Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  However, being a child, I didn’t understand the concept of tact. I must have conveyed how much I liked being at my godmother’s house to my mother, because one day she stopped sending me there. I had to go to her surgery and wait until she finished work for the day. There was only one TV and that was in the waiting room. Years later, when I confronted her about it during one of our many fights, she said that she was jealous. That she was my mother and my godmother was not. I retaliated that I wanted her to spend time with me and ask me about my day, but that she was never around. Most of my life, she never asked me what I’d been up to or about my friends. Her questions were always specific. ‘How is your study going?’ ‘Do you have enough money?’ ‘What did you learn today?’ She said that she was working hard to give me everything I wanted. Money as love. I wanted a mother, not an ATM.

  *

  I have a very poor memory. I think it comes from years in front of the television, but I can’t seem to remember anything clearly before the age of twelve. I worry that when I become senile, I will fondly reminisce about my days growing up on Ramsay Street with Phil, Helen and the rest of my Neighbours. However, there are a few things that I remember distinctly, mostly because they weren’t individual incidents but recurring facts of my life. My parents hated each other. They only stayed married because it was un-Catholic to divorce. For as long as I can remember, they never slept in the same room, let alone the same bed. I slept in my mother’s bed for the first ten years of my life and while we didn’t talk much, there was something she used to do on a fairly regular basis: bad-mouth my father. I would be regaled with stories of how my dad had commanded that they weren’t having any more kids; how he verbally abused her and treated her badly; how she never loved him and always loved someone else. For some time, I felt anger towards my dad, until I started noticing that it was she who verbally abused him. He never did anything right. He was lazy and inattentive and was contributing nothing to the family. Frequent shouting matches would occur without anyone thinking to send me out of the room.

  My father never knew how to deal with me. He never hurt me, never abused me. He never even talked to me much when I was a kid. I have this photo of me on what appears to be my fifth or sixth birthday with a red fire-truck in my hands, sitting on my dad’s lap. He looks happy to see that I am happy. I don’t remember getting that look when I was growing up. As an adolescent, I remember our family being very regimented, very segregated, almost like a prison. At dinnertime, we would sit in front of the TV, watch Sale of the Century and eat. As soon as dinner was over, we would disband to our rooms, shut the doors and never come out until we needed to use the bathroom or leave the next morning.

  For years I resented my father’s behaviour. Then he started getting sick. He worked less and less at the clinic and that meant that he was home when I was old enough to take the bus home alone. I started spending more time with him. I found out that he spent most of his time in front of the TV too. He had some great classic movies on video. He was a homebody like me. He liked pizza as much as I did. He would take me to my Saturday morning sport games every week without begrudging me for it. We even looked quite similar. I thought to myself, ‘This is a man I could love.’ And then he died.

  It was Boxing Day, 2000. I was fifteen. My mum, as she did every year, dragged me to the Boxing Day sales to buy things we didn’t need but should get because they were on sale. It was a long and boring day and we didn’t get home until the afternoon. My mother screamed. I ran in. He was lying on the bathroom floor, his pants still down from his attempt to go to the toilet. She yelled, ‘Call an ambulance!’ I called and talked at light-speed, in a total panic that my father could die while I was out shopping. To this day, I refuse to go to the Boxing Day sales. The ambulance and fire crew came not long after, pulled him out into the bedroom and began trying to resuscitate him. I waited outside and I prayed to God to give me my father back. I apologised to Him for going out shopping and promised that I would be a better person if He would just let my dad live. Thirty minutes later, the ambulance officer came out and told me he was gone.

  My first reaction was, stupidly, to hide in my room and to turn on the television. To pretend that it hadn’t happened. Wallace and Gromit was on. My mum yelled at me for being inappropriate. Over the next few hours, we had to organise the funeral directors and people came over to say goodbye. I was the last to do so. I said to my dad’s corpse that I hoped that heaven had good pizza. Afterwards, I was told that I should be strong. I was the man of the house now. You can’t tell a child not to mourn for his father. It’s cruel. At his funeral, I didn’t cry. I walked out of the chapel at the end of the service with his picture in my hand and I cried alone in the parking lot. The bastard videographer tried to film me, but my godfather told him to fuck off. He asked if I was okay. I nodded and he left me alone too. In case you were wondering, I don’t believe in God any more.

  *

  I have many Asian friends from many different nationalities. What amazes me is the uniformity with which all of us were raised, especially the first-generation Asian-Australians. We were all taught to be good boys and girls. Study hard in high school to get into a good course at university. Study some more until you become top of the class. Then you can get the best jobs and earn the most money and buy a house big enough for a family of six, two of them being your parents. Then, once you start working, you can start looking for a partner. Then and only then you can move out of home. He or she must be approved by your parents. Opposite sex only, preferably of the same nationality. Some other Asian nationalities may be acceptable. No white people. My mother frequently told me, when I was a teenager, how awful it would be if I brought home a white girl. Too bad neither of us knew how unlikely that would be.

