Page 156 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

THE CURSE OF THE SMILE

answer to be some distant, alien or exotic land. (Several people of Chinese descent
who have lived in this country all their lives and speak in a clear Australian accent
have told me that even they get questioned in this way.) Is such a presumption
racism? And by extension, is the question itself necessarily tainted by a racist
attitude? The irritation and frustration we feel at having to explain again and again
‘where we are from’ incline us to answer ‘yes’ to these questions. ‘White’ friends I
have spoken to about this issue generally deny any racist motivation implied in this
question, and defend it as a sheer expression of interest; but, then, what triggered
the interest in the first place, if not a certain curiosity about otherness – a curiosity
which is implicated in our very construction and positioning as other? On the other
hand, should the question not be asked at all? Wouldn’t a lack of genuine interest
in our ‘difference’ be just as frustrating and insulting? In short, what we have in
this very simple instance of social exchange is an acute moment of awkwardness,
which points to a semiotic realm beyond the simple binaries of acceptance and
rejection, tolerance and intolerance, racism and anti-racism – a realm of profound
ambivalence shared by both sides of the party, but keeping them worlds apart,
a true moment of ‘communication breakdown’.
In Australia, the celebratory preoccupations of official multiculturalism and
the ongoing national obsession with Asia overdetermine the way in which this
ambivalence is articulated in relation to Asians. In my experience, a significant
number of white Australians have internalized the ‘Asia-mindedness’ so promoted
by the government and have moved beyond ‘mere tolerance’ in their attitudes
towards Asians in the direction of a more enthusiastic excitement of sorts. Indeed,
due to Australia’s geographical proximity to Asia I have encountered many (white)
Australians who have actually become quite familiar with some of the countries
to the north: they’ve been ‘there’ on holidays or on their way to Europe, or they
do business with Malaysians, Chinese, or Japanese, and so on. Thus, as someone
who looks visibly Asian, I am quite often asked ‘Where are you from?’, but with a
curious inflection of liking or fondness for ‘Asia’ rather than suspicion and mistrust:

‘Where are you from?’
‘I was born in Indonesia.’
‘Oh, I really like it there; it’s such a spiritual country!’

This snippet of conversation reminds me of Ruth Frankenberg’s observation in
White Women, Race Matters (1993) that while American white women mainly
see nonwhite ‘cultures’ as lesser, deviant or pathological, they sometimes see these
‘cultures’ as somehow better than their own, for example, as more ‘interesting’,
more ‘natural’, or indeed more ‘spiritual’. But these ‘positive’ evaluations, as
Frankenberg (1993: 199) rightly notes, are still based on dualistic conceptions
of self and other.
At a party, I was introduced to a man who, upon giving me his hand, immediately
started to blurt out some words in Cantonese, then Japanese, then Malay. Did he
want to show off or something? It surprised and frustrated him that I understood

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