Page 155 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

difference’. That is, the problem is not so much that people cannot ‘deal with
difference’ (Pettman 1992), but that they often do not know how to deal with it,
which is to say that they deal with it ambivalently.
The contradictory nature of tolerance itself, as I have described above, produces
countless moments of ambivalence in everyday settings. This is the case, for
example, when a majority subject is suspended in the unassuming (and mostly
unconscious) moments of indecision over whether to tolerate or not to tolerate
a minority subject. Carmen Luke (1994), a white woman married to a man of
Chinese descent, describes the experience of being on the receiving end of such
ambivalence in this way:

In the company of my partner, I have been named by others in racist
terms. Racist positioning has occurred through various comments but
what is more difficult to describe and make explicit are the subtle social
mannerisms of exclusion from conversations, the avoidances, the ‘looks’,
people turning around on the streets to ‘look again’, people staring in
restaurants, and so forth.
(1994: 54)

As a white woman, Luke is identified as ‘other’ by association with her non-white
partner. As an Asian woman, I have been the object of similar penetrating treatment
and, like Luke, what I find most infuriating about these moments is precisely their
elusive, undecidable nature, the fact that one cannot prove any ‘hard’ racism here
while still feeling objectified, subjected to scrutiny, othered. This indicates that
when it comes to ‘race relations’, the problem most often confronting minority
subjects is not direct racial assault or straightforward discrimination (although this
still happens a great deal as well, particularly to those with little social power such
as most Aboriginal people and disadvantaged ‘ethnics’), but something much less
tangible than that. Luke (1994) cites a study of people’s responses to white women
in interracial relations which found that in by far the largest number of social
encounters (with workmates, neighbours, shopkeepers, children’s teachers, and so
on), people were unsure how to react and gave ambiguous signals, their reactions
falling ‘midway between complete acceptance and complete rejection’. As Luke
says, what these women found most difficult to deal with is ‘the way they were
made to feel marginal through begrudging acceptance’ (ibid.: 59). Here, the
ambivalent benefit of ‘being tolerated’ is resoundingly obvious.
Ambivalence also marks the apparently innocent question ‘Where are you from?’
which racially and ethnically marked people living in Australia are confronted with
over and over again. Many of us have become extremely (over-)sensitive about
this question because (we know that) it is often asked in the context of a denat-
uralization of our status as coinhabitants of this country, and in the automatic
assumption that because we don’t fit into the stereotypical image of the typical
Australian, we somehow don’t (quite) ‘belong’ here. As a result we anticipate,
often correctly, that the (white) person asking us the question would expect the

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