Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  Once through the gates, we kids would do our best to distinguish ourselves from the actual Asian tourists. We’d make our Australian accents more pronounced. We ended our sentences with ‘eh.’ Our trousers were pulled further downwards, away from our navels. We refused to wear bumbags, and spoke English very loudly, with proper grammar and syntax. These hoards of Japanese and Chinese tourists would point to the most innocuous objects and proceed to take photographs like idiots. We could only imagine what they were hollering to each other as they ripped through their film. ‘Look, a fire hydrant!’ ‘Over here, a drinking fountain!’ ‘Wow, there is a toilet: a public, shared facility and receptacle for my waste. Why not take a photo of it?’

  Mum would sabotage all our efforts to set ourselves apart. She wore her hair in a Bozo-esque clown perm, and had a strange insistence on wearing her fluorescent Dreamworld T-shirt if we happened to be at Dreamworld (and her killer-whale Seaworld T-shirt if we were visiting Seaworld).

  ‘Mum, come on,’ I’d say as she posed us at the entrance of yet another ride. ‘Everyone’s going to think we’re tourists.’

  ‘We are tourists, you idiot,’ she’d reply. ‘Now smile big!’

  It would take her about twenty seconds to finally press the shutter, and another five to release it. We’d groan.

  *

  When my parents split up, I was twelve years old and had just finished primary school. Trips to theme parks became less frequent. Custody was split. Mum hated driving long distances. Dad threw himself into work. The mood became downbeat and glum. The separation also made our family the subject of gossip amongst the local Chinese community, who were mildly scandalised by all the drama. Elderly Chinese women who smelled like mothballs and grease would corner my siblings and me in the shopping centre, literally pulling us to one side, shaking their heads and tut-ting their tongues, lecturing us in Cantonese.

  ‘Wah, what is going on?’ They’d raise their tattooed eyebrows. ‘You need to tell your parents they must make an effort to get back together! Ai-ya, why would any parents split up like this? You’re only children! And no marriage is a walk in the park, is it?’

  None of these concerned citizens ever visited my mother during this period. Mum was always a tiny woman, but she began to lose weight quickly. Her low blood pressure got worse. She became prone to intense dizziness that would render her immobile for days on end. She almost fainted at my fourteenth birthday party at the tenpin bowling alley and thought she’d need to get me to call an ambulance. We saw Dad less and less.

  Mum and Dad instituted a rotating roster of weekend custody. Schooldays were neutral territory; it was the weekend that was considered important family time. Mum and Dad would take turns, Dad taking us for every second weekend. But despite these weekends being technically Dad’s, Mum insisted on coming with us, declaring boldly that it was her right as a mother.

  Poor Dad. This really put pressure on him to make those four days a month memorable and worthwhile. At the same time, he was working as a chef in a hotel. He couldn’t afford the luxury of time, so when it came to his designated weekends, Dad needed quick and convenient options.

  He needed theme parks.

  *

  Let it be known: the Sunshine Coast hinterland is a haven for sad, miserable theme parks. In contrast to the Gold Coast’s pleasure domes (Dreamworld, Movieworld, Seaworld), which are show-offy and grand, garish and decadent, theme parks on the Sunshine Coast are poor-cousiny, half-arsed and afterthought-ish. Come to Superbee, where our prime attraction is ‘free honey tasting!’ Also: you can buy honey! Look, here is a man, dressed as a bee! Here at the Hedge Maze, get lost! In a hedge! We also have scones!

  On one of Dad’s more disastrous weekends, we travelled to suburban Noosa to visit a deserted tourist attraction called the Big Bottle. It was, as its name implied, a giant bottle. You’d climb the stairs inside, which were made up of hundreds of empty beer bottles. Once you were at the top, a giant metal slippery slide curled around the bottle’s exterior, and you’d slide down on a hessian sack. Inside the bottle, it smelled awful – like the piss of a hundred dehydrated men. Because the entire interior was made of beer bottles, you would never know which ones contained the urine. And because the bottles weren’t exposed to the sun, the piss would never evaporate. It smelled so bad. We never went there again.

