Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning after disturbing dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis (1916), quoted by Reg Mu Sung

figure 1

Reg Mu Sung

In this chapter, we shall present a second autobiography, this time by a fifth-generation male Chinese settler in Australia—Reg Mu Sung—whose family has been in the country since the 1870s, almost one and a half centuries ago. In this chapter, he emphasizes quite a few times that he and the Chinese in Australia are assimilated. Assimilation could be a personal or social fact as process or consequence, a self-declaration, an intention, a desire. Sociologists and historians have long pointed out that assimilation is one thing, but approval and acceptance by the mainstream is quite another. Identity is socially bestowed and also socially approved. While growing up in Australia, Reg lamented the Chinese Australians’ lack in numbers, possibly because size matters in terms of power, social capital, visibility, and acceptability, even assimilability. As it happens, there is a deep irony here: Chinese are instantly recognizable and visible because of skin color, the Chinese face, the Chinese body, their ‘smallness,’ but they are also at the same time invisible because of their lack of power and status. This irony of visible invisibility is the result of a strange but lethal mix of faciality/physicality and social deprivations. The Chinese face ironically renders the bearer of that face faceless, without a face, “having no face,” or lost face, which is equivalent with shame in the Chinese parlance. You are how you are treated, especially by those whose opinions about you matter a lot to you—an important fact captured by the sociological concepts of the significant other or the reference group. In a way, my sense of selfworth depends on my worthiness in the eyes of others. The externals determine the internals.

Reg continues to claim to the “fact” that he and his Chinese coethnics are assimilated into Australian society. He says it as a fact, an intention, a desire, perhaps a pledge of loyalty and allegiance to his birthplace. When he was accused of being “un-Australian” for not letting a woman “jump the queue” in a local supermarket, he felt like “a stab to the heart,” he wrote. This incident happened 20 years ago when he was 40 but Reg said, “I am still angry and upset to this day!” He continued, “The use of the word ‘un-Australian’ has become more common in current society and to me it is a code word for racism dressed up in acceptable language.”

Is Reg assimilated, or is he not? Is Australia racist, or is it not? Reg, like almost a million other Chinese settlers in Australia, has long learned to cope with overt or blatant racism by avoidance, keeping a distance, not confronting, “walking off and away.” Racism might have done underground, invisible or less visible than before, subtle, or, as Reg put it, presented in code words nicely dressed up. If victims of such subtle racism choose to ignore, avoid, and forget about it, then society can soothe its conscience and proudly say either there is no racism or it is a thing of the past; society has rehabilitated itself. Co-author Chan made this observation in his two monographs on Canada, Smoke and Fire: The Chinese in Montreal (1991) and Coping with Racism: The Chinese Experience in Canada (1987). What (rape, fraud, theft, sexism, racism) was not reported did not happen. Do victims of racism collude with society by not reporting their victimization? Do racial minorities play a part in helping society to uphold the “great white lie” of no racism?

Growing up as a Chinese boy in Australia, Reg was acutely aware of his body and his look, the former more so because Chinese boys, as a racial minority, were eager to join society, to belong. One way to do that in school is to excel in sports, which would enable one to become part of the gang, the in-group, all in an attempt to struggle for social belongingness and acceptance—or to fight isolation, loneliness, the stigma, or spoiled identity of an unfortunate person bearing a Chinese face. Perhaps, amidst the excitement and ecstasy of a football game, the Chinese face does not matter or at least it is temporarily forgotten—until he returns to the dressing room to remove his jersey, the group’s uniform and symbol of “insidedness.”

While failing up to the white men’s hegemonic hold on masculinity and femininity, what one fails in the body, one tries to make it all up in the mind. Like Doreen in her autobiographical chapter before this one, Reg, like all Chinese boys and girls growing up in a white country, tried the hardest to gain respectability in academic pursuits. He was eager to reclaim an identity that was robbed of him. Reg became a professional, a librarian. But as he might have told us in this chapter, in others’ eyes, he was a Chinese first, a man second, a librarian third, an Australian maybe a distant fourth or fifth. His Chinese look has sort of betrayed him, given him away, so to speak. Doing well in school didn’t help much either as Chinese in specific or as Asians in general all over the world are stuck with stereotypes such as being diligent, nerdy, model minority, conformist, socially inept, and so on. Chinese girls, as Doreen told us in the earlier chapter, would need to cope with a completely different set of stereotypes altogether: they are exotic, petite, quiet, docile, weak, and charming, which make them into white men’s objects of desire.

Reg shared with us many times rather disturbing anecdotes of him not feeling comfortable among the diverse groups of Chinese newcomers to Australia, the Chinese in Hong Kong, his village folks and kinsmen back “home” in China. Like co-author Ngan, Reg does not read nor write Chinese, neither does he speak Cantonese and other southern China dialects. Among the Chinese in Australia, Hong Kong, and China, he is as much a stranger, an outsider, as he is among the white Australians. His wife, an immigrant from Hong Kong, thinks he is pretending to be Chinese and considers him to be an Australian, trying “to take the best of both worlds.” She thinks being Chinese is like a thing Reg puts on and takes off at ease, like a mask, or a “min larp,”—a Chinese coat filled with cotton to keep warm, to survive the winter. Or so Reg wishes. As it happens, Reg is a classic example of the American sociologist Robert Park’s (1929) “marginal man,” who is eager to belong to both worlds but accepted by none. A stranger, adrift and homeless. Park predicted some 80 years ago the single barrier to assimilation into white society is skin color.

What about his children—sixth-generation Australians? Reg wrote this, “They are thoroughly westernized. Australia has changed with the advent of the multicultural society and the growth of the Chinese population to 700,000 (2006 census). They consider themselves to be Australian and not Chinese , but their appearance will always mark them as Chinese and how they will cope is unknown” (emphases ours). If Australia has indeed been changed for the better by multiculturalism and his children are thoroughly westernized and consider themselves Australian, not Chinese, why did Reg say, “how they will cope is unknown?”

