Page 124 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ASIANS IN AUSTRALIA

called ‘West Asia’ (including Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon and the Middle East) are
sometimes included in the broad category of ‘Asians’ in Australian public discourse,
sometimes not. Today, in the popular imagination at least, ‘Asians’ are generally
associated only with those coming from East, South-East and, to a lesser extent,
South Asia, reflecting what Lewis and Wigen (1997: 55) call an ‘eastward displace-
ment of the Orient’ in the global geography of the latter half of the twentieth
century.
Lewis and Wigen go on to remark that ‘Oriental peoples’ have come to
be defined ‘by most lay observers as those with a single eye fold’. This visual emphasis
on corporeal difference betrays the inescapable racialization of ‘Asians’ in the
dominant cultural imaginary: the lumping together and homogenization of a group
of people on the basis of a phenotypical discourse of ‘race’. In Australia, as elsewhere,
common-sense notions of ‘Asianness’ are inevitably, impulsively associated with
some notion of visible racial difference, even though contemporary official discourse
(such as that used in the Census) generally avoids the use of explicitly racial
categories. As we have seen in the previous chapter, in the early 1970s, when the
infamous ‘White Australia’ policy was finally fully abolished, a so-called ‘non-
discriminatory’ immigration policy was introduced and a policy of multiculturalism
established. In the process, the discourse of ‘race’ was erased in Australian discussion
about population and immigration in favour of a discourse of ethnicity, in which
people were categorized in arguably less contested and contestable terms such as
‘birthplace’ or ‘language spoken at home’. The racial term ‘Asian’ disappeared from
official classificatory systems such as the Census, even though the term remains
salient in the public mind, which cannot easily be censored.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the silence about ‘race’ in official discourse
has not prevented the repeated eruption of racialist and racializing voices into
the public sphere. Thus, ‘Asians’ are regularly and often unthinkingly, taken-for-
grantedly, talked about en masse as if they were a single, homogeneous group. In
most cases this proto-racial rendering is harmless enough, signalling no intended
racist othering. In some historic instances, however, racialist reference to ‘Asians’
is made explicitly to problematize and question the legitimacy and desirability of
their status as residents of Australia. The most recent example is that of Pauline
Hanson and her One Nation Party, the white populist political movement which
swept the country in the years 1996–98. While Hanson has always strenuously
denied being a racist, she has not stopped claiming that Australia is being ‘swamped
by Asians’ and that the influx of immigrants should be halted – a code message that
there are already ‘too many Asians’ in the country. Hanson’s brief but sudden surge
to popularity rocked the nation, rudely awakening many Australians to the virulent
persistence of xenophobic forces in their midst they had thought were long extinct.
Yet the ‘Hanson phenomenon’ illuminates the fact that the issue of ‘Asians in
Australia’ is profoundly entangled in the continuing significance of ‘race’ in the
Australian cultural imagination. This is an uncomfortable message for a nation that
has attempted very hard, in the past few decades, to efface its legacy as an explicitly
and self-consciously racist nation–state.

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