Close to Home

by Alice Pung

  But the girls at Hornsby Girls’ High School, in outer Sydney, understood that I was not talking about wanking. Many of them had Asian faces, and told me about how differently they and their brothers were treated when they were growing up. Most people value the goose that lays the golden egg. But does it make a difference whether that goose is free-range or caged?

  ‘Sometimes I feel like a human doing, not a human being,’ wrote a student in a writing workshop I conducted. Another wrote about being one among a mass of ‘sheeple’. It doesn’t matter whether they are from public or private schools: young adults all seem to feel the same way sometimes.

  The day I visited Shepherds Park School, in Wagga Wagga’s juvenile-detention centre, I was entirely unprepared for the sight of the three-metre-high fence topped with closely wound spirals of barbed wire: what must these students have done to end up here? I was greeted at the front office by Simon, the principal, a convivial man whose face lacked the severity I had expected of the principal of such a place – or of any secondary school. I was also given a short induction by Graham, who worked in the front office. ‘Now, we are allowed to restrain the kids by force, but they get a number of warnings before we do. So don’t be alarmed if we have to handcuff them or tackle them to the floor. It doesn’t happen very often when there is a guest, but be prepared.’

  Can all of these boys read and write? I asked. ‘Most of them can,’ Tracy, an English teacher, told me, ‘but some of them have very low literacy skills. And they would have covered that up at their schools by refusing to do any work in class and saying, ‘“That’s just baby stuff. I know all that already.’’’

  I walked into the classroom and noticed the locks on the door and windows. Then the boys filed in, slouchy-backed, monosyllabic. They looked just like boys I had met in so many other schools.

  ‘What would you like to do? Would you like to do some writing work, or would you like me to just tell you a few stories?’

  ‘Stories,’ one murmured, and the rest grunted assent.

  So I spent the next hour telling them funny stories that Dad told me, about surviving the Khmer Rouge, and the ingenious ways he had of finding food, of not getting killed. David Gilbey, a writer and a lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University, told me about his visits to the men’s prison in nearby Junee. ‘The men like seeing outsiders, people in normal society. They are thirsting to know that they can relate to “normal” people, so when I went to talk to the men in maximum security, they were very respectful.’ And of all the schools I had visited in the past three years, I’d never had such attentive listeners. The boys gave me complete stillness for a full hour, and each came to shake my hand after the talk. They taught me more about expressing respect for a stranger than most of the other places with their blanket allegations of ‘very interesting’.

  The teacher’s aide spoke to me later: ‘You know, a lot of these kids come from very racist families. They’ve probably never had the experience of speaking to someone like you before.’ It was a tiny school in a regional city, and these weren’t free-range kids by any stretch of the imagination, but when I walked out of that wired enclosure, I wanted to walk straight back into Simon’s office and apply for a job.

  SHUNNED IN A STRANGE LAND

  Their big apartment blocks are like pointed middle fingers scraping the Melbourne skyline. Their presence in our city is only tolerated because they bring money into our education system. They are anti-social, rich young foreigners who ‘form ghettos and don’t assimilate’.

  This is what is said about our international students, and these perceptions dangerously verge on the kind of racist rhetoric we thought had ended a decade ago. Worse, they are not true.

  I worked for half a decade as a pastoral care adviser and residential tutor at the residential colleges of Melbourne University, in some of the most privileged academic environments. I have seen my students through the beginning of their degrees, when they are finding their feet in a foreign country, to their graduations and the quest for permanent residency. During this time, I have come to respect and admire their stoicism. They do not live in their own little worlds: they have opened up my world.

  When they first arrive from countries such as China, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, even as far away as Botswana, they are lonely and homesick. Feelings are the same in young adults everywhere: isolation, loneliness, the need for acceptance and respect.

  Orientation week is daunting and international students soon start to become invisible, because they do not go to pubs twice a week. Drinking makes my local students garrulous and extroverted, qualities that seem to earn acceptance and respect in Australia but many international students come from cultures where drinking is not a social pastime.

  When local students go off to the pub, the college is usually empty but for the international students. In the quiet spaces of the evenings, these students have taught me how to crochet, how to appreciate anime and moon-cakes with red-bean filling, and they talk to me about their parents back home. They shyly speak about how awkward it is to adapt to the shared unisex bathrooms, the heaviness of the meals, the loudness of the music.

  Some have woken in the middle of the night with heart palpitations because they felt they were four years deep into studying the wrong course. But career counsellors did not listen to the silence between their words. ‘Follow your heart’ was their advice. Yet one of my students could not follow her heart lest it exploded. Her family had invested all their life-savings into her education and in return she was to study hard and obtain permanent residency, to bring her parents here for a better life. She could not switch courses; it was financially and logistically impossible. This young woman sought my counsel, but she taught me more about acceptance and stoicism than I could ever teach her.

  There is a misconception that all international students are cashed-up because they pay the exorbitant fees that our government extracts from them. There is also the pointed accusation that international students do not ‘assimilate’, but this is not always a choice they are able to make. They do not ‘form ghettos’; on the contrary, they are largely and deeply in our community, yet they are also largely ignored. They are the students who serve our meals in Chinatown, the people who drive our taxis. They are the lowest paid and often most exploited workers, unprotected by Australian workplace relations legislation. We refuse to see their toils because it does not accord with our image of how our overseas cash-calves should be.

