Undragon Stories

and

"Complicated Entanglement": questions of identity in Asian Australian women's writing

A creative piece and academic thesis by Rebecca Jee

Master of Arts, Research 2004 School of English University of New South Wales Undragon Stories and "Complicated Entanglement": Questions of identity in Asian Australian wom.~n-·~· writing •.. ' . ·,.,': •··

A creative work and essay by Rebecca Jee ,,, ,..,, l . ~ ' • • . • . . ';- .. '

Undragon Stories, the creative component of this thesis, explores problems of identity as they relate to young Asian Australians. It explores the lives of two mixed race Australians in their mid twenties reluctantly having to face the immediacy of their cultural identity and the narratives that confine them.

The critical component of this thesis examines the complex social, cultural and political issues surrounding the development of Asian Australian identity in Australian contemporary fiction. It examines three recent, prize-winning novels by Asian Australian women, in order to identify some of the constraints facing writers dealing with notions of ethnic and cultural identity.

This thesis argues overall that more "complicated entanglements" between Asian and Australian identities are vital in order to produce fiction that better represents the complexity of Asian Australian experiences. I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no material previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis.

I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

Signed: ______Date: 3'J/s/2oof Thank you to Paul Dawson, my supervisor Anne Brewster, my co-supervisor

and especially to Rachel Jee and Rebecca Caines for their precious time and unwavering support Contents

Undragon Stories

Dan/iel 1 Jasmine 39

"Complicated Entanglement": questions of identity in Asian Australian women's writing

Introduction 86 Multiculturalism: the imagined Australia 88 Constructing Identity: work in progress? 99 Hybridity: complicated entanglement 101 Literature's role in the construction of identity 103 Identity crisis: examples in contemporary Asian Australian fiction 11 0 New directions 133 Conclusion 137 List of References 143 Undragon Stories Jee 1

1. Dan/iel

Dan lives a life characterised by alone-ness. It isn't solitude, exactly, because he does socialise and occasionally he likes to 'catch up' with people (a phrase he has always considered odd: why are they going faster than he is? Most of the time it seems like too much effort). It isn't that he is lonely either. He just has a wide circumference of personal space which extends into every part of his life. This means he can have things just as he wants them, and he has grown very comfortable with his tidy life. He knows just enough people to fill up the requisite slots, with no extraneous hangers-on taking up valuable time and space.

Sometimes, like now, a vacancy opens up. Lucy has taken herself out of the girlfriend/significant other slot, which makes him feel less than comfortable. It's like driving a car with only three wheels, or trying to use a phone with no '9'. Sooner or later it's going to be a problem. He tries not to rehash the proceedings of Friday night, but scenes from the dinner with Lucy's parents keep scrolling across his mind.

Dan knows, deep down, that life is more cluttered and complicated than he'd like, that it is filled with dead ends and sudden diversions and compartments whose inhabitants have trashed the place and caused serious damage, but he doesn't want to admit that. He likes to think he has control at all times, that he can steer his world in any direction, that he is his own captain, his own navigator, and a good one, a calm, unflappable one with a wry expression and a cool comeback in the face of danger. A George Clooney, perhaps. Or maybe a Johnny Depp; he has a Jee2 closer physical resemblance to the latter, if he squints slightly when looking at his reflection in the mirror.

Dan sits alone on his charcoal couch, drinking scotch and listening to Miles Davis.

The one thing he knows he can control is his habitat, subscribing to the theory that a messy house means the owner has a messy life. Whatever else is going on, however else things have fucked up entirely, he likes to think his life looks minimalist, like something out of an architectural magazine. Clean lines, white space, lots of stainless steel. Unfussy. Controlled.

When he was a kid, Dan always hated the way the family home resembled a

permanent garage sale. In amongst all the brand new leather lounges and glass­ topped coffee tables were random piles of his father's bric-a-brac, slightly mouldy

rattan outdoor furniture, broken electrical equipment and stacks of dusty records no

one listened to because the turntable was in a box at the back of the garage. He

had hoped the record collection might yield some unknowingly hip vintage items like

original Beatles or Rolling Stones LPs, but the only vaguely interesting items he

found were Simon and Garfunkel and Neil Diamond's Hot August Nights, and he

wasn't sure they were worth the effort.

Dan's current CD collection reflects nothing of his father's taste in music and he

feels confident that any future child of his stumbling across it in twenty years will not

be disappointed. In fact, there are only a few CDs out of the hundreds he owns that

he has actually listened to more than a couple of times. His selections are generally Jee 3 made to reflect well on his taste and to satisfy his penchant for collecting. The CDs are ranged across one wall of his flat on purpose-built floating shelves, removing the need for art on that wall. Usually the CDs are alphabetised, and in his less occupied moments Dan has been known to sort them according to spine colour, but that strikes even him as just a bit shallow. He usually shuffles the CDs up before anyone can see, but he can't deny that the neat liquorice allsort stripes please him greatly.

Aside from the CDs and his very slick B&O BeoSound unit, there isn't much more to the flat. Bare, polished floorboards, the couch with no scatter cushions to mess it up, a new widescreen television, the requisite stainless steel appliances in the kitchen, a floor lamp shaped like a huge egg, and his king-sized island of a bed. He feels an almost licentious glee at the paradox of minimalist excess his flat embodies

- completely pared back, but always the most expensive and the most luxurious.

