R v Rogers (On Appeal from the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division)), the House of Lords held that using the words "bloody foreigners" and "get back to your own country" could transform the offence of using abusive words and behaviour with intent to cause fear or provoke violence, into the racially aggravated form of that offence.

What the charming Mr Rogers did was yell the above words of abuse at three Spanish women who were blocking his path, before "aggressively pursuing" them into a kebab shop where they took refuge from him. Counsel for Mr Rogers argued that, had Mr Rogers called the three women perjorative words identifying that they were Spanish or otherwise from the Iberian peninsula, then that would have made what he did a racially aggravated offence. But his use of "bloody foreigners" and "get back to your own country" was motivated by xenophobia, not racialism, and therefore could not be an offence.

Clever, huh?

Luckily, the House of Lords is brimming with clever men and one woman (who by the by wrote the main decision) and they said that "the definition of racial group extends beyond a group defined by colour, race or ethnic origin. It encompasses both nationality (including citizenship) and national origins." Baroness Hale (or as I like to think of her, Law Lord Brenda) also said that the aggravated version of the offence is intended to deal with the mischiefs of "racism and xenophobia. Their essence is the denial of equal respect and dignity to people who are seen as "other". This is more deeply hurtful, damaging and disrespectful to the victims than the simple versions of these offences. It is also more damaging to the community as a whole, by denying acceptance to members of certain groups not for their own sake but for the sake of something they can do nothing about."

I think her judgment is wonderful. And I have nothing to add to it, except for slow nodding of my head in awe at her simple, yet sage, words.

And I've heard those words plenty of times, directed at me. Although now I guess I am a bloody foreigner.

I'm back!

But I make no promises about regularity of posting because of good reasons and stuff.

I am in the UK! It is cold - although getting less cold. There are all kinds of mundane things I could tell you about how I've been and what I've been up to and and and ... but why?

Let me tell you some other things instead.

My favourite exchange so far on a topic related to some of the topics of this blog:-

Random woman in the store: Are you from the far east?

Me (honestly innocent, rather than just being smart): [thinking hard. I'm not very good at geography]. Um. Well I guess it depends which direction you are heading to. [smiling because a stranger is talking to me] But if you mean what country, I am from Australia.

RWIS: [looking perplexed] Sorry? I meant are you from The Far East. You know where Orientals come from. I would like to travel to the Far East some day.

Me [realisation dawns; now being smartarse]: Oh. Right. Yes. No. Maybe. Kind of. Not really. I guess Australia is east of here. But in those terms, it is probably the Near West, rather then the Far East. har har.

RWIS [looks at me again like I am lint on her clothes ie. how did that get there? it wasn't there when I left the house this morning]: mmm.

Me [brightly, a little too brightly]: Nice to chat. See you later!

My next favourite exchange, to show that I am a little clueless, and unrelated to the topics of this blog other than that it is about ME:-

Me: May I please have a cheddar cheese sandwich with red onion, tomato and capsicum?

Sandwich-gal: Sorry?

Me: A cheddar cheese sandwich with red onion, tomato and capsicum.

Sandwich-gal: I don't understand?

Me [a little louder and a little slower, after all I have an Australian drawl (or so they say)]: A cheddar cheese sandwich with red onion [pointing], tomato [pointing] and capsicum [pointing].

Sandwich-gal: Oh right. A cheddar cheese sandwich. Would you like any salad with that?

Me: Yes please. Red onion. Tomato. Capsicum.

Sandwich-gal: [very slowly] Red onion. Tomato. And what else?

Me: Capsicum.

Sandwich-gal: Sorry?

My partner steps in: Pepper.

Me: Ooh yes. I would like some pepper too.

Both my partner and the Sandwich-Gal looks at me like I'm thick.

When we sit down, my partner patiently explains: Oanh, they call capsicum pepper here.

Me, to show off that I know things: Oh yes, and zucchini is courgette and eggplant is aubergine, and they have a real funny name for snow peas. Mangy something.