  *

  In my early years of university, my mum would ask me whether I had a girlfriend or not. My response was always no, with the diplomatic Asian qualifier that I was ‘too busy studying.’ She once asked if I was gay. I said no. She replied that she was worried because I spent so much time with my best friend, who had come out a few years previously. She thought it would rub off. We would have this same conversation every few months and the script was always the same. By my fourth year of university, I had reached breaking point.

  The day I decided to come out to my mother was just before we were about to go on a holiday to Vietnam with a group of other families. I had been living out of home for three years, which in itself was a supposed statement of defiance against my mother, and I only came home for Sunday-night dinners. This particular Sunday night, I decided that there was no point stalling. These were my words: ‘Mum, you know how you’ve always suspected that I’m gay? Well, you’re right. I am gay.’ My step-dad, whom Mum had married three years before, was very calm about it. Maybe he felt it wasn’t his place to say anything or to try to act like my real dad, but I think that he’s just a really good guy. This is a list of things my mother said to me once we got her lying on the couch:

  ‘How could you do this to me?’

  ‘It’s not true, you’re lying.’

  ‘I knew it, I always knew it.’

  ‘It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.’

  ‘Is this because your best friend is gay?’

  ‘You knew about it, didn’t you?’ (pointing at my step-dad with an accusatory finger)

  ‘Why do you want to hurt me so badly?’

  ‘It’s just a phase. You’re too young to know who you are.’

  ‘Promise me that you’ll stay straight until twenty-four, then afterwards you can do whatever you want.’

  The next day I came back to do some damage control, having given her time to recover. I came home and tried to talk it out with her, only to be told, ‘Today, I wished I was dead. All I wanted to do was kill myself. But you know what kept me alive? My patients. They love me. They need me. You don’t. All you want to do is hurt me.’ So I stormed out. Since then, we’ve never discussed my homosexuality. I still hope one day that we
can speak about it, but I may be waiting a long time. For my mother, love is expressed in what she does, not what she says. So perhaps I am waiting for the wrong thing.

  *

  Like any good twenty-something, I have spent much time trying to define myself. This is what I have concluded. I am gay. I’m a gay Vietnamese doctor, the only child of two doctors. I am the son of two refugees who fought for a new perfect life, only to realise that perfection is unachievable no matter what continent you’re on. I am culturally bipolar, raised on television and English while being expected to love Paris by Night (Vietnam’s answer to Eurovision) and to speak fluent Vietnamese.

  I am also a collection of memories. Most of my life is a blur – but ask me to quote The Simpsons and I become the Rain Man. You can’t choose what you remember, be they good memories, trivial ones, or traumatic. What you can do is choose how they affect you. My mother chose to raise me as she did because of her own memories. Though she desired more for me culturally, financially and romantically, she only knew one way to raise a child: the way her parents raised her. I have decided to treat my memories as a warning sign rather than as a guidebook. One day, I hope to have children of my own. I pray that the memories they keep of me are fond ones. Then again, who knows? Maybe all they’ll remember is a senile old man talking about how he was friends with Billy and Anne back when they were still Neighbours. But at least they’ll be laughing.

  These Are the Photographs We Take

  Emily J. Sun

  1.

  Your skin sticks to the sweaty plastic seat.

  A red-faced tramp sits opposite you.

  His grin reveals a mouthful of neglected ochre teeth and on his face sit oversized plastic blue-framed glasses that shield his ant-like eyes from the world. It’s the eyes that remind you of the village idiot Lita left you for.

  ‘I have chest pains,’ the tramp explains. ‘Maybe I smoke too much.’

  He grins and you grin back.

  Sitting next to him is a man who looks like your father. You never knew your father until last week and by then it was all too late. He never apologised for leaving you, your mother and your sister Sam for a woman he hardly knew. He left you for that other woman because she had a Green Card, the winning lottery ticket for anyone not rich or politically important enough to leave Vietnam. During his two-hour visit last week he told you that one of your American half-brothers had just started his internship at UCLA’s prestigious San Fernando Valley medical program and the other was a pre-med student at the same university. You changed the subject. There was no point in knowing any more of his life. You would never see him again.

  The man, who is not your father, is a sick man. His body is hunched over and his hoarse laboured breathing scrapes against the still air.

  The village idiot returns and offers you a cigarette.

  ‘You look a lot like my brother,’ he says.

  A woman, who is only the size of a young girl, walks around the room with a large canvas bag, almost twice her size, slung over her shoulders. You did not notice her before and as she looks directly at you, you notice that sorrow has carved too many a grief line upon her once beautiful face. She has something to say to you, but continues to walk around the room with her eyes down cast. Each step is a deliberate placement as her feet instinctively try to form an arch that does not exist.

  She mutters under her breath, ‘Fifty-eight, fifty-seven, fifty-six, fifty-five …’

  The village idiot tramp sits closer to you.

  ‘I’m a gambler …’ he says. ‘I lost thirty thousand in a week. Couldn’t pay my debts. Had to run away from the moneylenders. But I told them my mother is sick … My mother is dead … She never smoked … She was very tall and had very pale skin. Very beautiful. Agent Orange. Bloody Americans. We should have killed them all …’

  You ask him for a lighter.

  But he says that that you cannot light a cigarette without oxygen.

  … forty-seven, forty-six, forty-five, forty-four …

  ‘When did you get here?’ he asks.

