Gang members were a microcosm of the new suburb of Blackburn Hamlet, built on what had until recently been farms and before that, First Nation Odawa land. They were tow-haired kids with freckled noses who spent their holidays camping, who brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to school, or soft squares of cheese individually wrapped in plastic. If you refused to comply with their verdicts, you got a nickname. Like Stinky Stephanie, wild-eyed, messy-haired Stinky Stephanie who roamed the very farthest reaches of the cyclone fence. Nobody wanted to be like her, least of all me.
I lived in Blackburn Hamlet, too, in the same suburban crescents, courts and cul-de-sacs as members of the gang, but I never considered trying to join them. I had no idea what going camping was like. My family went on car trips for our vacations, to Montreal and Quebec City and Granby Zoo, staying in motels and taking part in what my mother called the ‘Learning to be Canadian’ project. I had certainly never tasted peanut butter and jelly together. My parents had peanut butter and onion sandwiches instead, equally disgusting. And my father refused to allow that plastic-wrapped, orange pseudo-cheese anywhere near our fridge. But even though these things seemed glamorous to me, they weren’t alien. Canada was all I knew. Burma, the land of my birth, was more of a mystery. It was my mum and dad who needed to learn to be Canadian. I just was.
And yet, I was also different. We had a yellowing clipping from the Ottawa Citizen, the local newspaper, on display at home to prove it. It was an interview with me and my mum, and had a big picture of us at the top. We had been interviewed because we were the first migrants from South-East Asia to arrive in the city. The reporter wrote that ‘the baby’s preferred food is rice!’ But, despite that exclamation mark, I had long grown out of loving rice. Apart from the brownness of my skin, I couldn’t work out what about me was so very different. I worried that I didn’t really know how to be different. That was another reason why I was fascinated by Ash and desperate to be his friend. He knew what it was like to live in Ceylon, he was an Asian. For him, being different was effortless, and a badge of distinction.
It was this distinction that also attracted the gang. The new kid from Ceylon was a novelty and as the rulers of the playground, they should have been the first to hear about the taunting of teachers, to view the zombie-eyeballs trick and to be told where and what Ceylon was so that they could judge it. But instead, I was monopolising him in a way that made it hard for them to break in. On the other hand, Ashok and I were both from the same part of the world so it was logical for us to seek each other out and hang together; it appealed to the gang’s sense of order. One thing was certain: recess was short and action was necessary. I could feel the gang debating, making plans, circling until they finally came to rest a few feet away.
Jane, the leader of the day, marched over, and wasted no time in putting their plan into action.
‘Did you know your boots are on the wrong feet?’ she demanded of me.
This was a genius move. Every self-respecting seven-year-old knew how to tell their left shoe from their right shoe. Except me. Time and time again, my mother would put my left shoe beside my left foot and right shoe beside my right foot. She would trace the outside curve of my left foot with her finger and then retrace that same shape on the outside of the left shoe to show me how they were similar. But as soon as she stopped tracing, I could no longer see the sameness or the difference. Especially not with my lace up shoes, which fit closely to my feet. Not with my white patent leather strappy party shoes either. And definitely not with my black gumboots, which looked identical to each other. Even now, as an adult, I still mistake the right gumboot for the left and vice versa. So, when Jane accused me of getting the feet wrong, I didn’t even bother looking down as I would have no clue whether or not she was correct.
Mixing up left and right boots was humiliating in another way. When I’d arrived at the school, I’d been surrounded by the gang and interrogated, just as they were about to do to Ash. Who was I? Where was I from? How many brothers and sisters did I have? How many pets? And why was my skin brown? Was I an Indian?
I told them: Michelle, moved here from the city, one brother, one sister, no pets, and my skin was brown because I was from Burma.