Reg said many times in this autobiographical chapter he is “thoroughly assimilated” but he also reminded us that racism itself has changed. His children have many code words to contend with.

Reg mentioned upward social mobility, wealth or business success might possibly compensate for the Chinese’ lack because of race and skin color. He wrote, “social class and prestige trumped and overcame the problem of being Chinese and the aura of power… made being Chinese an irrelevancy.” Reg thinks, or hopes, class matters. Does it? If it does, cash-rich immigrants from Hong Kong buying up property in Vancouver, Canada, and flashing fleets of multicolored BMWs, Lexuses, and Mercedes in their front yards would not have incurred such public rage. Sociologists writing in the field of social stratification have long pointed to the crucial difference between money and respectability. Though the two often go together, the fact that money is objective and respectability is subjective and therefore can be withheld by those who are in the position to give it goes a long way in reminding us all that, plain and simple, there are many things in life that “money cannot buy.” So unfortunate, yet so very true.

Reg Mu Sung’s Autobiography

My family has been in Australia since the 1870s and I am the fifth generation but since there has been only one instance of inter-racial marriage I am still Chinese in appearance. I was born and raised in Sydney and I am thoroughly assimilated with English as my main language and Australian culture the only one I have known. Yet in spite of this my Chinese appearance sparks a reaction in white Australians that I am different from them. How does a multi-generation Chinese resolve the dilemma that although I look different from the others I am the same as them in language and values? How do I cope with the many situations where I am treated because of the way I look?

figure 2

My older brother and me

Growing up in Australia in the 1950s the factors which affected me were the White Australia Policy and the absence of other Chinese people. The White Australia Policy was a government-sanctioned policy of racism in both overt and subtle ways. The Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1968 stated the immigration policy as follows:

Admission of non-Europeans. Australia’s immigration policy is based on the need to maintain a predominantly homogenous population. It is fundamental to the policy that people coming to Australia for residence should be capable, both economically and socially, of ready integration into the community.

There was no acceptance or tolerance of difference. When I was a child I remember our next-door neighbor coming into our shop and shouting at my father that our “foreign” cooking smells were ruining his clothes hanging on the line to dry. Subconsciously you were told that Chinese people were not allowed into Australia, that you were a non-person and that you were not wanted. The psychological effect of this was a sense of not belonging and not being accepted. Since the introduction of the White Australia Policy in 1901 and the virtual exclusion of Chinese this had resulted in the Chinese population gradually declining. By 1947 there were 12,000 Chinese in Australia and they formed 0.15% of the population. Being such a small number they did not pose a threat but on the other hand this made them feel powerless as they were a minority and helpless in dealing with casual bullying. On a broader scale China was in a state of self-imposed isolation from the West from its founding in 1949 until the loosening of diplomatic relations in 1973. During this period of the Cold War it was seen together with Russia as among the great communist adversaries. Therefore there was an added stigma of being identified as a communist at a time when this vitriolic term carried even greater denigration.

The depth of anxiety about racial purity and the overarching desire to produce a white homogenised society was shown in a newspaper report from 1954 discussing the White Australia policy:

The fact that Chinese in Australia have, to a great extent, retained their racial purity and not intermarried is held, by immigration authorities, to support the view that Asians are not easily assimilated. Immigration authorities do not criticise these Australians of Chinese origin as citizens, but they go against the grain of an established immigration policy which aims to produce a homogeneous population without national groups and colonies.

A watershed occurred in 1973 when the White Australia Policy was officially abolished by the Federal Government and this psychological Damocles sword hanging over our heads was removed. There was no overnight change but the sense of foreboding of being Chinese and looking different was no longer present. When slavery was legal and institutionalised in the United States, all African Americans were viewed the same, whether they were slaves or free men. Similarly the White Australia Policy was an official declaration that the Chinese were not wanted and that they were worthless. The policy of seventy years of restricting immigration meant that the numbers of Chinese in Australia had decreased to such an extent that they no longer posed an economic or social threat. Their numbers were so small and their assimilation into the multicultural melting pot so complete that they had become part of the homogenised white Australia.

Showing the prevalence of unconscious racism in Australia, there was a popular saying which was repeated recently by Peter Costello, the former Australian Treasurer, when talking about his childhood: Don’t pick up anything in the street because it was touched by a Chinaman.

The stereotype of the Chinese in the written history of Australia was that they came in the gold rushes of the 1850s and provoked racial riots on the gold fields. At Lambing Flat in New South Wales in 1861, over 2000 European miners attacked the Chinese mining camp and 250 Chinese lost all of their belongings. This in turn led to the racial smearing by the Bulletin magazine in the 1890s, which depicted them with their vices of opium smoking, gambling and prostituting white women. The Bulletin persisted with their anti-Chinese campaign with their motto ‘Australia for the white man’ printed under the title of the magazine until 1960. The Chinese disappeared from public view except for the occasional story of them being deported. I could find no mention of me as a Chinese person in Australian history until 1975 when C.Y. Choi published his pioneering work Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia. For the first time the Chinese were significant enough to have their history recorded and I could see a part of me that had been hidden from the public view. With no public face I had avoided identifying as Chinese and now there was an alternative in being Chinese. I cannot count the number of times that I have been asked where I came from and I have always replied that I am Australian. This inevitably leads to the next question of where I originally came from and when I replied China the questioner is satisfied.

In his famous novel Metamorphosis, Kafka depicts an individual who changed overnight into a giant insect and how his family and society suddenly changed in their attitude toward him:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning after disturbing dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.

