Page 160 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

THE CURSE OF THE SMILE

Aware of my own ‘dark skin and slanted eyes’, I was hurt and angry by what I read
as the unconscious racism of this poem, although I later recognized the courage
of the poet to reveal her own feelings of resentment and vulnerability in the
face of the unfamiliar, the strange, the different. In this sense, the poem reminds
us of the fact, too often suppressed by the fantasy of easy harmony endorsed by
the multicultural ideal, that the difficulties of ‘living with difference’ should not be
underestimated.
Nevertheless, I identified with the ‘Vietnamese girl’, the writer’s addressee
and initial object of hatred. The moment of acceptance at the end – when the
Vietnamese girl smiled – did not conciliate me. Are we accepted, or tolerated, only
when we display our girly smile – the stereotypical submissive smile of the exotic
oriental woman traditionally so enchanting and pleasing to Westerners? To put
it more abstractly, must Asianness be feminized in order to be welcomed into
Australian culture? If so, where does this leave the Vietnamese boy? The Vietnamese
girl’s key to acceptance – her smile – is simultaneously the metaphoric seal of her
approval and the sign of her continued positioning as other in an Australia that has
learned to be ‘tolerant’ and to enjoy and celebrate ‘cultural diversity’.
However, my identification with the Vietnamese girl of the poem would be
presumptuous and inappropriate if I did not also recognize the myriad possible
differences between us in terms of class, education, language, and so on. There is
no homogeneous entity of ‘Asians’ simply by virtue of our common ‘dark skin and
slanted eyes’; to suggest otherwise would be to collude with the very process
of othering we are struggling with, and against, with so much difficulty. What she
and I do seem to share, though, is the curse of the smile.

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