The fridge is like a walk-in wardrobe. The walk-in wardrobe is like his own private

boutique, with floor to ceiling mirrors and discreet cupboard doors that slide back to

reveal his expensive and perfectly tailored clothes. A lot of black, but he has

recently begun branching out into chocolate, olive and charcoal, which he would

have avoided if the salesgirl had called them brown, green and grey.

Dan knows that his father admires the flat, but could never maintain such an image.

Dan's mother moved away from Sydney before he got the flat, so has no opinion

and is probably just grateful he isn't living in a hovel or a share house. His best

friend Jasmine likes it, but then she likes everything of his, more or less; her own life Jee4 is so full of clutter that he can only handle being in contact with it for short bursts at a time.

He hasn't told Jasmine about what happened on Friday. He's almost embarrassed about it, in actual fact, because he knows how much Jasmine dislikes Lucy and how satisfied she'll be to know it all went belly-up.

The phone bleats and Dan waits for a moment before getting up to answer it, preparing himself to fight, in case it's Lucy. He's almost relieved to hear the playschool tones of the stranger on the other end of the phone line who calls him by name and asks him how he is today. She speaks slowly and carefully and uses small words and Dan doesn't listen to most of what she is saying. He is watching his reflection in the mirror above the phone, turning his head from side to side, realising how dark his eyes actually are. So that's what he looks like when he's trying to appear interested. He thinks he should probably try harder.

After a while he realises she is still prattling on, and he begins to wonder whether she is mistaking him for someone else when she says, "That's why we're offering services to people like you in your own language."

He frowns at his reflection; he didn't realise until now that he had a language all of

his own. "My own language?"

"Yes. Although I must say, your English is very good, so perhaps you wouldn't need Jee 5 to use our service."

"Thank you for noticing."

"And you don't have a trace of an accent. Where are you from, originally?"

"Mascot."

"I'm sorry?"

"Although technically we first lived at Bondi."

"No, I'm sorry, I mean, where is your family from?"

"Australia. Where's yours from?"

"No, I think you've misunderstood me."

"No, I don't think I have."

"You're Asian, aren't you?" Her tone has flattened somewhat and a lot of the sugar has leaked from her voice.

"No, not really." Jee6

"You have an Asian name."

"I have a Chinese name."

"So which do you speak - Cantonese, or Mandarin?"

"Neither. Although the guys from Hong Kong at school taught me swear words in both - would you like to hear them?"

She hangs up. It's probably for the best.

He sits down on the charcoal couch and stares at his CDs on the opposite wall, which he has colour coded again just for something to do. He scans the room and challenges himself to find something that gives him away. If someone came in here who didn't know his name or his background or his ex-girlfriend's parents, would they be able to tell who he was? He sits there for half an hour and can't come up with anything. His flat could belong to any young man with a good job and a modicum of taste.

He doesn't even remember why he agreed to meet Lucy's parents and now, with hindsight, realises he should never have gone. They had pulled up outside her parents' house in his BMW, his pride and joy, but neither moved to get out of the car. Lucy had been silent the whole trip and had not replied when he asked her Jee 7 what was wrong. He just assumed she was nervous about whether her parents would like him, or whether he would like them. Or she was still a little hungover from the night before.

He was about to get out of the car when she said, "It's because you're Chinese."

"What is? And I'm half Chinese," he corrected, warily.

"One tenth Chinese would be too much."

"What are you talking about?"

"My parents are ... sensitive about that kind of thing."

"What has it got to do with them?"

"Well you're my boyfriend. It has a lot to do with them." Her dangling earrings

rattled as she turned her face to the window. Dan disliked those plastic beaded

earrings and had mentioned it once or twice, but she insisted on wearing them,

almost every day. He tried to ignore them.

It seemed like the end of the evening rather than the beginning, and Dan felt the

spectres of every failed relationship he ever had looming over his shoulder. He

remembered the first time he broke up with a girl in a car - after his year twelve Jee8 formal, sitting at Bondi Beach in his father's Mercedes. The luxurious surrounds hadn't stopped her bursting into tears, calling him names he didn't know existed, and landing the hardest punch he'd ever felt, somewhere between his ear and his cheekbone. He was partially deaf for three days. The only consolation was getting to drive the Mere home.

"It's not like we're getting married. I didn't need to give my parents a full run down of your family history."

"What's to tell about my family? I was born in Australia, so were my parents, so were theirs. We're a decent, hardworking Australian family."

"And mine isn't?"

"No, it's not that. But you are Chinese - half Chinese - and, well, they might have a problem with that."

He stared, his mouth slightly open, and she looked back at him, the flat plastic expression on her face betraying no emotion. She turned her face away again and sighed, staring detachedly out of the windscreen as though she was waiting to be served in a fast food drive-through.

"What about your last boyfriend? He was Italian!" Jee9

"Yeah, but he was rich. His family had that big house. He gave my parents a meat tray at Christmas."

"He called you a slut!"

"They didn't know about that until after."

"But they still think he was better than me."

"Well, really, I mean in terms of how it looks ... he was successful."

"I'm successful! I probably earn more than your parents do." Dan realised putting

Lucy's parents down probably wasn't the best way to win the argument. But here he was, sitting in a 23 Roadster for fuck's sake, about to be punched in the head again, he just knew it.