They reacted only to his outward appearance even though he had not changed internally. The way that people see you is the way that they will treat you irrespective of who you are. Your face is paramount but your identity only becomes evident through experience, sharing and familiarity. So if you look Chinese then in a white Australia you will be treated as Chinese and being different.

My great-great-grandmother was an Irish woman who had co-habited with a Chinese miner and gave birth in 1872 in rural Queensland to a daughter.

figure 3

My great-grandmother with her grandchild

My great-grandmother, in turn, married another Chinese miner and in 1895 a daughter, my grandmother, was born in the tin mining region in northern New South Wales. When aged sixteen she also married a Chinese miner who was aged forty-four and my father was born in 1918.

figure 4

My grandfather

figure 5

My grandmother

The family quickly returned to China to my grandfather’s native village of Du Tou in Zhongshan and my father spent the majority of his childhood in China and grew up more Chinese than Australian. He returned to Australia in 1930 in the depths of the Great Depression and work was difficult to find. So, in 1932, he went to China for four years and then spent the rest of his life in Australia. As my father was Chinese and born in Australia, he was entitled to a ‘Certificate Exempting from the Dictation Test,’ which allowed him to re-enter Australia without taking the dictation test designed to exclude unsuitable immigrants.

figure 6

My father’s ‘Certificate Exempting from the Dictation Test’

The Jesuits have a saying ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man’ and my early upbringing in an Australian setting shaped the rest of my life. I was born in 1951 in Sydney in a working class suburb where my father owned a small corner grocery store. Our suburb had three Chinese families and two of them owned grocery stores. These stores were ubiquitous and in our street alone there were four such stores.

figure 7

Our grocery store and home

The shop was open twelve hours a day during the week and six hours on Saturday and four hours on Sunday. My father opened the shop every day of the year and never had a holiday in forty years. As we grew up we worked in the shop from an early age, learning to serve the customers and performing many of the small duties. We would buy sugar in thirty-pound hessian bags and then repack them into smaller one-pound bags for sale. There was no self-service and we would get every item asked for by the customer off the shelf.

figure 8

My brothers and sister

As owners of the store we were part of the local community but rarely socialised with them. As a family of six children we played primarily together and our family’s social circle was our larger family network, other Chinese who were scattered around the suburbs, and perhaps informal linkages with clan and lineage members who were distant relatives anyway. Although both my parents had been born in Australia they had returned to China when quite young and had spent their childhood and adolescence in China. When they came to Australia as teenagers they felt like first-generation immigrants with Chinese as their first language and no experience of this new country. Subsequently speaking in Chinese remained their preferred means of communication and they felt uncomfortable conversing in English. Amongst the Chinese people language was another subtle marker to differentiate those from the different counties. In Guangdong the counties had different dialects of Cantonese and your language would identify your home area.

Like other first-generation immigrants they found support amongst their family and other Chinese-speaking people with whom they felt comfortable and shared the same values. One of our father’s friends was a man named Chan who had a market garden near the airport and he would cycle over to visit us. When we went to visit his home in the market gardens, I remember it was a ramshackle building made of timber with a rough floor with a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling and I thought that this was how Australians saw Chinese. Another friend of the family was memorable to this young child because when we went to visit him in his ­suburban restaurant he would offer us a new experience and start up his deep fryer and cook us spring rolls. Over the years my parents’ English language skills did not improve and they remained content to socialise with other Chinese-speaking people. As this was our family culture I did not find it strange that they socialised only with Chinese people. Yet they did not feel any affinity with recent immigrants from Hong Kong or China as they shared no common interests nor had an opportunity to mix with them socially.

A paternal aunt married a Chinese man who had come to Australia as a student and he subsequently became a successful businessman. This gave him entrée into the highest levels of society and his large house on the north shore became the centre of social activities. Australia in the 1950s was a class-conscious society and modeled itself on British society with distinct social classes based on wealth, upbringing and position. The upper classes appeared in the social pages and the middle class occupied the positions of authority such as doctors and bank managers. The working class had no visibility or power and toiled anonymously. The majority of Chinese were working class or self-employed and suffered the double disadvantage of class and race, disqualifying them from power.

Apart from the occasional activity my father maintained a social distance from his side of the family. On these social occasions they would bring out the mahjongFootnote 1 tables and the adults would break into male and female groups to play the sixteen rounds over the course of a long evening while the children would watch television. As he played mah-jong my father would smoke and drink—something that he did not do at home.

As one of four boys and two girls I did not notice any difference in the way that our parents treated us until adolescence when my older sister was scolded for not helping with washing the clothes while the boys were not asked to do this. My father was the head of the house and my mother never worked except as a housewife. Domestic duties were divided with my mother cooking the meal, my father washing up and the children helping with drying and putting away the dishes. We spent more time with our maternal grandparents who owned a corner grocery shop in a neighboring suburb. My mother ensured that we visited them regularly and one of my fondest memories is of my grandmother who was one of the sweetest people that you knew, with never a cross word. She had been born and raised in Sydney and she always spoke English with us. Due to the economic effects of the Great Depression and the lack of work in Australia, she had returned to China during the 1930s, where she had raised her four daughters in a village and, consequently, her English language was far better than theirs. In Australia my mother and her sisters attended the Chinese Presbyterian church and on one occasion when she took our family along to have afternoon tea with the minister, I remember him as an old-fashioned minister with a loud voice and an accent I could not understand.