  Eventually, most find company and comfort in the presence of each other. No one seems to begrudge Western students latching on to other Westerners when studying in Asia and forming insular little expatriate communities to observe the locals as if they were sociological studies instead of people who are only separated by a different culture. But somehow, we in Australia seem to demand assimilation from our temporary visitors, instead of offering acceptance and understanding.

  Many international students are acutely aware that their parents back home are breaking their backs and bank accounts to send them here. It is not their duty to assimilate: many of them come here, under no uncertain terms, for an education.

  It is our duty to deliver that education, but perhaps it is also our obligation to show to our young overseas visitors that we are also a tolerant society, and that we see them.

  IT’S TIME TO EMBRACE THE ‘F’ WORD

  No teacher likes to hear the ‘F’ word, particularly not during final-exam time. That’s understandable: ‘failure’ seems frightening when students are constantly told that they are not limited by anything, and should excel at everything. A certain paradigm of success is encouraged, and a particular type of student is hailed as the consummate model to fulfil this ideal: the High-Achiever.

  The High-Achiever is the perfect student because teachers have no need to upbraid her, only to encourage. If she ever struggles, she is asked to think of her tribulations as material for a potential book about her future glory. She is labelled a perfectionist, but that is not t
o be considered a term of derision. Conversely, she is taught to list it as her greatest flaw to land jobs in interviews. Yet although she may be accomplished at everything, there is one thing that the High-Achiever cannot handle: the dreaded ‘f’ word.

  As a teacher, I am taught never to tell students they’ve failed, only that they ‘did not pass’. Students are sensitive, we are told, and any shake to their self-esteem will shatter their desire to achieve. We are taught to teach our students how to succeed, but we never let them question why they should. Once during a school visit when I put that question up on a big overhead projector, an alarmed teacher asked whether I was telling students to fail.

  But when I speak directly to high-school students they are curious, because they are braver and more resourceful than our society gives them credit for. Students realise that if we don’t learn to have a good relationship with failure, but are just taught to doggedly work at success, then the terrible fear comes in. The fear of losing. The anxiety about not attaining. The conviction that your best is never good enough.

  As a university pastoral care adviser, I know that often the High-Achiever is a person with severe anxiety problems. She will cry in the toilets if she gets an A instead of an A+. She will control her body in self-destructive ways, while the rampant fears in her mind are left unchecked. She may be the migrant who is studying at the library during lunchtimes because when she gets home she has to sew for her parents. Or she may be the middle-class model from Kew who coaches the debating team and runs a marathon. But often when she comes to see me, she is not a healthy person.

  When I was seventeen, my teachers took me to a small and secret room within the labyrinth of school corridors, so that I could re-learn how to breathe. I had also lost the ability to remember when to eat, sleep and speak. Up until I ‘lost it’, society, my loved ones and well-intentioned people continued to reward the anxiety-ridden, petty-minded and unhappy person I was because my academic achievements appeared so impressive.

  But there is nothing impressive about a nervous breakdown. No one wants to know you anymore. Your friends float into the periphery. You are like a useless machine that no longer works, a computer that has run too many programs, caught a virus and crashed. Who will use you for inspiration now, when no one wants to catch your disease? Dulled by depression, your rubber-mask of a face must not be seen, so you learn to hide yourself from the world. You are a cipher.

  This is the other side of success – the risk of losing your resilience, courage and curiosity. At seventeen, I lost it to such a degree that I no longer cared whether I ate, slept or survived. This doesn’t fit into a narrative of accomplishment.

  This is the reason why I never focus on telling a tunnel-vision story of success to students. Not all of us will reach such dizzying heights. Yet all of us have experienced some degree of loneliness, loss, self-doubt and despair. We must learn how to deal with these very real matters first and foremost. We must realise that being successful will not eliminate these natural and inevitable feelings. We must realise this before these negative feelings become insurmountable. If you have cultivated an anxious, unhappy persona, it’s harder to be happy merely because of a change in circumstances. In fact, any higher accomplishment will only breed more insecurities and anxieties, larger and more hideous than the last.

  As our students sit their final exams, I hope they will give it their best shot and remember that what matters in the long run is not perfection, but perspective. When Sir Winston Churchill said that ‘success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm’, he had pretty good perspective. Let’s hope that this is the kind of learning that is encouraged in our students.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF THEM

  Tina Huang, fifteen, is what the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development classifies as a ‘gifted’ child. The Year 9 student is undertaking the Select Entry Accelerated Learning (SEAL) program at Box Hill High School. Running in thirty-six government schools throughout the state, the program was designed to stem the flow of talented students from public to private education by creating an environment that would challenge and stimulate bright children. Students begin Year 8 work in Year 7, and can complete their secondary education in five years instead of six, or they can choose to undertake a more comprehensive Victorian Certificate of Education that takes three years instead of two.