  Another time, we visited Forest Glen Deer Sanctuary, a typically neglected drive-in wildlife preserve in Yandina. Despite its catchy television jingle, the place was starting to lose business to the reptile park a few kilometres away, which had recently renamed itself Australia Zoo. We bought bags of feed at the entrance, then slowly drove around the dirt track. The deer came up to the car in packs, and we fed them through the windows. There was also one single emu amongst all the deer and kangaroos. It started walking towards our car, pushing its way past the does and fawns.

  ‘Are we even supposed to feed the emus?’ my younger sister Tammy asked. ‘Isn’t this stuff just for deer?’

  ‘Maybe it’s developed a taste for it,’ Dad said in Cantonese.

  The emu proceeded to eat all the feed from my hand, then moved on to my youngest sister Michelle’s open hand. Then, almost out of food, we wanted to move on. But then the emu spotted my paper bag – still full of feed, and reserved for the deer coming up around the bend – sitting next to me. It made a terrible, ungodly noise – an almost carnivorous, honking screech of excitement, not unlike the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Its neck came the whole way in to the Honda as it continued to shriek. We screamed and screamed as feed pellets flew around the car.

  ‘Drive faster, drive faster!’ Michelle screamed.

  Dad put his foot on the accelerator, and the emu squawked, trying to keep up the pace.

  ‘Wind up the window!’ Dad said.

  What Dad didn’t understand was that because most of the emu’s head was in the car already, winding up the window would make the situation worse. But in my stammering panic, I reached out, grabbed the window winder and start winding up. The emu refused to retreat. Its head became stuck, and it croaked and coughed at us, spasming in panic, banging its head against the car ceiling in wild, spastic fits.

  ‘Drive slower!’ I said. ‘We’re going to rip its fucking head off.’

  The whole time, Dad was creeping the Honda forwards a little at a time, but the emu was keeping up, walking alongside the car, screeching and honking.

  ‘Stop the car, stop the car!’

  We killed the engine and slowly wound down the window. Slowly, slowly. The emu gave the car’s ceiling one last bang with its head, before sliding its neck out the window and stumbling away from the car in a daze.

  We drove home in silence.

  *

  A fortnight later, Dad called me at Mum’s place.

  ‘So, what’s the plan for this weekend?’ he asked. ‘You got any ideas?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Haven’t we done everything around here already?’

  ‘How about the Ginger Factory? Or Underwater World? You guys like turtles. They’re Tammy’s favourite, right?’

  ‘We did that last month,’ I said, sighing. ‘You know, we don’t have to go somewhere special every weekend. We could just hang out.’

  At that point, I detected a faint click over the telephone line. I coughed loudly – a clear message to Mum that I was aware she was on the other line, tuning in to my conversation with Dad.

  ‘You know, I’m looking to invest in a new restaurant in Pacific Paradise,’ Dad said. ‘There’s a theme park there we should check out. What do you reckon?’

  *

  Nostalgia Town’s motto was ‘A Laugh at the Past.’ Its main attraction was a family cart-ride, a journey into an era when fibreglass brontosauruses roamed the earth alongside tableaus of Anzac diggers and plastic Aborigines. Slouching, I sat in the back of the cart with Mum, while Dad sat in the front with Tammy and Michelle. In the carts in front of us, mothers and fathers sat alongside each other with their
children jammed in the middle. Obese as they were, they even held hands.

  I wondered what they thought of our family, and whether they questioned why the Chinese family’s parents sat so far away from one another. Maybe it was a cultural thing. I’d continue to watch them, wondering how, and why, their parents got along so well together, and how strange their families must have have been in private.

  I’d watch them intently: like an outsider, like a tourist.