"I'm not saying that you're not talented and great in your own way, but. .. "

"I'm half Chinese."

"Yeah." She grabbed his hand with her cold fingers. "It doesn't matter to me. I just thought I'd warn you before we went in."

And then the night had unspooled. Jee 10

Dan is surprised how calm he feels now, after a weekend of simmering over it. He thinks he did quite well keeping his temper, at least up until the last fifteen minutes or so. Unfortunately that last fifteen minutes discounted the previous three hours of putting up with being patronised, insulted and ridiculed. He hates that he let himself get riled by Lucy and her family. He hates that he lost control over such unworthy opponents.

The intercom buzzes once. He sits unmoving on the couch, knowing it's unlikely to be a cable salesman or Jehovah's Witness. If anything, Lucy's timing was always spot on. The intercom buzzes again, three long, deliberate buzzes. He gets up and presses the button.

"It's me," Lucy crackles through the speaker.

"What do you want?"

"I came to get my stuff."

"Why didn't you just use your key?" Dan slouches away from the intercom without

opening the door and resumes his position on the couch.

Lucy opens the door carefully, trying not to make a sound on the wooden floor with

her spiked heels. As usual she is dressed completely inappropriately for the time of Jee 11 day; for the first time Dan realises he hates how she dresses, and he knows it's on purely snobbish grounds. Although her clothes are always expensive, they never manage to convey any kind of class or style. She can't do Audrey Hepburn but she can manage Liz Hurley. He knows most guys would be happy with a girlfriend whose clothes were always one size too small, the necklines a few inches too low and the skirts a few inches too short, but he always felt slightly cheap standing beside her, especially when other people stared because then he'd be expected to defend her virtue, and he didn't think there was much to defend.

She stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, bending one ankle backwards and forwards, her eyes darting around the room as if trying to see what he has changed in her absence. Her gaze rests a moment too long on the newly arranged CDs.

"Well?" He swirls the scotch around in his glass. "What are you taking?"

She sighs and clacks across the room to the breakfast bar to screw the lid back onto the bottle of scotch. Another thing he hates about her - the way she follows him around, tidying up as she goes and fixing up his mistakes. He watches as she walks back across the room and into the bedroom.

There is a long silence before Lucy reappears in the doorway, holding a shoebox.

"You already packed my stuff." She stares at him, her eyes slightly narrowed, as though she's caught him going through her handbag and is wondering what he Jee 12 found.

"It was in the way." He shrugs and feels the warmth of satisfaction flood him as her expression darkens. He had enjoyed taking her toothbrush and the half packet of tampons out of the bathroom cabinet, the three pairs of underpants out of his top drawer, the glossy fashion magazine from the bedside table and the low calorie sweetener from the kitchen cupboard. He likes how shallow it makes her look, how bare it makes their relationship look, how easy it is to pry Lucy off his life and fit her

into a shoebox.

"Look, Dan, I'm ... " she sits down on the edge of the couch.

"Don't apologise," he says, feeling the satisfaction of exorcising Lucy hardening

around him like a shell, like armour. "I don't want to stay friends, if that's what

you're worried about."

"How can you say that?" she cries. The third thing he hates - her tendency towards

melodrama. "It's not my fault. You completely overreacted."

"No, overreacting would have been for me to have called your father a racist,

bigoted arsehole when he basically called me a half-breed."

"Why are you taking it out on me? It's not like I was the one who said it. And

besides, he wasn't being intentionally offensive. He was just making conversation." Jee 13

Even as the rage bubbles to his lips, Dan knows any retort will glide off her well­ preened feathers like water. He realises that she will always be this way. She clicks her tongue impatiently and flicks her hair out of her eyes, the melodrama forgotten, his refusal to submit needling her. Before he can say a word, Lucy stands up with her shoebox and walks to the door.

"You are just too much work, Dan." She shakes her head with an impressive display of regret and walks out.

He leaps up, ready to run after her and yell some trivial obscenity, but his better judgement kicks in and he stops. For a moment he stands in the middle of the room, glass in hand, ice melting too fast, Miles swirling around him. Eventually the

CD stops.

He sits down slowly and looks around the room again. Clean lines. White space.

Lots of stainless steel. He smiles.

*

The casino is draped with enough razzle-dazzle to distract from the fact that it is no more salubrious than a mid-1990s RSL club. Red and gold swirls in the carpet, good lucky colours. Two huge tube shaped fish tanks rise up on one side of the room, full of languishing fish and pallid grey coral - fish are lucky too, and fish tanks Jee 14 apparently have good feng shui.

Dan likes being invisible here. He can glide from table to table, game to game, nobody knows his name, nobody remembers his face, nobody wants to engage him in conversation and nobody cares. If he makes some money out of it, that's a bonus, but he'd probably come here anyway.

Row upon row of pokies sit unattended, a few hapless souls drifting from machine to machine in the hope of finding a lucky strike. The blackjack tables are to one side, little islands of cards and chips and religion, the faithful few huddled around the dealer-evangelist with their fortunes in the palm of his hand. Roulette tables float in the middle, with their flashy spinning wheels and confident clicking as the ball trips in and out of the slots, a knot of worshippers holding their collective breath as they wait for the idol's pronouncement. Huge screens fill the wall down the end with twenty-four hour sports coverage, and the cashier sitting underneath dispenses largesse.

