Page 159 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

ideal (as well as ideal-typical) ‘Asian’ migrant more often than not feminized?
To be sure, it should be clear that the appearance of an ‘Asian’ woman on the
government poster should not just be seen as a feminist triumph, but as a symptom
of the particular national desires invested in the image. The kind of ‘Asian’ desired
in ‘multicultural Australia’ is evident from the selection of the official two millionth
migrant in 1988. As Stephen Castles et al. (1990: 170) have observed, the choice
fell on someone who ‘fit the Prime Minister and staffer’s bill as “a presentable,
articulate Asian, and a woman”’.
I have to admit that I would probably fit the bill too. That is, I realize that, from
the perspective of Australian multiculturalism, I am now positioned as a desired
other, and that my femininity actually enhances that desirability, at least at the level
of cultural representation (in social actuality, the most desired ‘Asians’ in Australia
are more likely to be overseas Chinese business migrants, who are mainly male).
The Asianness imagined and represented here is one which is useful and flattering
for Australia’s self-image and projected future: not quite the same, but almost. To
put it differently, I am not a dispossessed refugee with no job and no proper
linguistic skills living on welfare, but a westernized, highly educated professional
whose English is almost fluent, a presentable and articulate Asian whose presence
is arguably of economic and social benefit to the nation. That the image of the
desired Asian other is feminized, however, might be precisely a sign that Asians,
no matter how desired, can still not quite be imagined as integral to the national
self. No matter how ‘multicultural’, Australian national identity still bears the traces
of orientalism in a Eurocentric discourse renowned for its feminization of the
‘Orient’ despite all well-intentioned efforts to wipe them out. It is telling, for
example, that one of the most popular books on ‘Australian impressions of Asia’
in the past decade bears the title The Yellow Lady (Broinowski 1992), thereby
replicating (unconsciously, ambivalently) the very process of gendering/othering
that the author had wished to criticize.
Some time ago I read a poem in my local community newspaper entitled
‘Vietnamese girl’. I want to end with a brief description of this poem because both
its textual ambivalence and the ambivalence in my own reading of it sum up what
I have tried to argue. The poem was written by a mother of four and expresses the
resentment many ordinary Australians must have felt when Asian migrants first
came into the country in large numbers in the 1970s. The writer describes her
feelings of rising hostility, hatred and panic as she drives in her car and sees so many
strangers with ‘dark skin and slanted eyes’ on the footpath, in the buses. But then,
in the poem’s finale, comes the moment of reconciliation, of redemption:

Dark skin and slanted eyes.
Go home! We don’t want you here!
Then you look at me.
You smile.
My anger dissipates, and, so does my fear.
(Read 1993)

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