I attended the local primary school and when we had to choose a scripture class I heard all the other children say “Church of England.” So when it was my turn I also said “Church of England” and this was how my religion was chosen. This was the predominant religion and sectarianism was rampant with Catholics still being discriminated against and non-Christian religions such as Buddhism unheard of. I was one of the brightest in my class and was in constant competition with several others in examinations. When I came first in the exams in my final year I became dux of the school, which signaled that I was the best in the school academically and there was a great sense of achievement. My siblings were average in academic achievement and apart from my being a voracious reader it was a carefree time with no pressure to perform academically in order to gain admission into a selective school. Here is my school photograph from 1957 and there are three Chinese children. Do you notice them or do they blend in?

scheme 1

School photograph

In the 1960s I went to a selective boys’ high school with two of my classmates while others went to local comprehensive high schools. I was placed in the top class and the other two boys were placed in lower classes and we drifted apart. There were only two Chinese boys in my whole year of 120. I had gone from being a big fish in a small pond to a very small fish in a big pond. Being one of the smallest boys in the school and not being very sporty did not make life easy. Schoolyards are extremely competitive and belonging to a social group made life more enjoyable. One of the easiest ways to forge social bonds with others was by joining a sports team. Sport was compulsory on a Wednesday afternoon and was divided into two streams. The inter-school competition was for the better sporting types and interest focused on the first-grade football team whose exploits were duly reported at the Monday morning school assembly. Those who could not qualify for the inter-school competitive teams played house sport—a term for pseudo-sporting activities looked down upon by everyone. I was a late physical maturer and finally in the fourth year of high school I qualified for a rugby union team in my age group and I was selected in the lowest team.

scheme 2

School football team

I had just scraped in but I was very happy. I was beginning to belong and I continued to play football in my subsequent years at school and also played cricket—a quintessentially Anglo sport with its uniform of white clothes.

figure 9

Wearing my cricket uniform

Looking back at my school yearbooks, two thirds of the contents listed the achievements of the sporting teams and there was no mention of the boys in the school and so I could not even tell you how many classes or boys there were. No wonder I felt invisible at school. The school was ruthlessly competitive in promoting excellence and those who did not thrive were ignored. My best friend arrived in the later years of high school as a German exchange student with a poor grasp of English and he always carried a pocket dictionary, which he pulled out when he could not understand a word. I think that he carried the stigma of being German with the aftermath of World War 2 and the Nazis being still an object of hatred, felt like an outsider.

figure 10

My father in the grocery store

My father worked long hours in the shop, seven days a week, and above all he wanted his children to have economic success and stability. Education was the pathway to success. During the 1960s it was becoming easier for working class children to attend university and we were encouraged to further our education. I then went on to University of Sydney where I gained a science degree in chemistry and psychology. The size of the university population made it easy to lose yourself in the anonymity of the crowds and the liberal and elitist values of the students made me feel as if I were no different. In the early 1970s the proportion of Asian students was probably higher than the proportion of Asians in the general population and this engendered a tolerant atmosphere as the visibility and presence of Asians was a sign that they shared the same values. The science faculty had huge general lectures of several hundred students in mathematics and chemistry and this placed a barrier in forming friendships. My friends coalesced around the chemistry laboratory where I spent most of my time and I would wear a white laboratory coat to psychology lectures as a mark of my youthful independence. By 1973 when I graduated, less than five per cent of my age group had a university degree which was an advantage in getting a sought-after job.

figure 11

Graduation day with my father and sister

My friendships over the years have been predominantly with white Australians as I have felt myself to be Australian and they were the ones who shared my interests and values. At work we talked about sport and gossiped about what was happening in the office and laughed at the same jokes. For many years my passion was my children’s sport and this was the main topic of interest that I shared with other fathers who were Australian. With three children playing sport this occupied the bulk of our weekends in terms of time and became the centre of my attention.

My parents spoke Chinese to each other at home but the children grew up speaking only English. We overheard Chinese conversations and could understand a smattering but could not speak or read Chinese as our parents believed that to succeed you needed the ability to speak English, in which they were not fluent. Our Australian family surname was given to my grandfather when he arrived in Australia and was made up by the immigration official. I did not learn my Chinese family name until my twenties and even then I did not take much notice. When I was married at twenty-eight we had a traditional Chinese wedding invitation printed in Hong Kong in both Chinese and English and I finally learned my full Chinese name. However it is something that I cannot remember or recognize when it is written down and my Chinese name is not used by anyone.

My parents had come out from China in the 1930s and 1940s from a rural village in Zhongshan near Guangzhou and their Chinese language reflected this time period of being both rural and slightly old-fashioned. Recent immigrants in the 1990s from the cosmopolitan cities of Hong Kong and Singapore found the Australian Chinese language to be old-fashioned and spoken with an Australian accent and a point of differentiation between the Australian-born Chinese and the recent arrivals. Within the Chinese community there are multiple levels of differentiation based on place of origin and language. The Australian-born Chinese initially were the majority and occupied positions of authority within the community and transactions were conducted in Cantonese. They have been overtaken by arrivals from Hong Kong, Malaysia and, most recently, mainland China and there has been a shift toward Mandarin as the predominant language which the ABCs cannot speak. The old guard have given way to the new arrivals who, by sheer weight of numbers and economic clout, now wield the power. The Mandarin Club was founded in the 1960s as the centre of Cantonese social activity with its dim sumFootnote 2 lunches and poker machines. As a sign of the declining influence of the Cantonese community the club has closed down and its premises in the city centre have been sold.

At home my mother cooked rice every night for dinner and the next morning we would eat leftover rice for breakfast. We quickly became adept at using chopsticks and this was a small indicator of our cultural heritage. Our school lunch was homemade sandwiches and once a week there was a treat from the tuckshop where we were allowed to buy a pie. At the weekends my father would cook a roast lamb dinner as a result of his days as a cook in the army during World War 2. He never spoke of his experiences in the army during the war apart from the fact that he was a reluctant conscript and only once alluded to the horrifying nature of warfare in Papua New Guinea. He did not participate in the Anzac Day marches and one small memento was a photograph of him in his uniform. Anzac Day was a glorification of the valor of war and like my father I shared the belief that war was a futile attempt to solve problems and should not be the cause of celebration. Public holidays were an occasion to escape from the rigors of opening the shop and an opportunity to have a family picnic in one of the many public parks in Sydney or to go to the beach. The only times that our family ate out for dinner would be a trip to Dixon Street for a meal at Lean Sun Low, one of three restaurants in this small enclave of Chinatown. We would squeeze into a booth or around a formica table and devour wontonFootnote 3 soup or fried rice noodles. At other times he would bring pots to the restaurant, which they would fill with the food and we would have our takeaway meal at home.

