Page 151 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

peculiar way, Asians have, by the mid-1990s, become Australia’s pet people. I know
this from personal experience. My earliest memory of Australia dated from the
mid-1960s, when my parents wanted to get out of Indonesia, my country of birth,
because of the volatile political situation there. We ended up migrating to the
Netherlands, but there were other possibilities: in a tight labour market quite a few
countries in the world would have been willing to give my father, an engineer,
a job – Brazil, America, Singapore. Why not Australia? I asked my father. As a child
growing up in Indonesia, I was very aware of Australia’s proximity as the Great
White Land to our direct south. It was on Australian radio that I could listen
to exciting music such as the Beatles and Elvis Presley – virtually banned from
Indonesian radiowaves because they were considered ‘western decadence’.
I wouldn’t have minded moving to Australia then. But that was simply not an
option because, so my father told me, ‘They only let white people in.’ It is therefore
not a little ironic that thirty years on I am not only living and working in this
country, but also, from time to time, receiving extremely ‘welcoming’ comments.
As one very friendly taxi driver recently said to me, ‘We need people like you here.’
‘People like me’ were, so I gathered, ‘Asians’ (although, as I will clarify below,
not all Asians, but only particular kinds of Asians). The driving force behind this
change of attitude towards Asia and Asians has been primarily economic, related
to Australia’s belated realization that in an increasingly globalized world and as
transnational regional economies become more and more important, it should
exploit its geographical closeness to its populous, and increasingly prosperous,
northern neighbours. What I want to explore here, however, are the more complex
and contradictory cultural aspects of this renewed acceptance of Australia’s
inevitable regional context, enshrined as it is in the image of the Asian woman on
the government poster for Australian citizenship. In this sense, multiculturalism as
propagated by the state can be seen, at least in part, as an instrument of Australia’s
desired ‘integration with Asia’. This does not mean that people of diverse Asian
origins living in Australia are no longer constructed as other to the Australian self
but, as I will argue, that the status of that otherness has changed.
I want to trace the specific forms and mechanisms of this change because it has,
I believe, major consequences for the way we think about the distinctiveness of ‘race
relations’ in a society which avowedly adheres to multiculturalism. What I want to
argue is that the historical tensions within these ‘race relations’ are not solved by
the rhetoric of multiculturalism, but, instead, made more complex and complicated.
This does not mean that I am against multiculturalism. But I do want to suggest
that the notion of a ‘multicultural Australia’ creates problems of its own, which
we need to address if we are to pursue a critical ‘politics of difference’ – arguably
one of the most urgent issues in contemporary critical theory (see e.g. Anthias and
Yuval-Davis 1992; Pettman 1992; Gunew and Yeatman 1993). In much late
twentieth-century critical theorizing, including feminist theory, the ideal of ‘living
with difference’ has been put forward as a way beyond homogenizing definitions
of identity politics. As Sneja Gunew (1993: 17) put it, ‘the issue of cultural differ-
ence has become an inevitable qualifier of any questions to do with gender or class’.

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