My partner: Mange tout. Means ready to eat in French.

Me (still stupid and blithely munching sandwich): Yes. Isn't that odd?

Only after my coffee did I realise how dumb I'd been.

Welcome to the mother country, Oanh. They do things differently here. *smack forehead*

A Goodbye Post

In my travels around the web - I was working really hard today, honest - I found this site.

The Migrant Project seems like a very interesting one. This is a little something from their manifesto:

The Migrant Project is a unique, interdisciplinary arts project, developed by a collective of Australian artists from a variety of cultural and artistic backgrounds, discovering and reassembling the untold stories of Australia’s past and present.

I am reminded of a day I spent at the National Archives in Canberra. I had planned myself a little 'Nationals' tour (only one day free in Canberra): the National Archives (half an hour), the National Library (1 & 1/2 hours), the National Art Gallery (2 hours), lunch (1 hour), the War Museum (1 hour), plane home. It did not quite work out like that because the Archives had an exhibition of the lives of people who first arrived in Australia as emigrants and who lived initially in a migrant community at Bonegilla. It was a fascinating exhibition and I spent about 3 hours there.

Each time I see things like the Bonegilla Exhibition and the Migrant Project, one half of me is inspired, and the other half exhausted. My desire to document my family story and, indeed, to find out more about my family story is re-invigorated. On the other hand, the time evidently put into these projects and the sheer talent that surpasses my own wears me down.

The Migrant Project poses this very interesting question:

In what ways do we forge a hybrid sense of self between our different identities, our different senses of home and belonging and the many identities we possess, the communities we straddle?

This blog started out telling snippets of my family story. It's morphed into all kinds of things - a little about books, a little about law, a little about race/ism, a little (probably more than I intended) about me.

In many ways, I have found it impossible to separate my Viet refugee past from my current life.

The nature of blogging itself does not assist me to keep separate stories of my past, from stories of my present. I began to worry, as I realised that people were actually reading my blog, of revealing too much about people who had not agreed to have anything at all revealed about them, to an unknown audience. It began to be safer to tell stories of my present, in which only (or predominantly) I - who had explicitly agreed to having things revealed about me and who was (mostly) in control of the revelations - figured.

I am a hybrid - not only of my Viet-ness and my Australian-ness, but also of the different identities of Oanh the daughter, sibling, aunt, partner, lawyer, reader, feminist, etc. I live a digital, and a non-digital, life. You, too, are a hybrid.

I have documented, and will probably continue to document, the transgressions between the me who aligns with my family and cultural expectations of me, and the me whom I think of as more truly myself. It is the cultural straddling I (and others) do, and suspect will always do, that intrigues me. I do it mostly unthinkingly. Have I forged a hybrid sense of self, or has it just arisen?

I am moving to the UK - a kind of confused reverse Australian migration. I will soon be struggling for a sense of home, and definitely for a sense of belonging. That won't be anything I have not done in the past, but it will be interesting to do, equipped as I am now, with the verbiage of theory. I will soon have no family and very few friend reference points for my identity. I will be behaving amongst people who will have no pre-conceptions about how to expect me to behave in any given situation (except my partner, of course, who has years of pre-conceptions, now). It is why travelling is so exciting to people, I think, this opportunity to re-create.

For my parents, my moving is not quite travelling. I wonder if they view this move as akin to their migration to Australia. It is not, of course, as I reassure them of at least 12-monthly visits home. That in itself, and the immediacy and simplicity of communication unknown when they left Viet Nam (and complicated by other factors too), makes what I am doing now, conceptually very different to what they were doing then.

This is my goodbye post. Not because I am leaving blogging forever, but, because, circumstances being as they currently are, I will need to have a blog hiatus of at least two months, maybe more. Moving across the world is time-consuming. I will probably still be reading and commenting but suspect that, too, will be sporadic. A break will be a good opportunity to think about the direction and purpose of this blog, and to return, hopefully, with a clearer idea of what I want from my blogging or an epiphany that such clarity is not possible, nor even desirable, for me.

chao.