The Chinatown of the 1950s consisted of Dixon Street which formed its heart and was located near Paddy’s Markets, the central produce markets. There were a small number of restaurants, Chinese grocery shops and boarding houses where elderly Chinese would sleep in tiny cubicles. The grocery shops were the only places in Sydney where you could buy Chinese groceries and in Campbell Street on the other side of George Street there was a roast meat vendor where you could buy a treat of roast pork. These excursions into Chinatown were part of our routine but we did not feel that we belonged to the group who lived here.

Unusually for a fifth-generation Chinese immigrant family there has been only one instance of inter-racial marriage in the direct line of descent and we still maintained our Chinese look. During the period of Australian history from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century the sex-ratio imbalance between Chinese men and women would imply that there would be a great deal of intermarriages with white women. Although this did occur, Chinese women as in the case of my ancestors tended to marry Chinese men due to cultural imperatives and their relative scarcity made them highly valued to the traditional males. My parents belonged to a generation that married within the Chinese community that was small and knew each other.

The Chinese community was scattered throughout Sydney but, like a spider’s web, maintained ties with each other. My generation had more opportunities and contact with the wider society due to our Australian upbringing. As a result inter-racial marriages became more common and my parents accepted that two of their daughters-in-law were Australian.

One incident that stands out happened twenty years ago when I was forty. It was in a supermarket and a female of that indeterminate middle age approached me as I was standing in the queue with a full trolley and asked if she could push in as she only had a few items. I politely refused and then ignored her. She then raised her voice and began a speech to everyone how un-Australian it was not to allow anyone to go ahead. She continued ranting in this vein and repeating how un-Australian this was. I tried to ignore her but I was getting angrier and angrier and no one else in the supermarket queue made any response. Her aggressive behavior and her repeated use of the phrase un-Australian felt like a stab to the heart. I am still angry and upset to this day as I have always tried to avoid conflict as much as possible. Looking back I see that it was the use of the phrase ‘un-Australian’ which I was hearing used for the first time and also that it was a rare occurrence when I was involved in a public dispute with a stranger. The use of the phrase un-Australian has become more common in current society and to me it is a code word for racism dressed up in acceptable language.

Subtle racism occurs when you use the concept of race to signify your disapproval of a topic. The Australian is a national business newspaper which supports the conservative Liberal Party in Australian politics and consistently opposes the Australian Labor Party. They gloated about the recent national elections in which there was a swing to the Liberal Party and that the only people who voted Labor included those on social welfare and Middle Eastern people. This was the only ethnic group singled out and who coincidentally are the scapegoats for news on terrorism, crime and illegal immigration. Each generation of society has its racial scapegoats on which to hang social evils. Australian society in turn had Chinese, Italians, Vietnamese and Middle Eastern immigrants as the stereotypes. Having seen how the Chinese were previously portrayed as the criminal outsiders with their gambling and opium smoking I can see how and why the Middle Eastern people now occupy this role.

As a young adult I would go to the movies on a Saturday night to the cinema strip on George Street. In the hurly burly of the crowds that jostled each other, groups of youths looking for excitement or danger would call you names such as ‘chinaman’ or ‘commo’ and I would ignore them and try and walk past as quickly as possible. Racist outbursts would occur in public places where you would be insulted by strangers. In Hobart on a holiday in the main street in the middle of the day, my family with young children was abused by a drunken homeless man and we walked on as quickly as possible. I later thought that this was due to the provinciality of Hobart where there were not many Chinese. With their distinctive look Chinese will stand out and be noticed in public places. In many parts of Australia where there are not many Chinese, the appearance of one in the street will be a noticeable event and bring to the surface any underlying attitudes. My brother mentioned that when he stayed in caravan parks which are not normally frequented by Chinese, he has encountered instances of racial abuse. In areas where there is a high concentration of Chinese they are not seen as different. The suburb of Chatswood in Sydney has long been an area where the Chinese have congregated and in 2006 they constituted sixteen per cent of the population. It has become a de facto suburban Chinatown providing a critical mass of services for the Chinese population such as grocery shops, restaurants and doctors. Similarly the suburb Richmond in Vancouver, Canada serves the same function of being a magnet for middle-class Chinese and their presence is the norm rather than the minority. However in the working-class suburb of Cabramatta in Sydney there has been a conflict between the older Anglo stores and the newer Asian stores which the former see as taking over their suburb and not having signs in English and which they feel will ultimately drive them out of business.

My twenty-year-old daughter recounted a story where only this year she had been in the Sutherland Shire, the scene of the Cronulla beach riots, with a group of white friends when another group of white youths began to taunt them racially in the street. Her friends decided to avoid an incident and moved on and my daughter said that she felt so angry that she had wanted to retaliate. On an opposite note she finds herself targeted by Caucasian males who find Chinese females to be exotic and she finds this equally distasteful.