Burma! Ta dah! I thought they’d be impressed like the reporter from The Citizen. I thought they’d ask me questions which I would answer cleverly, earning their lifelong respect. But they weren’t impressed, and they didn’t ask me questions. Instead, one of the kids pointed out that my boots were on the wrong feet. And rather than admit that I didn’t know how to work out right from left, I said, ‘In Burma, nobody needs to tell left from right.’
This was not just a lie, but also a mistake. The lie made my stomach clench as soon as I said it. And I paid for the mistake almost instantly because some kid piped up. ‘That’s right. They cannot tell left from right because they are poor and have no education.’
No, wait, what?
‘Yes,’ said another kid, ‘and they don’t have clean water to drink …’
‘… and they live in grass huts,’ — a terrible thing in the land of aluminum siding.
The gang kids were speaking with such authority, and I had such limited actual knowledge of Burma, I felt that I couldn’t contradict them. If I did, I would just show my ignorance of the place I was born and make things worse. Then came the clincher.
‘Your country is backward. That is why you came here. This country used to be backward. Countries take it in turns.’
Backward? Was that what different really meant? Was that what made grass huts worse than aluminum siding?
Of course, I know now that this was totally bogus. If I didn’t know much about Burma, then those kids in the gang knew even less. What they were spouting were stereotypes — over-simplifications and generalisations used to define people and places. Stereotypes are what people fall back on when they don’t know about something. Stereotypes feel like knowledge. But they’re not. Knowledge takes effort. You have to try to see things as they are. You have to go beyond the general and the superficial to the specific. You have to seek out or experience things beyond the confines of the everyday.
That is why we were all so fascinated by Ash. He had knowledge of a faraway place, outside all of our experience. This is the power of difference. It was this power I was drawing on when the gang had interrogated me. I had thought I could exploit their ignorance by pretending that the Burmese didn’t even know left from right because I didn’t know left from right. Instead I’d betrayed my mother and branded myself backward as well.
So, when Jane asked me if I realised my boots were on the wrong feet, she had me at my most vulnerable. I was embarrassed by the ‘backwards’ label that I felt I had brought on myself. Worse, Ash was watching. I didn’t really know what to do. All I could think of was to simply say, ‘Thank you.’
Amazingly, ‘thank you’ worked. Jane hadn’t been expecting that and surprised, retreated back to the gang. But I knew I’d only bought myself some time.
Sure enough, it was only a minute or two before Jane came marching back.
‘Well, are you going to change them? Your boots?’
The gang members moved in, keen to hear what I would say.
‘Yes.’ I replied. But I didn’t bend down to do it.
Janet Caster, that day’s second in command, stomped forward.
‘Maybe she can’t change them. Maybe she needs our help.’
I definitely did not want their help. I wanted them to go away. But it didn’t look like they would. I glanced at Ash. Did he suspect he had made a fatal error in going with the first overture of friendship? The gang closed in tighter.
‘I can change them myself,’ I insisted. To prove it, I bent over and started tugging.
The problem was gumboots are not just hard to put on, they’re even harder to pull off. Especially if you’ve got them on the wrong feet. If you’re trying to remove them while still standing in them and attempting to seem like a worthy person to be friends
with, well you have no chance. I tugged hard at those boots but they wouldn’t budge. Ash was clearly thinking he’d wasted his zombie eyeballs on me. Finally, Jane and Janet could stand it no longer.
‘Let us help you.’ Jane bent over and grabbed my right foot (or maybe it was my left). Janet bent over and grabbed the other. They both pulled. I fell over onto my back. There was a cry of alarm from the gang. Pushing people over was exactly what attracted the attention of the teachers. But Jane and Janet were committed. They had to keep going. They tugged harder until, with a sucking sound, one boot and then the other came off. Jane and Janet then exchanged boots and put them on the correct feet.
‘Thank you,’ I called out, lying there on my back, my feet still sticking straight up in the air. It was my final attempt at dignity and retaining Ash’s good opinion. But the gang had already moved on. My Singhalese friend was already in their midst. I heard their collective ‘eeewwww’ as he flicked back his eyelids to reveal zombie eyeballs.