Above the urinals in every bathroom is a bright A3 poster asking, "is gambling a problem?" and Dan thinks it depends on how you view it. It's not a problem for him.

After all those newspaper stories about the Chinese gamblers some drunk prick asked him whether he'd left his children locked in the car, but Dan stared him down.

Gambling's not a problem for Dan.

He likes the fact that the casino's solution is a poster in the toilets and a 1800 Jee 15 number. He likes being left alone like that. Choice. It's all about choice. Some people choose to stay at home, putting the kids to bed, taking the garbage out, falling asleep in front of the television. Some people choose to dance all night in clubs, snorting any white powder waved beneath their noses, screwing nameless bimbos in the toilets, drinking till they forget. And Dan chooses to spend most nights here, breathing in the alcohol fumes and the well-worn carpet fibres and looking at all the other people like him. It's almost like family. It's almost like home.

He gets into the lift behind the fish tanks and watches the numbers climb to the top floor. The glass capsule shoots up out of the bowels of the casino and for a brief moment, he has Sydney at his feet, Centrepoint and its radiating satellites twinkling at him from across the bay. He had spent far too much time on that one blackjack table; at one point he looked up and realised every other person around him was

Chinese. If he knew anything about gambling, it was that you could never win against the Chinese, even at blackjack. When he left his seat was quickly commandeered by a short woman wearing enormous bifocals, a thickly lacquered helmet hairdo and a red jacket. She gave him a piercing look, as if to determine the luckiness of his position on the table, and seemed less than satisfied as he pushed away through the crowd.

The bar is full of black clad women and men in untucked shirts and casual trousers.

Dan notes that women in places like this always seem to make much more of an effort to dress up, and always seem to be hanging around with losers who don't. It occurred to him a while back that Lucy was one of those women, and he is quite Jee 16 glad, when it comes down to it, that he no longer has to function as her handbag.

He no longer has to put up with her constant forays to the bathroom to check her makeup, her inability to pay for anything, and her crippled stiletto hobble. After another glance around the room, he decides he looks positively slick in comparison to most of the other poor slobs and, happy in that knowledge, he buys a Stella

Artois and takes it out to the rooftop to watch the city ripple.

He lights a cigarette and closes his eyes, enjoying the cool air on his skin. it wakes him up after the lurid hypnosis of the casino floor, after hours of sucking in the thick re-circulated air, heavy with desperation and the smell of instant coffee. He hears the chatter of a couple of women behind him, but ignores it, smoking quietly, grateful for the relative solitude.

One of the women laughs, a high-pitched giggle that sounds like a cockatoo screeching, a noise that would embarrass her if she heard it played back. Annoyed at the interruption, he opens his eyes to glance at them and confirms his suspicions.

One blonde, one redhead, dressed to be noticed and tottering on their spiked heels.

Lucies.

"Excuse me," the blonde catches his eye and grins toothily. "We've got a bet on."

He pauses for a long moment, figures it could be worth the effort and turns to face her. "No kidding, in a place like this?" Jee 17

The women sidle closer.

"Suzie thinks you're part Japanese. And I think you're part Spanish."

"Interesting. What's riding on this bet?" He leans as casually as he can on the railing and hooks one ankle over the other. The blonde can't stop grinning, but

Suzie has altered her approach to match his own and is playing it very cool.

"The next round," Suzie replies, moving over to the railing and leaning beside him.

"And what are you drinking?"

"Long island iced tea." She holds up her glass, not breaking eye contact. "So who's it going to be?"

Dan laughs. "Well that depends. Neither of you are correct, although I must say no one's ever called me Spanish before."

"So I'm closer?" Suzie purrs. He is getting distracted by the way she keeps touching his arm.

"Looks like it."

"Hey, it's my bet!" The blonde pouts in mock-petulance and goes to Dan's other Jee 18 side, shaking her long hair out. As she moves, he catches sight of a man moving towards them and the tingling sensation that tells him he might actually have scored the impossible slithers down into cold panic.

"Shit! My dad!" he mutters, swinging around to face the other way, his cheeks burning.

"What?" Suzie scans the rooftop and lets go of his arm.

"My father's coming towards us." He sees Suzie and the blonde glance at each other across him and knows the game is up.

"You're here with your dad?"

"No. I didn't know he was going to be here."

"Well he doesn't look Spanish," Suzie observes.

"No."

"We'll, uh ... let you go." Suzie winks at him, more sarcastic than seductive, and the two women strut off towards the bar. He hears their cockatoo-cackle again as the door closes behind them. Jee 19

"Daniel!"

Dan takes a deep breath and composes himself before turning around.

"Dad."

"What are you doing here?" Dan can tell his father is pleased to be socialising in a place his son deems worthy. He can't help glancing down at his father's feet and is unsuprised to see they are both wearing the same brand of boots. Dan would call it a mid-life crisis if his father hadn't always been that way; even before his hair started thinning and his waistline started to thicken, William had always tried to keep up with fashion. The problem is, his interpretation is always slightly off-target. For example, this evening he is wearing the right boots and the right trousers, but his shirt would look more at home on a golf course and his leather jacket is entirely the wrong cut.

"Just having a drink." Dan replies, unwilling to admit he has spent most of the night indulging in one of his father's favourite pastimes. "How's your night going?"