Review: Parable of the Sower

by Octavia Butler

Don't you hate reviews that tell you nothing about what the reader thought of the novel, and just gives you a precis of the novel itself? Well, I'm not going to do that. If you want a precis, here it is.

If you want to know what happens at the end, you can google "Parable of the Talents", which is the sequel to "Parable of the Sower". I've not read that yet. But vague information you glean on Talents, well tell you the conclusion of Sower.

***

It's been a long time since I've read much new (to me) science fiction. I think at some stage there was a glut of science fiction in my life and the only way to move on from that was to cease reading it altogether. Like fantasy, there is too much rubbish out there. I get disheartened when I pick up a novel, read a few paragraphs to discover appalling writing style or bland story or fetishism of gadgets (sci-fi) / medievalism (fantasy) / magical worlds (also fantasy). Nothing is wrong with each of those things of themselves, they just don't speak to me. And yes, I am using a broad brush to tar sci fi & fantasy with accusations of appalling writing and bland story-telling. Other genres are equally culpable.

Nowadays, I read science fiction only on well-trusted recommendations. Recommendations from people who know my reading proclivities. So when my partner borrowed a novel by Octavia Butler and, after reading it, duly declared that I would enjoy it, I happily picked it up. I found myself a couple of days later reading the last chapter while I was walking home, dodging fellow walkers, cyclists, park benches and the occassional overgrown plant.

This is excellent science fiction writing. Octavia Butler has a dystopic vision of a world, that could easily be our world in 20 years. It is unexplained why the world has descended into anarchy; the sense of an ordered society is within living memory and there are remnants of governed civilisation: presidents and grocery stores. Good science fiction, to me, reveals flaws in our current society. This is a novel about civilisation. Many things that are wrong in our current society are depicted: racism, self-interset and greed, environmental damage, sexism. This dystopia is complex and comprehensive: it is not one thing that has gone wrong, but many. Octavia Butler depicts a violent and raw society; one in which the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is attempting to build a new world. I really enjoyed the focus on the minutiae of self-sufficient survival: water, food, clothing, agricultural skills.

Lauren creates a religion - Lauren would say that she is articulating the truth as she discovers it - and views the world around her with an incisive and pragmatic eye. The stragglers who form Lauren's travelling companions are a mixture of the different races that comprise American society: African-American (Lauren herself), white, Latino, Asian. The explorations of how each of these individuals have survived are fascinating, if somewhat simplistically presented. Their individual stories are related in one hit, rather than revealed. Only one character is given the joy of unravelling his past throughout the novel.

Lauren is also a character created from an idea of Octavia Butler's about how society could be improved. In an essay on NPR about the UN Racism Conference, Octavia Butler raises the notion of empathy and whether this would enable society to be more tolerant, whether fewer wars would start if everyone experienced the pain that they inflicted upon another person.


"The point was to create, in fiction at least, a tolerant, peaceful civilization -- a world in which people were inclined either to accept one another's differences or at least to behave as though they accepted them since any act of resentment they commit would be punished immediately, personally, inevitably."

It is a concept more immediate than karma. Instead of the civilization, Octavia Butler creates just one character: Lauren, who is a 'sharer' - she feels other people's pains and pleasures.

It's an interesting idea, but one that Octavia Butler was ultimately pessimistic about.
She says:
"[I]n real life, what would make us more tolerant, more peaceful, less likely to need a UN Conference on Racism?

Nothing.

Nothing at all."

Octavia Butler cites contact sports and schoolyard bullying as examples for why sharing pain isn't the solution. We're a hierarchical civilisation and "[t]here is, unfortunately, satisfaction to be enjoyed in feeling superior to other people."