  You shrug your shoulders.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  You take another one and make your way out of the room. There must be a lighter or oxygen somewhere here.

  2.

  As you walk down the corridor you think that you must be in the city’s main hospital because you remember walking along a similar corridor when your sister Sam accidentally cut her finger on the rusty and jagged lid of a baked bean can. But this is not the same corridor because there are no windows here, only a long corkboard on which there are layers upon layers of leaflets.

  Volunteers Wanted, See Jesus,

  Save Your Soul, Space for Rent

  You think how great it would have been to leave home. You were sick of sharing a bathroom with Sam, who always spent at least an hour in the morning washing and blow-drying her hair. She always complained about her hair and threatened to put it through the chemical bonding process so that it would sit flat and limp against her head. Why did all the Asian girls want their hair to be straighter and smoother? Lita was different. She had naturally straight and beautiful long hair, like a model straight out of a shampoo commercial. She went through phases throughout high school, dying it blonde, orange, teal and pink, but it was always silky, smooth and black in the in-between stages. Lita. Oh Lita. You wonder where she is now, but the more you think about her, the more you feel as if an elephant is suspended over your sternum and you need a cigarette to smoke out this feeling.

  You walk until you reach a sliding door on the other side of which you see a pit of butchered buildings. The wiring on one of the remaining grey concrete blocks sticks out like sinews from a freshly severed limb. The remaining window frame is like a mouth agape; a witness to the carnage. You try to step outside but a strong gale-force wind howls, hurls debris in your direction and pins you back behind the door.

  There is not a living soul in this place.

  3.

  An unfamiliar room.

  You assume it is four-walled, but you cannot be sure because the fluorescent lights flicker on and off. The only certainty is that you are the only person in this room and your cigarette is still unlit. You are hungry. You cannot remember the last time you ate. You miss the village idiot and his ochre teeth, you miss the man who looks like your father and you miss the laundry woman. Loneliness is the ache in your chest.

  It is not always about Lita.

  This place reminds you of the time you were seven and were left all alone in a very cold room at the airport on your way to Australia. You were with your mother and Sam, except her name was Trinh back then. They took your mother and Sam away from you because little boys had to wait in another room. You were only wearing your favourite yellow shorts and a Hello Kitty singlet. That woman who was left to keep an eye on you asked you if you were a little boy or a little girl. Little goose bumps rose from your skin and you started to cry. But then she gave you an ice-cream and a plastic construction set. These are not such unpleasant memories, are they now?

  You could have ended up anywhere really. You wanted to go to America because your father was there, but your mother said that there were too many guns in America, Canada was too cold, France was too French and England was too English. Anyway, you already had cousins in Australia and your mother heard that no one really cared about Australia. It was a peaceful place tucked away in the furthermost corner of the world.

  4.

  You look up to the ceiling and see that the fluorescent light panes form a zebra crossing. The room appears a lot larger than you first thought. Do you see the three blue doors at the far end of the room? They look like the classroom doors of your primary school. You could barely speak English when you first started there. Thank goodness for Ronald who lived next door. He stood in his backyard and you stood in yours as you spoke gobbledygook to him and he spoke English back at you. Finally one day you were both speaking English. You didn’t go to the same school as Ronald. His parents want
ed more for him so they sent him to a private school in a better area, but you played with him after school until his family moved to be closer to his school. Your mother wanted to move too but she could not afford it. It was difficult making ends meet back then. She was grateful for the social security. This is a country that cared about everyone – even the refugees who had no right to be there. She worked at home sewing clothes for a local T-shirt company. She was paid less than fifteen dollars for each bag of T-shirts – which worked out to be around twenty cents a shirt. She was grateful for this work because she was paid cash-in-hand and had time to pick you up from school, cook you dinner and put you to bed.

  But you hated that she had time for you. You hated it when she walked up to the classroom door and peered in through the small window like an institution inmate. The other kids laughed at her. You knew why they laughed at her and you wanted to laugh at her wild hair and mismatched colours too. They laughed at you for the same reason. You told her not to pick you up from school. You told your teacher she could not speak English so they would not ask her to do canteen duty. You hid her from the world.

  Things changed for you when Jenny Prosser, the Aboriginal girl with the golden flax hair, came to the school. They said that she was almost beautiful with her tan skin and green eyes.

  What a pity about the rest of the face and her drunken half-caste mother. You were happy when Jenny came to the school because it made the others forget about you. The ‘Boong’, the ‘Abo’, the ‘Monkey’. They laughed at her when she pissed her pants. This was the funniest incident the class had witnessed and they forgot that the week before you had turned up to school in pink tracksuit bottoms. At least you were clean. Jenny was never clean. She was always late for school and smelt like rabbit shit. Jenny’s mum was far more embarrassing than your mother. You did not want to laugh at Jenny because you knew how she felt, but you did not want the other kids to laugh at you either. What if they made you marry Jenny? You always secretly hoped that they would involve you in a game of ‘Paralyse’ – a tag game where the person who was ‘it’ touched Jenny and then tried to pass her disease on to anyone they ‘caught’. You wanted to be contaminated but they never asked you to play.