"Can't complain. Lost four hundred on blackjack but made most of it back on roulette. Lucky numbers proving their worth."

Dan almost winces at hearing his father's favourite saying. He realises it has been running through his subconscious all evening, despite the fact that he has lost a Jee 20 thousand dollars.

"Are you here with anyone?" William asks.

"Uh ... no ... l was, but they had to go." Dan lies. "You?"

"Felicity and a bunch of our friends are inside." William points out a group of men and women who don't look much older than Dan, crowded on sofas around a glass topped table in the middle of the room. William's girlfriend sits among them holding court, wearing a sequinned top and running her hands through her short blonde hair. Dan realises that with very little encouragement she could be a Lucy too and the thought makes his skin crawl.

"Did I tell you I'm going to Singapore soon for a couple of weeks?"

"No."

"You should come along for a holiday. The family would love to see you."

Dan can't stomach the idea of spending a couple of weeks with his father, let alone the entire extended family, and he doesn't relish the thought of explaining why his life appears to have run aground at the ripe old age of twenty five. How come no wife? How come no house? How come no luck, /ah? Although he suspects that his young cousins would admire his well-funded, IT-driven lifestyle. Jee 21

"I'll think about it."

"You've been thinking about it for a while now." William sounds like he's joking but

Dan knows better. "The family asks about you all the time. They're always disappointed that you don't visit."

"I haven't had time, dad."

"You can make time."

"Maybe."

"Hey, it'd be fun." William grins, then claps him on the shoulder. "Anyway, I should get back. I'll see you on the weekend for the big birthday dinner. Come early and help us set up, okay?"

"Sure."

"Good to see you, mate."

As he watches his father through the glass door, Dan feels an unpleasant feeling of ill will descend upon him. His father has never been able to pronounce the word

'mate' properly; it always sounds forced, mimicked. Insincere. Jee22

He hates the constant pressure from his father to see the family. The family doesn't mean much to him these days, and he doubts he means much to them. Even when he lived in Singapore he never felt like they were really a part of him; the adults seemed more like his parents' friends than his own relatives and his cousins were all too young to be of interest. Besides, he has to admit it isn't so much the thought of family that holds him back from going to Singapore as the fact that it would please his father if he went.

Dan finishes his cigarette before going back inside. Suzie and the blonde are perched on bar stools, half draped over a couple of tanned, thick-necked jocks in suits. Dan grits his teeth as he passes them, trying not to hear the laughter that, through those long island iced teas, now sounds like cats brawling. He goes downstairs and aggressively wins back twice what he had lost earlier in the evening.

"Good night?" the cashier remarks as he hands his chips in.

"Lucky numbers proving their worth," he mutters as he walks away, stuffing his earnings into his pockets.

*

Dan hangs one leg over the railing of the balcony. He always feels claustrophobic at his father's house, trapped and threatened, and usually ends up sitting on the Jee 23 balcony railing with a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of beer. Dan thought it amusing at first when his dad and Felicity had started arguing through terse smiles, considering all the world wars he'd seen his father invoke with his mother over the most trivial things. The bickering started with the fish but the humour wore off and

Dan left the room when they got onto what to drink with the meal.

"You take the wine." A voice from downstairs floats up to him, in answer to his thoughts. He peers over the railing to see the heads of the Lim family bobbing up the front path, Peter at the front, Cath in the middle carrying what is probably a pavlova, and Jasmine at the rear carrying the bottle of wine. Dan recognises that bottle of chardonnay, even from this distance; it is destined to be passed backwards and forwards between the two families for years to come, as neither like chardonnay particularly. It's just a well-known fact that in Australia you give your host a bottle of wine when invited for dinner and neither Peter nor William could bear to break social conventions, even though they have known each other for more than thirty years. The hapless bottle has been chilled and rechilled so many times the label is starting to peel.

Peter knocks on the door, gives his family a quick once over and barely suppresses a sigh. Dan picks a pebble out of a nearby pot plant and throws it behind Jasmine.

She glances up quickly, a huge grin splitting her face, and sticks her tongue out at him.

"Welcome!" Dan hears his father open the door. "Come in! Cath, lovely to see Jee24 you. Jasmine, prettier than ever!" Dan swings his leg back over the railing and goes downstairs.

"It's good to see you too." Jasmine's mother Cath is smiling tightly, standing awkwardly in the hall, holding a covered dish with both hands. In years past she would have headed straight for the kitchen, but she seems unsure of herself, as if it is the first time she has ever been to the Yip house.

"Is that what I think it is?" William lifts the comer of the tea towel. "Aha! Pavlova!"

"Just for you." Cath smiles again, a little more relaxed. "Shall I take it...?"

"Yes! Go on through. Felicity is in the kitchen, just finishing up. Let me introduce you," Wiliam leads Cath towards the kitchen and Jasmine follows her father into the living room. Dan strides in behind them.

"Uncle Peter, hello," he says, shaking Pater's hand formally. He winks at Jasmine.

"How are you, Daniel?" Peter asks.

"Not too bad. And you?"

"Fine. Fine. It's been so dry lately, hasn't it?" Jee25

"Yes. We need a good rainfall," Dan dutifully replies.

"Those poor farmers. I thank my lucky stars every day that I don't make my living off the land." Peter shakes his head.