When I was growing up, because there were so few other Chinese I did not think of myself as an Australian-born Chinese or ABC. I thought of myself as being Australian. I spoke and wrote English and had very little knowledge of the Chinese language. I was unfamiliar with Chinese customs and did not celebrate Chinese festivals. My parents thought that the only way for us to succeed in life was to assimilate and be the same as everyone else. There was no expectation that we would identify as Chinese. We celebrated birthday parties with soft drinks, party hats and a birthday cake and food such as frankfurts. At Christmas we eagerly awaited Christmas morning when we rushed downstairs to see what Santa had brought and we tore open the presents.

figure 12

My brother’s birthday party

With the abolition of the White Australia Policy and the gradual influx of Chinese from overseas I first heard the term ABC from one of these overseas Chinese who was more aware of these cultural differences than I was. The recent Chinese immigrants were professional or entrepreneurial types who were different from the local Chinese who tended to be on the lower socioeconomic scale. I felt that I had little in common with the newcomers whose language and interests did not coincide with mine.

My sister married into a well-off Hong Kong family who had immigrated to Australia. They had the trappings of success: a large house in a prestigious suburb, private schooling for the children and a Mercedes Benz. This entrée provided an insight into the world of the successful overseas Chinese and also the traditional Chinese culture that I had not experienced before. Her wedding was a large formal Chinese banquet where ten courses of food came flowing to your table. The formality and respect paid to the Chinese elders was another contrast and the rituals associated with Buddhism such as the burning of incense broadened my perspectives.

A turning point came in my life when I went overseas to Europe in 1975 and on the way home stopped off in Hong Kong. For the first time in my life I was no longer surrounded by white faces but was in a sea of Chinese faces. I was no longer the outsider like the hero of Albert Camus’ novel L’Étranger and I felt that I belonged. This sense came as feeling of freedom and relief as I did not have to try to fit in. The problem had now changed. My face was the same as everyone else but underneath I was still different and could not understand the language. The local Chinese that I came into contact with in restaurants were not sympathetic to my plight of not being able to speak Chinese. My Mandarin acquaintances have said that they experienced similar treatment from the Cantonese-speaking people in Hong Kong when they spoke Mandarin to them and that they found them to be arrogant and unfriendly.

My interest in Chineseness intensified when I married my wife who was born in Hong Kong. We met at my aunt’s sixty-first birthday party which was a lavish social occasion which gave me the opportunity to meet other people. There is an old adage that you marry someone whom you are familiar with, someone you meet through work or family occasions and with whom you share common values.

When I learned that Lucille Ngan was conducting her research into the multi-generational Chinese in Australia I volunteered because I wanted to learn more about myself and my Chinese identity. This was an area specific to my situation which spoke to me for the first time about being born in Australia of Chinese descent. When I was being interviewed by her, I reflected on a conversation that I had with my wife:

My wife still considers me to be Australian. She thinks I wear my Chineseness like something that I can put on and say “Oh I am Chinese I have a ‘min naap’ on” and then I take it off. She doesn’t think I am Chinese at all … My wife says “You are pretending to be Chinese and you are talking about things you don’t know anything about. You are trying to take the best of both worlds. You are trying to be Australian but you are trying to be Chinese at the same time.”

My wife is my sternest critic and insists that I am not Chinese in my behavior or thought. Her parents had been raised in China in the traditional manner and she had grown up absorbing many of their values.

figure 13

My father-in-law as a young man with his parents

In a later conversation my wife elaborated on how the older Chinese saw the ‘native born’ (to saang in Cantonese) who were the younger generation born in Australia. They were seen as lacking the traditional values of the Chinese because they were born here and also, as young people, they lacked the respect that should be shown to their elders. My aunt had complained that these to saang would greet her with an exaggerated version of hello by saying in a mock accent ‘har lo’ which she interpreted in Cantonese as prawn person. In public I would address my aunts as gu mou and in private mix my Chinese and English by distinguishing them as big and little gu mou.

My wife further critiqued my Chineseness by discussing my attitude to our wedding. I had wanted the ceremony to be held in a church and then the reception held in a Chinese restaurant with a ten-course banquet for the three hundred and fifty guests. However my side of the family adopted only those Chinese wedding customs that suited us. In a traditional Chinese wedding the groom pays the bill but I insisted that we split the cost in the western manner and in the end I prevailed and we split the bill. Furthermore in the Chinese custom we offered my mother her choice of the wedding gifts from which she took four items but in return she never offered the jewelry, which was to be given to her new daughter-in-law. I followed the traditional customs when there was an advantage to me or did not require any great effort. I paid respect to the parents by ceremonially offering them tea at the wedding reception (jam cha) and gave her brothers a pair of trousers because she had married before them. At the reception my wife and I stood publicly in front of the guests and we would proffer tea (jam cha) to the older Chinese and they in turn would give us a red gift packet (lai see) in return.

My entry into her family’s household led to a small cultural reversal on my part where I adopted a Chinese persona. At dinner time we would sit around the table and wait for her father to arrive and we could not begin to eat until he said sik faan (eat rice). However I did not adopt the habit of greeting her parents when I arrived at their house by saying jou san (good morning) which they excused by saying that I was only a to saang. When we stayed in Vancouver with her relatives she vigorously enforced this rule by ensuring that I greeted our hosts every morning. Her father was an artist and he painted the painting below for her, which she valued as a memento of her Chinese heritage.

figure 14

Painting by my father-in-law

Another physical object which symbolized Chineseness to me was the camphor wood chest with its distinctive carvings and aroma and I lusted after one as if to prove and reinforce my Chineseness. We purchased one from Hong Kong and its arrival was another sign of my growing Chinese identity.

figure 15

Chinese chest

I had gained a new interest in being Chinese which answered my questions of who I was and I began to learn and adopt the custom of my new role. I attended a Cantonese language community class for one year but dropped out at the end of the year as my Cantonese had not improved at all and I was not using or speaking Cantonese in regular situations. However by going to regular classes and having a Cantonese dictionary my understanding of hearing Cantonese spoken by my in-laws had improved and my vocabulary had also increased. My wife and brothers would mock me in what they saw as an affectation in trying to speak Cantonese. Attempts at speaking Cantonese to my in-laws would provoke mirth as my accent in pronouncing tonal Cantonese words would give them the wrong and usually inappropriate meaning. One time we were discussing the traditional Chinese custom of arranged marriage and I meant to say that I chose my wife (gaan in Cantonese) but with my accent apparently I said that I raped her (also gaan in Cantonese).