I think that it is not only our baser instincts that mean we are willing to inflict pain, and Octavia Butler explores this aspect in her novel. Even if we felt the pain that we inflicted on another person, there would nevertheless be situations in which we would continue to inflict that pain. Pain is part of living. And there are things that are, in the end, more important to us than not experiencing pain. In the novel, for example, Lauren herself is willing, and quite able, to inflict significant pain on other people, sometimes to avoid further pain to herself, sometimes to prevent pain happening to other people.

The theme of shared pain makes for a very interesting exploration of the dystopia that Octavia Butler creates: in a society in which pain, suffering and human's baser instincts prevail, what, exactly, assists us to transcend it? I am taken with this idea, and I would like to see how Octavia Butler explores it in the sequel.

Here's something else Octavia Butler says that resonates with me:-
"Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned."

White Wash

I am slowly turning white.

Yesterday, I looked down at my belly while sitting on the toilet and there was a patch of white, roughly 1 cm squared, to the left of my navel. I scrubbed at it. It peeled away like old paint.

"Must have been toothpaste," I thought. "Will be more careful in future."

Throughout yesterday, I found patches of white all over me. Some of it was on my clothes, but most of it was on my orange-toned skin. I was perplexed. When I do my teeth of a morning, I can be vigorous. I am often running late for walking to work. But I certainly was not wantonly flicking toothpaste all over the bathroom and myself. Especially as I was dressed and ready for work (sort of).

Today, I was more careful in the bathroom. As I sat at work - reading, typing and surfing the net (I mean researching) - I notice a streak of white on my left forearm. As I turn my arm around, I see little spots of white. Whatever I have done now, I can't scrape these off so easily.

There are the tiniest spots on my right arm, too. I wonder if it's permanent, if it will spread.

People have described my skin tone as 'olive' and I cannot see how this is correct. No olive I have ever seen has been a kinda browny orange, with streaks of blue and some blotches of red. Olives are either green or a purple-tinted black.

Some have described me as yellow, but I am sure that my skin colour looks nothing like a banana, or the sun as drawn and coloured by children. And I don't think they were referring to my courage (or its lack).

I think that I am definitely orange(ish). Or brown. Or brown with an orange base. Or orangey brown. Anyway, my skin is definitely dark(ish) South East Asian coloured. I am not fair like most of my sisters. I am of fishing stock, and my colour pigment is there to protect me so that I can spend most days sorting through the fish that my father, brothers and cousins have hauled in. I was obviously meant to remain in Viet Nam, and live the fishing life. Or failing that, perhaps the farming life. My fairer sisters were destined for distant shores, less physical labour type lives. Oddly enough, my parents took all of us over with nary a thought for what our skin colour indicated we were fated to become.

These days, of course, I sit inside an office for much of the sunlight hours. The sun slants in through my office window (yes, I've got the window seat) but it is barely enough to warm me, let alone to justify my skin colour. Its greatest effect is in the afternoon, when it glares so horridly from the reflection of the other huge glass covered buildings that I am forced to close my blinds.

My mother wastes precious breaths telling me to stay out of the sun. I do not waste any breath telling her that I don't actually spend much time in the sun anymore. As a child I was often out in the yard, climbing trees and chasing after frogs (in winter) and lizards (in summer). I was a dark brown back then, and I would get darker as the days got warmer. Um often stuck her head out the back door and hollered for me to come inside. I always pretended not to hear her.

When I was in school and playing sport, Um always berated me for the colour my skin would become, darker and darker as the netball season drew to its exciting conclusion (we were never in the finals, but always made it to at least the quarter finals).

I tried to tell my mother that my skin tone was not my fault! I had no conscious control over what colour my skin was. If I was feeling especially rebellious I would tell her that it was HER fault, or perhaps my father's, if I was not beautiful rich-person white but dirty peasant brown. She would retort with the example of my sisters, very few of whom played sport or chased lizards and frogs. I would scowl.

Years inside an office and I might, after all, be turning white. My skin tone is still orangey-brown, brownish, orange-based etc. But I keep discovering these patches of flaky white.