Dan figures it does him no harm to play out the little ritual Peter expects. All they need is a ravening dissection of Sydney's real estate prices and they would have a full small-talk complement. Maybe Peter won't play that card until dinnertime, when he'll have a bigger audience and can boast about his investment properties.

William will try to top him, of course, but that part of the game is between the two men and no-one else.

Peter looks around the living room. "The room's changed a bit."

"Oh, yeah." Dan shrugs. "Mum took some stuff to Melbourne when she left."

Peter coughs suddenly, his face flushing.

"Oh, do you want a drink, Uncle Peter?" Dan asks coolly.

"No, no that's okay, I'll go and see if they need me inside." Peter quickly marches off into the kitchen.

Jasmine flops down onto the lounge and gazes uninterestedly at the television. Jee26

"He's been so anxious, all the way here. Desperate that none of us says or does anything wrong. I thought he was going to explode with the tension."

"Don't worry about it." Dan fishes two bottles of beer out of the bar fridge, hidden behind a glass and chrome counter. "The whole double birthday steamboat dinner thing seems strange anyway without mum."

"I guess our dads still have birthdays, whatever else has happened. My mum still made a pavlova." She takes a swig of beer and Dan smirks wryly. "How's Felicity coping?"

"Don't know. Don't really care." He puts his feet up on the coffee table.

"Mum'II sort her out." Jasmine looks around the room, just as her father had done.

"Your mum didn't take much, for all that."

"Nah. She wanted to get her own stuff mostly. And dad made a fuss about most of the things she did want. She's just happy to spend more time with her own family now that she doesn't have to worry about dad's."

The two sit silently watching television like they always do at these family gatherings and Dan tries not to think about his absent mother. It's easier with Jasmine here.

He always liked being alone with Jasmine at these joint family gatherings, getting into mischief, as the adults used to say. It was always so uncomplicated, so Jee 27 separate from the usual mess of the Yip household, separate from the fighting and the side-taking and the accusations of betrayal and disloyalty. Now that his mother was gone there was less of that, but his position with his father still felt precarious and he was glad to have an ally.

"You should invite Lucy to one of these things. Maybe she and Felicity can keep each other company," Jasmine says suddenly. Dan runs a hand through his spiky hair and clears his throat.

"We broke up last week."

"What?" Jasmine sits up. "Why?"

"It's not important. Sorry I didn't tell you."

"That's ... terrible ... "

He whacks her on the knee with his hand. "Don't act like you're sorry! You're glad to see the back of her."

"Well, it's just that...she was ... "

"A total bimbo." Jee 28

Jasmine gasps in mock-horror and starts to laugh, silently at first, the sound brimming and bubbling over. He grins too. She simmers down eventually and wipes her eyes and, as she straightens up, he's sure she wriggles closer. Their knees touch slightly, her hand fallen in the space between them on the couch.

"Look, so grown up now, drinking beer." Dan's father marches into the room with

Peter, Cath and Felicity in tow, and Jasmine jumps up. Dan takes another swig on his bottle for emphasis. "Daniel get your feet off the table. Jasmine, I'd like you to meet Felicity." He squeezes Felicity's arm and she smiles with a dazzling array of straight white teeth. "Felicity, Jasmine is one of Daniel's oldest friends."

"Pleased to meet you," Felicity shakes Jasmine's hand. Dan knows by the stunned expression on Jasmine's face that she cannot reply, nor can she prevent her eyebrows rising. Felicity is dressed simply but immaculately, her thick blonde hair cut short and neat. She looks exactly like Dan's mother, with the same colouring, the same appealing openness in her expression. But while Fiona had seemed yielding, Felicity looks commanding, and about twenty years younger than her predecessor, which would give her the advantage every time.

"Felicity was just saying how impressed she is with your writing, Jasmine." Cath's painted-on rictus of a smile has not wavered since she arrived.

"Oh, thanks," Jasmine manages. Her eyes dart to Dan. Jee29

"Have you had much published?" Felicity asks.

"Oh, bits and pieces. It's hard to keep on the treadmill, you know, sending stuff out all the time, getting rejection slips." Jasmine shrugs. "But sometimes you get accepted and -"

"And it makes it all worthwhile." Felicity squeezes Jasmine's arm. "It's a passion, I understand."

"Yeah ... I guess so." Jasmine forces her smile to stretch just a little bit wider.

"Which of my stories did you read? Did Daniel lend them to you?"

"No, no. I subscribe." Felicity beams. Jasmine looks momentarily confused until

Felicity points to a large stack of magazines on a side table. Dan suspects Felicity arranged them just-so for Jasmine's arrival, with the last issue of urbane artfully skewed on top of the pile. "I particularly liked your Chinese New Year story; it gave me heaps of ideas. I'll show you how I did up the spare room, if you like."

Dan mercifully swoops across and takes Jasmine by the arm.

"Jasmine, can you come outside for a sec?" He smiles charmingly at the other women and steers Jasmine out the sliding glass door to the pool area. She starts to laugh and paces up and down, shaking her head, while Dan lights a cigarette. Jee30

"Is she for real? Where did your dad find her?" she exclaims. "The clothes, the hair... she looks exactly like -"

"They met through one of his clients. At some work dinner. Mum hasn't met her, but she's heard about the resemblance."

"It's so weird!"