  *

  Nowadays, if you drive through Coomera, towards Dreamworld, you’ll see the Thunderbolt has been dismantled. Nostalgia Town has long been torn down, and the deer at Forest Glen have disappeared, presumably having undergone a mysterious transformation into venison. (I don’t know what happened to the emu.) That old wildlife sanctuary is now a luxury tourist resort. I can’t find a trace of the Big Bottle on the internet, so I can only assume that the piss fumes proved a health hazard, and that it’s been torn down too.

  Right now, my family is planning to spend New Year’s Eve together. (Everyone except Dad. He will be slaving away at a restaurant.) We’re throwing around some ideas for what to do, since this will be the last time the family will be in the same place, at the same time, for quite a while.

  Someone has suggested we go camping.

  The Family Tree

  Grandfather unfurled a yellowing scroll

  with the calligraphy of the family tree

  and twenty-eight generations rolled out

  into the lounge room.

  Only the male family members were there

  the diamonds of the family

  the ones who carry on the family name

  the female family members cast off

  to the blank scroll of oblivion

  as if they were never born.

  —KEN CHAU

  The Firstborn

  for Matthew

  Ten thousand rivers flow into the sea;

  the sea is never full.

  —CHINESE PROVERB

  Great-Great-Grandfather arrived

  in 1897 by sea.

  Great-Grandfather arrived

  in 1931 by sea.

  Grandfather arrived

  in 1949 by sea.

  I arrived

  in 1961 an ABC.

  You arrived

  in 1996 by amniotic sea.

  The sky

  is blue

  the earth

  is yellow:

  this is

  the Middle Kingdom

  this is

  the sea

  awash

  with the unfathomable

  Chinese

  sons.

  —KEN CHAU

  Family Life

  Diem Vo

  My father owned a Vietnamese video store in Irving Street, in the working-class suburb of Footscray. The business is failing now, but during the days before home-pirating businesses took over, he was able to earn a decent enough income. Sandwiched between a Chinese hairdressers’ and an Italian take-away shop and directly opposite the Footscray bottle shop, the video shop stood, rather oddly, with colourful, glossy Asian movie posters covering every inch of the glass windows outside. Over time, the posters faded from the constant exposure to sunlight.

  The front of the shop was where the customers rented the Hong Kong serial movies (dubbed in Vietnamese), and the back of the shop was where both my father and mother sewed Country Road garments for eighty cents a piece (quite a high price in those days). Sometimes my parents would run long errands and leave us in charge. So there we were, two schoolgirls wearing our school uniforms running a video shop. We liked to think of ourselves as young businesswomen and took pride in the responsibility thrust upon us.

  Customers came to the shop carrying plastic bags containing previously borrowed videotapes. They would inquire about the latest Hong Kong serials. Most popular at the time was one titled King of Gamblers, in which the characters fought and killed one another to become the top card-player. This involved a lot of fancy card acrobatics. In one scene, a skilled gambler slashed his opponent’s throat by throwing a playing card from some distance away. The plastic card, expertly aimed and thrown like a boomerang, landed perfectly, slitting the man’s throat. All very farfetched and dramatic, and therefore extremely popular with Vietnamese people.

  The customer would select his or her movies, choosing from the numerous coloured posters plastered on the walls. My sister would obtain their customer number and look it up in my father’s handwritten filing system. I would fetch the movie from the piles of videotapes, which were stacked in rows and columns in no particular order, making searching difficult. The customer would hand us their money and we would give them change from the shoebox, kept in a drawer, which served as a cash register.

  My sister and I would complain sometimes about having to work and having no life. However, we made up for it by using the coins from the cash-register shoebox to treat ourselves to hamburgers and take-away cappuccinos from the pizza shop next door.

  *

  When we weren’t working at the shop or studying, our childhood and early teenage years were centred on our father’s extended family. A weekend with the Vo family at St Albans was always a dramatic experience. It was like being on the set of the Vietnamese version of Neighbours, filled with drama and gossip. My dad’s parents and his seven siblings owned two rows of double-storey houses on the same street, and family gatherings occurred regularly. Every child’s birthday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, New Year’s Day, Ancestor’s Death Commemoration Day, the weekend – any event was an excuse for the men to get pissed and the women to gossip.