My mother would be so pleased.

Bloggable event

I'm back! and I'm ... sleepy.

I am finding myself un-inspired to post. Predominatly because I have been reading heartfelt and heartrending posts from other, better writers than me. I'm curling up in a little ball of awe and self-doubt.

But onwards with the me-blog nevertheless. I've always been a battler. I was actually much more inspired to write posts during the Film Festival*, but, alas, sloth did beckon and I did obey.

* when I have sufficiently rested, and digested, I'll tell you all about it. I'm still suffering visual/aural exhaustion.

***

Bloggable event # 1

During one of our many speedy meals at (usually Asian) restaurants over the past few weeks, the (Asian) waitress said to me in surprise or shock (I was not sure): You've got a full on Aussie accent!

These things don't bother me so much any more. Depending on the tone and the speaker, I am usually amused and only occassionally bristle in offence.

I replied: That's because I am a full on Aussie.

The waitress exclaimed: No! Really? And, wittily, I said: Yes. Really.

Bloggable event # 2 -

I attended a law function and was seated at a table with a number of legal luminaries. Naturally, I introduced myself to the (not-Asian) woman beside me, whom I did not recognise. I stuck my hand out and said my full name. She stuck her hand out and said: Are you from Inala?

For those not in the know, Inala is a suburb of Brisbane wherein resides a large proportion of the Viet-Australia population of Brisbane. It's a wee bit notorious.

I responded, not unkindly but certainly in reprimand: No. I am from [the firm of lawyers that I work for].

She replied: No, I meant do you live in Inala?

At this, I gave up. Unkindness here I come. Actually, [her given name], I knew exactly what you meant. And then I turned away and managed to not speak with her for most of the night. I don't think she really wanted to speak with me, either. I hope she saw me walk over to the most luminous legal luminary present and have a friendly, comfortable chat.

Bloggable event # 3 -

On Tuesday lunch at a café, owned by an Asian woman, staffed by all and sundry. My (Asian) friend and (Asian) I were paying the bill, when another woman asked the owner (who was on the till) if the café would be open tomorrow, being the Ekka "People's Day" public holiday (it's a quirk of Australia).

The owner said: oh no! and laughed. We Asians like our businesses to remain open when other people shut. Then she turned to my (Asian) friend and (Asian) me and said: don’t' we?

I blinked at her in surprise and looked over at my friend. I am a lawyer at a middle-sized firm. She's an accountant at a large firm. The people who patronise this café are people who wear suits and work at the various businesses in Brisbane's 'prestigious' end of town, and I know the owner knows that a lot of her regulars are from the law and accounting firms round the area. Sometimes she serves me after serving someone else, even though I was there first, and says gratingly and apologetically, that was so and so from some large national firm. And I always want to say (but haven't yet been brave enough): I know and I really don't care. I was first.

***

So, what do these events tell me?

Event # 2 made me angry, but events # 1 & 3, which made similar assumptions about my Asian-ness did not raise any ire. A little amusement, and perhaps a raised eyebrow. (Okay, maybe a little ire.)

Looks like I'm racist too.

Love & Vertigo

A Novel by Hsu Ming Teo

I've had this book on my 'to read' list for a very long time.

I have a little black Book, with artist's acid free paper inside. I carry this little book with me almost everywhere I go and when I stumble across a book, or when I see someone else on the bus or in a park reading something that looks interesting, I note the title & author down. Sometimes, I ask other people to write books down for me. I read in circles and tangents, following authors I like and recommendations from other people.

When I first met my partner, and we were having meetings at cafes to establish whether we were going to become friends, lovers or just not bother, he always had a book to hand. It was one of my little check-ups: I would occasionally turn up just a little bit late and guage his attitude to waiting. The man who kept looking at his watch and had nothing else with which to occupy himself was not for me. The man who, like my partner, had extracted a book and stuck his nose into it before my falsely tardy self appeared got a big 'tick'. I asked him to write a few recommended books into my Book for me to look up and read, eventually.

