Growing up Asian in Australia

When I was growing up, we were called Power-Points. I thought it was because we were so smart and dweeby in a dynamic Microsoft-magnate sort of way. All that untapped potential! All that electrifying brainpower! Then someone pointed to an Australian power socket, and told me to take a closer look. Imagine it was a face, they said; think about what kind of face it would be. They saw two sloping lines and one straight down the middle, and thought it was hilarious. I didn’t get it - the power socket was white.

In fact, if there was any kind of ‘face’ on it, it looked vacuously cute, like most of the lead characters in the teen fiction I was reading at the time. After a while (with the exception of Claudia from the Babysitters Club books, who was Asian and funny, good at art and bad at maths), most teen fiction gave me the idea that I needed extensive plastic surgery. So I stopped reading those books and turned to John Marsden and Robert Cormier instead, who wrote with raw honesty and real feeling about coming of age.

Growing up is a funny time. During no other period will we experience so many ‘firsts’: first day at school, first friend, first love, first fear, first heartbreak, first loss, first epiphany. This anthology is a book of firsts – all from a uniquely Asian-Australian perspective. Whether growing up in the 1950s with ancestry from the gold-rush days, or arriving more recently and attempting to find solidarity in schoolyard friendship, our authors show us what it is like behind the stereotypes. Asian-Australians have often been written about by outsiders, as outsiders. Here, they tell their own stories. They are not distant observers, plucking the most garish fruit from the lowest-hanging branches of an exotic cultural tree. These writers are the tree, and they write from its roots.

The poet Horace said Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur: ‘Change only the name and this story is also about you.’ I felt this way when reading many of these stories. Compiling this anthology also made me more aware of the difficulties faced by earlier generations of immigrants - parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Even with our mastery of ‘Strine,’ those born in Australia in the past four decades find it difficult to be Asian-Australian. Imagine what it must have been like for those who didn’t and still don’t have the language. Usually, it is the next generation that feels able to put their parents’ experiences into words. Of course, they also have their own stories to tell about mediating between two cultures, and the authors in this collection explore the generational divide with insight, humour and compassion.

I arranged the anthology around loose themes, selected with a certain irony. Some sections are named for traits that have been worthy of collective national pride - ‘Battlers’, ‘Pioneers’, ‘Legends’ - and show that these heroic characteristics are not confined to those with white faces and First-Fleet heritage. Other sections playfully borrow from Australian slang: ‘Strine’ (the difficulties of navigating a different language), ‘Mates’ (stories of school), ‘The Hots’ (love and sexuality), ‘The Folks’ and ‘UnAustralian?’ (race, racism and identity). There are stories of the painful journeys we must sometimes make while growing up (‘Leaving Home’), and of journeys made in search of a recovered feeling of home (‘Homecoming’).

I also subverted the term ‘Tall Poppies,’ a term often used disparagingly, but in this instance used to cast a new light on inspirational Asian-Australians: the collection includes interviews with artists, film directors, writers, rock musicians, actors, lawyers, politicians, journalists, comedians, radio DJs, even the first Asian presenter on Play School. The diversity of our authors shows that Asian-Australians have flourished in almost every occupational field. Some sociologists have described us as a ‘model minority’ - working hard, studying hard, conforming to the expectations and ideals of the dominant culture. This can be a burden for young Asian-Australians growing up. It implies that external indicators of success - money, education, fame, career - define the value of our contribution to society. Our ‘Tall Poppies’ are included here not because they are ‘model minorities,’ but because they express, with great depth and generosity, what it is like to persist in pursuing one’s passion, to surmount racism and overcome adversity.

These are not sociological essays, but deeply personal stories told with great literary skill. They show us not only what it is like to grow up Asian in Australia, but also what it means to be Asian-Australian. And this is exactly the sort of book I wish I had read when I was growing up.

Extract published courtesy of Black Inc.
© Alice Pung