  Tina’s parents were granted permanent Australian residency after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. With a university degree apiece, the Huangs wanted to give their future children, Tina and her younger sister Nicole, a better life in Australia. They bought a small business, Mussel’s Fish and Chippery, across the road from Tina’s Catholic primary school at the end of a short ribbon of boutique cafes and gift shops in Elwood. London plane trees dapple the enormous Edwardian and Queen Anne–style houses with shade and lend the neighbourhood an ambience of class and continuity, but for a concrete block of rental flats. ‘That’s where we used to live,’ Tina says, pointing to one of the balconies jutting from the building.

  The beach is a few minutes’ walk away, but Tina never went there much. She just wasn’t interested – hers was not that kind of childhood. Primary school plays and concerts were seen as indulgences; Tina rarely took part. Every weekend, her parents would drive the thirty-five minutes to the Asian stores in Springvale, in Melbourne’s south-east, to buy cheap groceries. When her mum and dad were not working, they were usually sleeping, because their shop was open till late. Tina would clean, or watch over her little sister, or practise doing sums. Her parents drilled into her that maths was the most important subject. Maths made sense, particularly in their shop. When Tina was asked at school to write about her weekend, her parents wondered what on earth the school was teaching her, not fathoming that in the surrounding brick houses, children’s lives ruled entire Saturdays and Sundays. ‘Looking back, I sort of get why other kids gave me such a hard time,’ Tina says. ‘I was an unforgiving, obnoxious brat who didn’t think much of creative writing or playing around.’

  ‘When I was about five,’ she tells me, ‘family friends came over, and their daughter had got into MacRobertson Girls’ High School. From then on, that was what my parents kind of expected of me too.’ Tina’s mum and dad understood it to be a good school because it required students to pass an entrance examination; only the smartest students were sifted through. Also, it was a government school, which meant education was essentially free.

  Tina’s extracurricular activities promptly became curricular. She had always been a bright child, but her parents believed she could be further ahead than she was. Soon, she was spending most of her free hours in after-school tutoring, including on weekends and during school holidays. At this early age, none of it was her choice, and the extra work set her apart from her schoolmates. It also instilled in her the idea that time had to be ‘used constructively’.

  At age ten, Tina was enrolled at a popular coaching college, one with more than forty branches across Australia. Every Thursday after school, Tina would take a three-hour scholarship-preparation class. ‘I sat in a classroom and did a maths and an English test, followed by two writing pieces,’ Tina explains. ‘For an extra $25 you could also do an abstract-reasoning test. They run the tests through a machine and tah-dah, you have your results and self-worth all summed up in a pretty blue graph.’

  There are now hundreds of such colleges around Australia, dedicated to drilling students in the skills needed to win scholarships to private schools, to get into selective state schools like MacRobertson or North Sydney Boys High, or to gain admission to state schools’ SEAL programs. These coaching colleges do not require any form of certification from state educational departments and are free to set their own curricula. The more successful companies, such as James An College, have many satellite offices in suburbs where there is a high concentration of Asian parents, many of whom, like Tina’s, work long hours, putting their earnings into their kids’ education.
Courses are often booked out months ahead. The companies kill two birds with one stone: not only do they alleviate the guilt parents face at leaving their kids at home alone for long stretches, they also make that ‘idle’ time productive.

  I went to an information night held by one such college. When I phoned beforehand, I was advised the company did not teach ‘generalised maths and English skills’, but focused on ‘techniques for taking scholarship or selective entry – school examinations’. The session took place on a Sunday evening in the small hall of a leafy primary school. On arrival I was handed a clipboard, a stack of papers, a highlighter and a red pen, then told to take a seat. There were five Chinese and Indian families. With the exception of a boy and girl in Year 8, the children were in Years 3 to 5. The three Caucasian attendees had come without their children.

  The woman who gave the presentation (and ran the company) had the demeanour of the kind of old-fashioned school mistress who would post the results of every student on the board at the end of each week. She spoke as if addressing a much larger audience and urged parents to find schools that filtered the brightest students from the rest. She singled out a small Catholic school in the outer-eastern suburbs, which one of the Indian children, a shy girl, was attending in the hope of winning a Year 9 scholarship to a private school. ‘Half the numbers in this school,’ the presenter said, not hiding her sarcasm, ‘are studying vocational education subjects: fascinating subjects like horse studies.’ One of the mothers laughed loudly.

  The presenter asked the Year 8 boy which maths book he was using in class, then told him he was already lagging behind because the SEAL students at state schools were studying Year 9 maths. She mentioned how some schools wanted ‘well-rounded’ students who were engaged with their communities, and advised parents that they could get around this by finding a topical issue in their local paper and getting their child to write a letter to the council opposing the cutting down of a tree or the installation of new poker machines. The letter could then be included in the student’s portfolio should they get an interview with a school. She told us there was ‘no need to lock little Johnny up in a room all afternoon, forcing him to read about the war in Sudan’ because scholarship tests do not cover foreign affairs or ethical issues. She knew the details of each company that administered tests for the different schools, the contents of past tests and exactly how many students had sat for each one. Again and again, the same mother hooted with glee: she had clearly found herself a kindred spirit. No pain, no gain.