"Yeah. I don't come here much anymore."

"Did she really do up the spare room like the magazine?"

"It wouldn't surprise me."

"I didn't realise anyone actually took those articles seriously! Makes me think I should try a bit harder." Jasmine snatches Dan's cigarette and takes a drag. "And she's doing the whole Chinese hostess thing?"

"Kids! Dinner!" William sticks his head around the door. Dan takes the barely smoked cigarette and extinguishes it in a pot plant.

"I guess we'll see."

The round table is crammed full of the usual paraphernalia: the metal steamboat in Jee 31 the centre like some alien spacecraft, full of simmering broth, plates of uncooked vegetables, meat and fish balls arranged around it. Small wire ladles rest in front of each setting, ready for rescuing morsels once they've been cooked in the broth.

Dan notices that the old melamine table settings with their paintings of pink dragons and lucky philosophers are gone, replaced by matte stoneware in charcoal and white. The chopsticks are pointy red Japanese ones, instead of the blunt square ivory coloured ones they always used before. Instead of the familiar bell-shaped teacups, white wine glasses have sprouted at every place. He can appreciate the look Felicity is going for, but he doesn't like it.

"Hey, dad, what happened to the chopsticks?" he asks loudly. He knows for a fact that his father hates Japanese chopsticks: they're not good for eating Cantonese food.

"I picked these up last week. Aren't they great?" Felicity trills. "Those old ones looked like they'd been there for twenty years."

"I think they had been." Dan isn't sure where the rebellious adolescent streak has come from, but he is enjoying Felicity's discomfort and is determined to push it as far as he can. Felicity's smile is cold and he knows she is aware of his intent.

Dan's father pretends he hasn't heard the exchange and gestures to the chairs.

"Please, sit!" Jee 32

"I'm going to open this." Felicity digs the corkscrew into the bottle of chardonnay and everyone at the table freezes. Their eyes linger on the bottle until she pulls the cork free with a high-pitched pop. "Who wants wine?"

Dan nudges Jasmine with his foot as they sit down and suddenly they are ten years old again, staring at their plates, trying not to giggle. Everyone politely accepts a glass of wine, but Cath quietly gets up and fetches the teapot from the kitchen. The adults start talking, as they always do, without involving Dan or Jasmine. Dan often used to wonder what it would be like if there had been more children, whether they would have risen up and taken over family gatherings. Dan nudges Jasmine in the ankle again and she peers at him, her face still turned to the plate in front of her.

He raises his eyebrows towards Felicity and Jasmine starts to laugh.

"So, Daniel, how is work going?" Peter asks, plopping fish balls into the steamboat.

Daniel straightens up and tries to put on a serious expression.

"Fine. Finished up a big project last week, and I've got some holidays coming up."

"Are you going anywhere?" Cath asks.

"You should come to Singapore with me," Dan's father points a chopstick at him and he feels like kicking himself. How could he have been so careless? "My mother always talks about Daniel. Dad always wants to know how he is going. You should write to them or phone them up." Jee 33

"I tried." Dan fishes around in the broth with his ladle. "I sent grandpa a card on his birthday and I phoned them last year. He doesn't remember getting the card and they couldn't understand me over the phone."

"Have you been to Singapore, Felicity?" Cath's try-hard smile resurfaces.

"Oh, one day, I'm sure, but William has to break the news to the family first."

Peter and Cath exchange an embarrassed look and Dan's father quietly pours tea, without meeting anyone's eyes.

"So why haven't you told them about Felicity, dad?"

"I haven't had the chance to." William tries to glare sternly at his son.

"I would say it's more important for them to meet Felicity than to see me, wouldn't you say?"

"All in good time," Felicity says in a conciliatory tone, but Dan reaches over and pats her hand.

"No, no, Felicity. I don't think it's right that you be kept a secret like this. It's as if you've done something wrong." The thick silence around the table tells Dan he Jee34 might have gone too far, but the momentum is too great and he can't stop himself.

He turns to his father. "I mean, you've told them that you and mum split up, haven't you?"

"Daniel," Jasmine whispers urgently, tugging on his sleeve.

"Well haven't I got the right to know?" Dan addresses the table, his hands spread wide.

"No, Daniel, you don't." William drops any pretence at politeness. "It's between

Felicity, your mother and me. Nothing to do with you."

"No, nothing to do with me at all," Dan stands up quickly, knocking his chair back against the wall where it leaves a dirty black mark on the white paint. "Uncle Peter,

Auntie Cath, please excuse me."

"Daniel!" His father shouts after him as he opens the front door. He stops, his hand on the door frame, and waits for the tirade.

"Look, dad, I'm sorry, but..."

"You're not leaving." William slams the door, and Daniel gets his fingers out just in time. "How can you be so rude to our guests?" Jee 35

"Why do I have to stay? Do you honestly want my company?" Dan snarls.

"Just for once I'd like to have a dinner that doesn't end up with someone storming out."

"Why are you always going on about Singapore and visiting the family? Why is it so important to you?" Dan is almost shouting now.

"Because it is! You don't have family, you don't have anything. My parents were good to me when I came out here, they paid for my studies, they helped us buy our first home. We have a debt to repay."

"You have a debt, not me."

"What do you mean, 'not me'? How did you grow up with everything you wanted?