Hsu Ming Teo's Love & Vertigo was written into my Book, along with a number of other excellent Australian novels, by a poet former friend. The friend is former because she has moved away to another state and we have both been remiss in keeping in touch. She is, I am pretty certain, still a poet.

For some reason, I could never find Love & Vertigo – it was never at the library and I must have been looking in the wrong places in bookstores. I must admit, the title repelled me as well. I did not really have any idea what the novel was about, but I was not sure love and vertigo, together, were things that would capture my imagination.

I was wrong.

Love & Vertigo was an excellent read. Lyrical and humorous, it deals with the reminiscences of a young woman uncovering and telling her mother's life after her mother's suicide. Immigrants to Australia, her ethnic Chinese Malaysian-born father and Singaporean mother have an unhappy marriage and are dislocated in the Sydney suburb they find themselves in. The narrator and her brother absorb and reflect their parents' unhappiness. The novel reveals the disparate searches for Love an individual within a family undertakes and the multifaceted meanings of Love. And the Vertigo? Symbolically, it was the confusion felt by all the characters in the book with their expected cultural, gender and relational roles: obedient Chinese children, submissive wife, breadwinner husband, alienated immigrants.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel – it was incredibly well written and insightful. I finished the novel late at night, my partner asleep beside me. I sobbed through the final chapter: so much of the guilt and self-recrimination were familiar to me.

Hsu Ming Teo captures and documents experiences that I am sure are common to persons ethnically different from the mainstream, or from a family with roots in East Asian and Confucian ideology. And she also uncovers universal aspects of family relations, misunderstandings of love and self, the struggle of the developing individual with the expectations of family and society.

I am sure, had I read this novel in my teenage years, it would have been highly formative for me. It's too late for such a novel to become integral to my person – not any fault of the novel, just that I am quite fully developed in cultural, relational and gender understandings of my own identity – but I was nevertheless moved by the writing.

I eagerly anticipate an interview with the author, to be published in the very first edition of Peril, an Asian Australian journal.

Anonynmity in Hoi An

This is one of my favourite photos of me. Mostly because I don't really look like that. And it's such a well composed picture, don't you think?


Taken at the delightful Mango Cafe in Hoi An town. There are chyrsanthemums in the foreground, the window is painted in bright blue, a palm tree and Hoi An's main river just outside.

I had a splitting headache but loved the town. My sisters wanted to do more shopping but I wanted to watch the world go by. I'm just not into haggling when a little woodpecker is jabbering away behind my right ear.

I sat outside for a bit and chatted to three male tourists at the opposite table. The Accountant took this photo while I wasn't paying any attention.

I smile a lot - happens when you grow up and your mother is telling you always to smile. The three men were nice enough and I told them a little of my history. They were a ragtag bunch of travellers - little in common except that they were on the same tour. The youngest was Greek and had been in Australia a few months prior, the two older were from the UK and America. They were intrigued by the fact that my sisters and I spoke a mish-mash of English and Vietnamese.

After I told them we had been Viet refugees and were now Australians, the American delighted in wanting to know if I was going to visit My Lai.

I was short with my response. No, I said. Why not? He said.

I stared at him.

I don't think it is appropriate, I said primly.

He stared at me. It's your history, he said.

I looked at him quizzically, my ire growing. I could not really articulate why I did not want to see, and that it had never occurred to me to visit, My Lai. I had been shocked by his asking. Although an important part of the American War, and an iconic turning point in the rest of the world's understanding of who was really being hurt in that war, I could not bring myself to contemplate visiting a place where so much horror and agony had occurred. I can't imagine making it a place to visit, on a tour of a country. Just like, though it is not part of my culture's pain, I would never vist Auschwitz.