And then the bell went for the end of recess.
I slunk back to class and then, at lunch, slunk off to the edges of the playground, where I sat alone. Not even Stinky Stephanie would keep me company.
Ash ran with the gang for the rest of that day and part of the next. But the day after, he was sitting on his own at the edge of the playground as well. We glanced at each other, but that was all. Friendship was no longer an option. The whole boot incident had just been too embarrassing.
Fast forward through the rest of primary school, through middle school and high school and all those years of slavish conformity, to university in Toronto: a bigger city and a time of life when being different was what you wanted to be because it made you interesting (although it turned out that interesting was sometimes just another way to be the same).
Fast forward through London, the biggest of all the cities I’ve lived in, where what had once been different elsewhere was everyday ordinary on the Tube.
Fast forward to Melbourne, Australia, to Wurundjeri land, and my son’s first day at the inner-city primary school near our house. As I stepped through the school doors, my son’s little hand in mine, I felt like I was stepping back into Blackburn Hamlet Elementary School all those years ago. It was so similar, except where we had asphalt, this playground was covered with AstroTurf and although there was a shed and a water tank, I knew this one would never freeze over to look like icy poles. Most of the kids had surnames like Nguyen and Chin but would once have been Kontis or Katsoumis, and before that, Brady or Byth.
Fast forward to right now. To me sitting here writing this and wondering what how to be different? really means. What do I know now that I didn’t when I was trying to persuade Ashok to be my friend?
You have to be different from something. That something is a measure. And that measure is often what is ‘normal’. Those people who would tell you who you are and where you belong consider themselves, above all else, to be ‘normal’. Maybe they like to think of themselves as upholders of normality for there’s power in being someone who can say, you are the same as and you are different from. Yet there is a power in being different too. It is the power of knowledge, of richness of experience. Of being able to see the world from more than one perspective.
ALICE PUNG
Alice Pung is an award-winning author, editor, speaker and educator whose ethnically Chinese parents were born in Cambodia and came to Australia as refugees. She grew up in the working-class Western suburbs of Melbourne in the midst of a terrible economic recession. This story is a work of fiction. Alice writes, ‘While many long-standing residents of my area couldn’t find jobs, many new immigrants were moving into the neighbourhood because rent was cheap, and this escalated racial tensions. My story reflects on how class alters race relations in a suburb.’
The Last Stop
Funny I’d never considered Asian chicks before, never found them attractive. In fact, Tommo had this half-joke that they were the last stop, as in the last stop before a guy going fully gay. You’d know if one of your mates was heading that way if he started dating an Asian chick, coz they were supposed to have no curves or nothing. My kid sister had made me watch Disney’s Mulan seven times with her, so I know what I’m talking about.
I’d won the trip to China as a joke. Some interschool competition sponsored by the Rotary Club and the Confucian Society. It was Tommo that saw the ad in the local paper and pointed it out to me. Win a trip to China. Write an essay about what the teachings of Confucius mean to you. Open to all high school students Year 9 and above. I’d snickered.
‘Confucius say, Man who go through airport turnstile too fast will arrive to Bangkok.’
‘Go on then, you should enter,’ he told me.
So for a laugh, we sat down and punched out a five hundred-word essay based on some quotes of Confucius that we’d found from brainyquote.com. It does not matter how slowly you go just as long as you do not stop was the first quote, and Tommo said it was about me because I took ages to learn stuff. Then when we’d finished, Tommo didn’t want to put his name on it, so we put mine down instead.
I’d never won anything in my life. The judges said the voice was simple in its insight, with a keen awareness of irony and racial stereotyping. I had no idea what they were on about, but I took it to mean that I didn’t write like a tosser, coz the other two essays that also won were full of wanky words like ‘ascendant’ and ‘vicissitudes’. Tommo was so pissed off because he said half of it was his work anyway, but I’d done all the typing while he’d just sat there saying stuff like, ‘Now write about the time your dad learned his lesson getting stuck under the bonnet of that Camry he was fixing,’ but it wasn’t funny coz my dad got some pretty serious burns from that episode.