In high school I had studied French and Latin for three years and I felt comfortable with my schoolboy French so that when I went to Paris on holidays I could easily understand simple conversations with the French people. I would often be asked by waiters “Êtes vous chinois?” and I would reply in English “No, I am Australian” and this would lead to linguistic confusion as there would be uncertainty about which language to conduct the conversation in. Also the fact that I said that I was an Australian confused them more as they expected me to be Chinese and their visions of Australians would be different from what they saw before them.

On another occasion, sitting in a restaurant in Venice with my family, we were approached by an expatriate Australian living in Italy who had overheard our conversation and recognized our Australian accents. She came over to join us. We reminisced about life in Australia and she displayed a nostalgia to reconnect with her homeland that she had not seen for twenty years. Her homesickness mirrored my own feelings that Australia was my home and that I could connect with other Australians overseas with whom we shared a common bond.

In Hong Kong I never felt comfortable with the Chinese language as I found that I could not handle even simple conversations with the waiters. Attempting to speak Cantonese was even more trying as my level of fluency was so low that I could not say simple sentences because of the tonal pronunciation of words. I sensed that in Hong Kong many of the people outside of the tourist areas were monolingual and therefore indifferent to those who could not speak Cantonese. When I travel overseas I always feel like a tourist and I do not have a sense of belonging as I stay in these locations for only a short period. Language is the main impediment that prevents me from fitting in. My inability to converse in Italian in Venice or Cantonese in Hong Kong prevents me from feeling comfortable. I felt much more at home in England and Canada as the ability to conduct conversations in English simplified life. In Hong Kong they can identify you as overseas Chinese and make you feel different.

As a librarian in a university I often gave classes to students on finding information. Afterwards in a reference inquiry with another librarian they will mention that they have already attended an information class with the Chinese librarian. On the one hand as the only Chinese librarian giving information classes it is a quick way to identify me but on the other it emphasizes how your face becomes your primary means of identification. In another instance when I had a disagreement with another driver on the road he hurled a torrent of abuse and swear words at me calling me a **** Chinese so that identifying me as Chinese becomes my primary identity and also a mark of abuse.

When our work group goes out for a social lunch to celebrate birthdays I prefer going to yum chaFootnote 4 as the variety of dishes is more satisfying than a single dish. I tend to do the ordering of the dim sum from the trolleys as they pass but as the supervisor and with the group’s unfamiliarity with yum cha this seems like the normal thing to do. Yum cha is a Chinese experience with the different food and the Chinese language spoken by the trolley ladies; it is an acceptable and enjoyable aspect of a different culture. I still encounter many older Australians who do not eat Chinese food and cling to their traditional eating patterns.

As a young man my experiences of dating were disastrous. As Caucasian Australian women were the only ones I met socially, I attributed my lack of success to my gaucheness rather than to my ethnicity. At that tender age there were not many opportunities for meeting people and I lacked the social skills and confidence to interact with females successfully. After my trip to Europe when I traveled around in a Kombi van for two months I learned a lot about dealing with people. I matured in my social skills and changed my mind about dating Chinese women. Previously I had unconsciously avoided them since that would emphasize my Chineseness. I realized that was an inappropriate response and I had the confidence to embark on blind dates with Chinese females whom relatives seemed to know. Match making was a favorite pasttime for older female relatives and acquaintances and nothing would delight them more if they were successful in matching young males and females who were both Chinese.

After marriage to my wife my cultural sensitivity increased as I realized that the plurality of cultures in Australia no longer meant that the mainstream Australian culture was the only choice and my wife would point out instances of my cultural ignorance. Chinese associate the color white with death and wearing white on inappropriate occasions such as births or weddings may cause offence. Similarly the number four, like the Australian number thirteen, had connotations of misfortune and death. Chinese would avoid any connection with this number and would not buy a house with a street address with the number four in it. For them the number eight was the lucky number and a motorcar license with the numbers 888 almost invariably indicated a Chinese owner.

In the 1990s when I took my children to Saturday morning soccer I entered this public sphere of strangers. As I looked around at the other families my children were the only Chinese on the field. When you arrived at a playing field and you were waiting for the game to begin you observed the players and nothing distinguished them except the way they looked. Once the game started this feeling dissipated as the action became the focus and all thoughts concentrated on the flow of the game. From my own experience I had absorbed the stereotype that Chinese were not good at sport and I was worried that my children would fit this image. Soccer is physically competitive and it quickly becomes obvious who the better players are and their skill is the important factor in being accepted. My son was one of the better players and had the vital role of midfield in generating the attack and then dropping back to help in defense. He graduated from local to representative soccer and as he played for the Ku-ring-gai and District Soccer Association against teams from the Sydney metropolitan area his playing ability ensured his acceptance by the others. At this level the only thing that mattered was how good you were and whether you could help the team achieve their goal of winning. Being involved in a team sport and working toward a shared goal facilitates your sense of belonging.

figure 16

My son playing soccer

The Chinese festival of Ching Ming, where we go to the cemetery annually and pay respects to those who have passed away, has been one of those customs that I have adopted. My father, sister and son are buried here as well as my wife’s parents. Sometimes the pain of grief can be overwhelming but the simple ceremony of bai saan (praying) provides a soothing balm and a sense of continuity that the grief felt at bereavement is a necessary adjunct of life and helps with the healing process. We would offer food, burn paper money and incense and bow. It is better to remember those who have passed away than to forget them. We have already purchased the plots for our family to be buried together and I hope that our children will continue to remember us.

figure 17

Paying respects at the cemetery

My interest in family history grew very slowly as my father never talked about his parents and he only briefly mentioned that they had died when he was very young. A glimmer of interest was aroused when my aunt showed me the only photograph that existed of my grandfather and I had something tangible to look at. Then when I needed to have my wedding invitation printed in English and Chinese I learned my full Chinese name (Louie gam-yat) for the first time. My father then wrote the names of my siblings and I saw that we had the same generation name. Learning my family history has filled in the gaps that were previously blank. I began my family history project to discover who my ancestors were and the joy of unearthing previously unknown facts has been rewarding. The process of research and of going to archives to look at original documents widened to examine how our family history fitted into the wider context of Chinese Australian history, and how our story could illuminate and contextualize the experiences of Chinese in Australia.