It was difficult enough to contemplate reconciling myself to the Viet Nam of today, let alone the Viet Nam of 1976. And what about my history beyond the war that got Viet Nam to the notice of the rest of the world? Just because the Viet Nam / American war and the My Lai massacre might be part of this man's guilt and understanding of Viet Nam - it wasn't mine. I didn't quite know, and don't know still, what is my understanding of Viet Nam. (My guilt is more explicable.) But there's more to it than the War.

I don't recall my answer after that. Some muttered politeness and we left.

Fetishising Asian-ness

I was going to call this post 'asian fetish' but then I got worried about what people might google and come up with. In any event, I read this story which is both humourous and sad, and it made me want to respond. But because I babble and comments are meant to be brief, here I am responding in a little web-room of my own.

My partner is not Asian. Although it has been suggested that he is Asian looking (his eyes, though blue, are almond shaped). We regularly have dinner at a Viet restaurant near where we live and were there beside a table at which sat three east Asians - I am not sure from which specific country - one man and two women, all roughly my age-ish.

The tables, like many Viet restaurants, are set reasonably close to each other. I am notorious for eavesdropping on other conversations - something about having once read that if you want to be a writer, than you should observe conversations - but it would have been quite difficult not to overhear. The conversation was about a movie called Glitter which I think was one with Mariah Carey in it. I tuned out. But I tuned right back in again when I heard - "There's another Asian girl with a white boy."

The speaker made the comment that lots of Asian girls went out with white guys because white guys think they're hot, but Asian guys then get left with no one because no white girls will go out with Asian guys. Instead, Asian guys go 'back home' and find some girl from home to marry.

There were so many assumptions in this brief monologue that I wanted to scream - not even counting the complete non-attempt to pretend she wasn't talking about my partner and I. I could not even discuss it with my partner because then I'd be guilty of the same thing!

First of all, I was thoroughly insulted that she thought the reasons why my white partner was dating Asian me was because he found Asian girls hot. Not because I might be interesting, that we shared intellectual and political interests, a sense of partnered independence, or the plethora of reasons, some known and some unknown to me, why we might be together but because Asian girls are hot. Insert oriental or exotic.

Secondly, the idea that Asian guys get left with no one. An inference I draw from this statement is that it is the hot Asian girl's fault that the Asian guy has no one to partner with. That the Asian girl should be preserved for Asian guys only.

Oh – and as an aside which I won't delve into – why not an Asian boy?

Thirdly, that white girls won't go out with Asian guys. Has she asked a white girl? Although in my anecdotal experience, I certainly do know more couples that are Caucasian male & Asian female than I do Caucasian female & Asian male, I know a number of couples of the latter description. My favourite pair met in Viet Nam – both as travellers, he from Australia and she from a northern European country. In Australia, he has no accent and she does. And I've known the reverse fetish to occur in women, most memorably captured in the statement (said to me): I want a chocolate baby. This blog is not even go to go into the can of worms that statement unveils. Not today.

Fourthly, does she have a fear of miscegenation? Is that an implication of her words? That's also a topic for another day, boys and girls.

Finally, that the Asian guy must go 'back home' to find someone to marry. Because the entire purpose of a relationship is the end goal of marriage. But marriage is another socio-cultural assumption that I currently don't have the patience to dissect.

My thoughts in response relate to the role of women from non English speaking migrant background. I don't know which type of Asian these two women and man were or if the same place / country, whether they would consider themselves Australian or not, whether they are migrants, or indeed, anything at all about them. The one assumption I allowed myself to make of them was that they were not local – they were discussing how best to get to somewhere in the city and certainly weren't discussing the most direct route.