  However, unlike in Ramsay Street, there were never any cups of tea or bickies served. Instead, each family unit came armed with a slab of beer. VB – or, as my uncles liked to refer to it, ‘Vietnamese Beer.’ I can remember thinking that if I had collected all the beer cans from all those family gatherings, how rich I would be to this day.

  An enormous amount of food would be served. Due to the large number of people, the dining table was useless. There would not have been enough space for everyone to sit down. Therefore, newspapers would be spread out on the floor and the food, brought out by the women, placed on top. The men would gather around the makeshift newspaper table; in front of each of them lay a little porcelain rice bowl, chopsticks and their beloved VB cans. Here they would contentedly eat and get pissed.

  Meanwhile, the women would form their own group. These family gatherings were their chance to parade their newly purchased designer bags. They would show each other their latest Chanel or Louis Vuitton (always hot goods) and discuss the most flattering ways to carry the bags. Another popular topic of discussion was who had recently been to Vietnam to have plastic surgery. (Nearly all the women in my family have had plastic surgery). From the television in the background blared Paris by Night, a popular Vietnamese-American variety show. The female co-host, done up in her beauty-pageant finery and rumoured to have a brilliant plastic surgeon, always sparked keen interest. They also gossiped about pyramid schemes and who owed money to whom, and entertained themselves with gambling and karaoke. They tended to sing traditional songs, a form of Vietnamese opera, mostly melancholic stories about love or love for one’s mother.

  *

  At family gatherings today, as our overweight, McDonalds-eating younger cousins struggle to eat their Vietnamese food, we tell them that they have it easy. We paved the way for them to have more freedom growing up. We tell them how our parents’ discipline drove us to rebel. One of my cousins rebelled against her mother’s strictness by leaving home and becoming a heroin user. She used to frighten her mother by saying, ‘If you don’t let Mai (her younger sister) go out with her friends, she will end up like me!’ That was enough for her mother to loosen the reigns a notch.

  We also remind our younger cousins that their parents came to Australia at a younger age than ours did, with at least a little English. Our younger cousins have not had to act as inte
rpreters, translating at parent–teacher interviews, explaining every bill, forging their parents’ signatures and writing their own school sick-leave certificates. They have not had to become masters of forgery and rebellion!

  Like most migrant youth, we spoke English at school and our parents’ language at home. This switch was made further complicated by our parents’ use of ‘Vietnamese-English’: English words spoken with Vietnamese tones. When Vietnamese family or friends telephoned us, they expected to hear a tonal sounding ‘Hello?’ Answering the phone in an Australian accent would result in them hanging up, thinking they had called a Westerner’s residence. On the other hand, answering with a Vietnamese-sounding ‘Hello’ would cause confusion among my non-Vietnamese school friends, who wouldn’t recognise my voice.

  All of these aspects of growing up Vietnamese in Australia were frustrating. Our younger cousins were spared some of these frustrations. On the other hand, we had the chance to witness our parents’ struggles during their first years in Australia, and so to understand them better. Before they owned their own homes and obsessed over designer goods, our parents all lived in housing-commission flats and took public transport to work in various factories. Before they owned the video shop, my father earned a pittance picking fruit and working in shoe factories. My mother sewed in factories and at home. Sometimes she would sew until the early hours of the morning, working frantically towards delivery day. She developed chronic back pain from constantly bending over the sewing machine and sore eyes from squinting at the tiny stitches.

  Having witnessed all this, we understood that our parents were struggling people who had recently left a war-torn country. Their old country was no longer theirs, and they were not equipped to participate fully in their new country. They found it far easier to deal with other Vietnamese-Australians than to learn English. However, this kept them alienated from the non-Vietnamese-speaking world; they lived in their own cultural bubble. This was problematic for them, and we too felt their uncertainty and awkwardness. Standing next to them, translating, we recognised their helplessness.