I joined the Chinese Australian Historical Society, CAHS, to satisfy my curiosity about my family history and the Chinese in Australia. The members were a mixture of Chinese and Caucasians and the presentations were predominantly in English. The society tried to balance the needs of those interested in family history and academic researchers but favored the academic angle. Its highlight was the organization of an international conference in Sydney on Quong Tart, the Chinese businessman in early twentieth century Australia. As a result the members interested in family history drifted away to join another group, the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia, whose focus was on familiar topics and had less academic rigor.

Within the Society there is one elderly member, the Vice-President, who attempts to maintain the cultural values of the Chinese. He acts as the host at the meetings and will introduce members to each other. I am always introduced by name and then my ancestral district Zhongshan is mentioned, even my home village. The majority of Australian-born Chinese in Sydney originated from Guangdong and those from Zhongshan formed the largest sub-group. At one of these meetings I was introduced to another member from my home village and this coincidence was a great pleasure; I established a link with someone with our common surname Louie. Her family had a series of grocery stores in northern New South Wales and employed people from the same district of Zhongshan and my father may have worked for them. The Chungshan Society was formed in the early 1900s to assist immigrants from Zhongshan and it still remains active to this day though its membership has declined with the passage of time as members move into the wider community and find other means of social support.

Membership of the society has focused my interest on the importance of the home village or heung ha to the Chinese immigrants. Their district of origin in Guangdong provided their first means of social support in Australia through their district associations and shops. They supplied mutual support, economic assistance and channels of communication with their home villages. Within the Chinese community the first level of loyalty lay with their family and village, then the district and finally to the broader Chinese community. My interest lay in exploring the history of our district grouping of Zhongshan and an in-depth analysis of their role in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Australian history. An area of further research is the role that district associations played in the lives of the Chinese miners on the gold fields and tin mines. As an outsider on the border between the Chinese and Australian cultures I had the curiosity to understand both sides of the equation.

At a talk given at the CAHS, John Yu, the pediatrician and hospital administrator, reminisced about arriving in Sydney in 1937 as a two-year-old with his family. Earle Page, who was later to become Prime Minister of Australia, carried John Yu off the boat unchallenged and undocumented by Customs and Immigration. This came about as John Yu’s grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister and his uncle was the first Chinese graduate in Medicine from Sydney University and Earle Page was a classmate. In this instance social class and prestige trumped and overcame the problem of being Chinese and the aura of power which surrounded John Yu made being Chinese an irrelevancy.

There is still a tenuous link with our home village in Zhongshan. My brothers have made fleeting visits to see the house where my father grew up but their stay was hampered by the fact that they could not speak Cantonese and thus could not converse with the villagers on such a short visit. The cultural industry of finding your roots is a growing phenomenon and represents an attempt to establish a link with your Chinese heritage. They did not feel an affinity for the village and felt more like tourists and outsiders who had come to observe but were not part of the life there.

figure 18

Ancestral home in Zhongshan

In a similar example of cultural tourism I visited the town of Emmaville in northern New South Wales where my grandfather was a miner in the tin mines during the 1880s and 1890s. The surrounding district was the largest tin producing area in the world for a brief period in the 1870s and attracted over two thousand Chinese miners but is now a sleepy rural town of only a few hundred inhabitants. I walked along the streets and tried to imagine what it was like one hundred and forty years ago but most traces of the mining industry have disappeared and the only Chinese presence is the grocery store which was previously owned by Chinese.

figure 19

My children

My children, the sixth generation, are thoroughly westernized. Australia has changed with the advent of the multicultural society and the growth of the Chinese population to 700,000 (2006 census). They consider themselves to be Australian and not Chinese but their appearance will always mark them as Chinese and how they will cope is unknown. At their age my goal was to assimilate and I believe that will be their fate. There is a current debate in Australia about multiculturalism sparked by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the wearing of the niqab, the enveloping outer garment, by women in public places. This challenges the principle of assimilation and asserts the right of ethnic groups to be culturally distinct. This presages the debate about how much tolerance there will be for a society to function harmoniously if a minority attempts to assert their cultural beliefs. Two examples are the orthodox Jews saying that in their beliefs the Sabbath is a holy day and that they cannot work and the other is a day set aside in the public swimming pool for Islamic women so that they do not appear immodestly in public in front of strange men.

So finally how did a multi-generation Chinese resolve the dilemma that although I looked different from the others I was the same in language and values? How did I cope with the situations where I was treated because of the way I looked? You learn to accept this by attempting to assimilate and become like them but as I grow older I accept that looking Chinese is part of my identity. It has been a long journey but my identity as an Australian-born Chinese has been validated: someone who looks Chinese but feels Australian but can put on Chineseness like a min naap which is only a superficial covering. My wife who is traditional Chinese has strengthened my identity by providing this Chinese part of the jigsaw puzzle. Fate and chance will decide your destiny but I believe that marrying a Chinese has been a positive choice.