Here are the bare bones of a theory: Women embody culture. (That one should not be very controversial). In a diasporic or migrant community, women come to represent the continuation of the culture and traditions of the homeland. The 'loss' of women to the dominant culture is a loss the greater because it is a putative loss of the next generation. To prevent this happening, women are more strictly policed – their behaviour more circumscribed to ensure that no loss will occur. I am a feminist; I believe that, in most societies and certainly in both the societies of which I am a part (mainstream Australian and first generation Viet-Australian), women are subservient to men and women's interests are subordinated to that of men's. In most societies, women are still “the other” - the one who is seen, not the one who sees. Women's roles are still limited – not necessarily to just being a wife or a mother – but limited in the extent to which women are referable to something other than their own autonomous beings and their own autonomous desires to flourish as complete humans. There are rules about how a woman should behave – and within a first generation migrant community, there are distinct ideas about the type of woman that a migrant woman can be. Even more so than in mainstream Westernised cultures, a woman is to be chaste, family oriented and obedient. And when she ceases to be any of these things she cannot be a part of the migrant culture from which she arose.

A woman of a background different to that of the mainstream may enter the mainstream for a relationship because it does not necessarily require her to behave in strict or limited ways. Although there are probably still limitations, these may be fewer than those expected of her as a migrant woman, within the migrant culture. A man of a background different to the mainstream has greater freedoms to explore his ideas of flourishing and remain within the strictures of his culture, and may not need to seek out a relationship from the mainstream because his ideas of his autonomy are accepted within the migrant culture or community.

As the generations go on, there should be less distinction about whether an Asian girl dates a white boy and not the other way around. Because the Asian girl and white boy may be remarkably similar to each other. I have a good friend who appears Asian. She is Australian and has been in Australia longer than my partner and, though few people will ask him where he is from, they invariably ask her. She is more gracious than I am, and will tell them that her grandparents are Chinese.

I wonder how my nieces and nephews, who will be second generation and who speak only English, will navigate these rocky multi-cultural and assumption filled seas?

Where are you from?

The question is heard often when travelling, and understandably so. But I am asked this question rather often at home. The question took on a different flavour while I was in Viet Nam and Thailand – I did not mind it so much.

But in Australia, this quite banal question riles me. One particularly aggravating exchange:-

It's 6.00pm. An Asian looking girl, in a suit, is standing at a bus stop, presumably waiting for the bus. That Asian girl is reading a novel and leaning against the wall, her head excited about the possibilities of travel and a holiday in the very near future. A boy, roughly the girl's age, approaches and stands beside her. The boy keeps looking at his watch in exaggerated and distracting movements. He finally leans in towards the girl and says:

Him: The bus is late.
Me: Mm.
Him: Where are you from?
Me: I'm sorry?
Him: Where are you from?
Me: What do you mean?
Him: Where are you from?
Me: (You do realise that you are just repeating yourself, don't you?) Um, Brisbane.
Him: No, where are you really from?
Me (looking perplexed and feeling angry but remembering my partner's generosity towards people): I'm really from Brisbane.
Him: Oh, I get it.
Me (not aloud): (Do you now?)
Him: Where are your family from?
Me (sighing): Viet Nam.
Him: What are you doing here?
Me: Waiting for the bus.
Him: No, I mean what are you doing here?
Me: I live here.
Him: No, like are you studying?
Me: I live here. (repeating himself worked for him)
Him: Oh, wow. So are you from the north or the south?
Me (my generosity – what little there was – gives out. I am exasperated.): I am from Brisbane.

He laughs. As if I made a joke. I look at him. As if he is an ignorant racist. He realises at least that I don't seem to want to talk to him anymore and becomes quiet. I return to my book.

In Viet Nam and Thailand, and probably other developing nations for which tourism is one of their main industries, the question is a way of engaging the traveler, before trying to get some money out of them (usually). I find the children who call out: “Where you from? Where you from?” particularly adorable. More so when I wander over to tell them and they respond with blank or fearful or surprised expressions. I grin, they grin.

Perfect communication. Just a joyous way of saying 'hello!'

The above exchange (verbatim with some blogger licence) is a convoluted way of saying 'I'm racist and have heaps of preconceptions about Asian women, belonging, identity, and no sense of general etiquette about waiting for a bus.'