Anyhow, so what started off as a joke ended up with me going to China for two weeks to Confucius’ ancestral homeland in the Shandong province, with a boy named Raymond and a girl named Grace. Mum told me to pack the Imodium in case I got diarrhoea from the spicy food, and Dad told me not to go to any hairdressers coz they doubled as brothels. No one in our family had been to China before, so Dad asked Vo from the auto-repairs, but Vo said he was Vietnamese, and Dad said it didn’t matter but could he please give his son some advice. So that’s where Dad got the hairdressing warning from. Just to be safe, Dad gave me a buzz cut before I left.
Grace and Raymond, you could tell they were really uptight. They both came from grammar schools, and wore a lot of white and tan during this trip, like walking advertisements for café lattes. He had hair like Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons, except it was cut short and carefully parted in the middle, like fat orange wings to help his big head fly off at any little thing I said. Grace was pretty hot with her pale eyes and floaty hair, but she often ignored me, or pretended not to understand what I was saying. Like, WTF? We both spoke English.
But the Chinese students at the host school dressed exactly like me: tracksuit pants and T-shirts in bright colours. The first time we met, one of the boys came up to me, this staggeringly tall dude — like, monster tall, I didn’t even know Asians could be that tall coz the ones in Australia are just squat little packages like Vo — anyhow, he came up and high-fived me. I had to stand on my toes to reach his hand, but admittedly I did feel a bit like a legend. Coz he didn’t do it to Raymond.
I thought I would hate it in China, but I effing loved it! Along with some other old Rotary Aussie people, we had a guide named Ziran, who was pretty cool, like a fully Asian Keanu Reeves. They fed us like kings; every night tables with the spinning things in the middle and about twenty plates of food on them, going round and round. I ate everything, while Raymond and Grace praised the food to anyone who was listening but just picked and poked at it in their bowls. One evening, there was a steamy brown meat on the table and I asked Ziran, ‘Is this dog?’, and Grace looked at me as if I had asked if we were eating foetus, but Ziran said, ‘No, it’s turtle, is a Chinese speciality,’ and I said, ‘Oh, cool’ and continued eating, but Grace liter
ally gagged, and afterwards she said, ‘How could you?’ but I could have asked her the same thing because she’d been the one spitting out the food of the hosts into a red napkin.
And another time, when Raymond was rabbiting on in English about Jin Dynasty this and Yuan Dynasty that to our host students, I blurted out, ‘Kooooong Miaooooooooo!’ which means Temple of Confucius in Chinese, where we were visiting, but I said it in a really dramatic kung-fu way, extending the last syllable in a high pitch, like the noise Bruce Lee makes before he kicks you in the balls, and all the school students, all sixty-eight of them, cracked up, and Ziran patted me on the back and said, ‘You funny man.’ That evening Raymond muttered something to Grace about not letting racist hoons on a cultural tour, but I didn’t care because Dan the monster tall basketball bro had asked me to play ping pong with him and they were gunna take me out to karaoke later on, while those other two spent their night writing more speeches about Chinese history to deliver to their bored Chinese hosts.
And the girls! I had thought that Asian chicks were all shy and hard to read, but these Year 10 girls came up to me early on and asked me a whole bunch of questions in English like, ‘What says on your T-shirt?’ (Billabong), or, ‘Do you watch Friends?’ One of them touched my hair, another pinched my nose and laughed. A third poked me in the stomach and said, ‘Heh, so fat!’ But strangely enough there was no meanness in any of this, or coyness, or sexy stuff. They’d called me Pangzi which I think meant ‘Fatty’, but I got the feeling that they liked my chub.
Meet Me at the Intersection Page 14