How did you get to private school? How did you get to university? Because they helped me and I helped you. You must show some respect." William stabs his finger into Dan's chest.

"And Felicity?"

William wearily rubs his hand over his face. "That's a different issue, Daniel, and you know it." Jee36

"But it's not really, is it? I'm supposed to go there and show them what a good son you brought up so they won't notice what a mess you made of your own bloody life!"

Dan and his father stand toe to toe, each shaking slightly, wearing almost identical expressions. There is a cough from the doorway and their heads snap around together to look at Jasmine, who backs away slightly in the heat of their collective glare.

"Okay. You want to leave? Get out." William shoves Dan in the shoulder and storms out of the room, pushing past Jasmine.

"At least if I go the rest of you will have a good time." Dan opens the door, but hesitates. His mouth is dry, remorse already seeping into him.

"If you go I'm coming too and then we'll both be in trouble." Jasmine is by his side, suddenly, squeezing his arm.

"Alright then. Let's go," Dan grabs her hand and pulls her out the door, but just as they start down the front steps the porch light snaps on and Jasmine freezes.

"Hey guys, come back in. The food will be all gone if you don't hurry," Felicity's voice is warm, but when Dan looks up at her, he sees her eyes are cool and impassive. He knows she isn't asking them to come back because she likes either of them; it's just self preservation. Jee 37

Jasmine stands between them on the steps, looking from one to the other. "Well I'm going back in. I'm starving!" she says, far too brightly. She hurries back inside, not looking at Dan as he grudgingly climbs the steps.

"Look, Felicity, I'm sor-"

"Don't say anything." She holds her hand up. "He'll be okay in an hour or so. Just come back inside. If you don't he'll hold onto it and take it out on me - we won't be talking for a week."

"I know."

"So come on, then. I've got to inflict this awful wine on you, nobody else is drinking it."

Dan follows her into the house and closes the door behind him. Nobody meets his eyes when he walks into the room, and he accepts Felicity's glass of wine without comment. Peter starts talking loudly about interest rates and the property boom, and gradually the dinner gets back on track. Within an hour, when the pavlova comes out, he even sees his father smile.

He watches William across the table, his tired eyes, his face spread flatter with age and weight. Dan likes to think that when he reaches that age he will have given up Jee 38 the casino, that he will have filled his life with more than just colour co-ordinated

CDs and stainless steel kitchen appliances. He would like to get married, just once.

He would like to have more than one child.

He wonders what he could possibly pass on to those children. What kind of heritage can he give them if he doesn't even know his own? Will he force them to visit William and Felicity and Fiona? Will he make them go to Singapore, or will the debt be so diluted by then it won't be worth honouring?

But that's a long way down the track, and for the moment he is still the centre of his controlled and ordered universe, with an occasional hiccup but nothing he can't deal with. There is a place for family in Dan's compartmentalised life, but he is not jealous of people who know their entire family tree off by heart and the details about how this person died and how that person lived. People don't really know. It's all just gossip dressed up as history. Everyone has interesting stories, some people just choose not to tell them. Jee 39

2. Jasmine

We have to go to Paddy's Markets. Again. Apparently you can never have enough koala-shaped tissue box covers. Either that or they're such a commodity in

Malaysia my grandmother is planning to import them. I really only agreed to come for Mama's farewell lunch, but there is no way shopping can be done without the whole extended family. You've probably seen those coalescing knots of Chinese people, old and young, taking up whole walkways in suburban malls; that's where I'll be today, stuck in the middle of one. There's no such thing as just ducking round to the shops, and there's no point breaking away and doing your own thing; you'll never find the family again and you'll spend most of the afternoon standing alone at the agreed rendezvous point.

So I'm sitting in my aunt's house in Randwick and I'm bored. It's already one o'clock and as usual nobody else has turned up on time. I brought a book with me, as I usually do, but Mama won't let me open it. Every time I reach for it she starts talking at me, so I can either stare at the Chinese soap opera on television or stare at her.

Dad's family has never really understood my love of books. It's not that they're ignorant, it's just they prefer to do things other than read. But it baffles them, the fact that I don't spend every last minute absorbed in making more money or socialising, preferring to hide away between the covers of some novel. It baffles

Mama because she can't read and has never found a reason to learn. It baffles my Jee40 dad because he won't read a book unless it has something to do with wealth and getting more wealth and even then he'll only skim through the index. He likes sidebars.

A small burr of adolescence I've never quite smoothed out enjoys seeing the frown on dad's face when he feels compelled to lecture me on my life and my choices.

That's in between me yelling back at him and slamming doors. When I enrolled in the BA at the end of year twelve he hardly spoke to me for a week, but would tell anyone within earshot that my marks were good enough for law and I was throwing my life away to become a hippie.

Now he's resigned to the fact that I'm never going to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a stock market genius. Now he tells me that with all the money I spend on books I could have bought a house by now. Mama doesn't care about that so much as the fact that I am unmarried and have no immediate plans to change this.

"You have no boyfriend, even. When I was your age, already married with two kids," she says during an ad break.

"I don't want to get married yet, Mama."

"Ai yoh! Don't tell me that." She lets out a frustrated hiss of air between her teeth.

"What is wrong with you white girls? Chinese girls get married young, they take care of their family. You marry a rich man, Jasmine, and look after everyone. Your Jee 41 father can retire, I can go to China."

Mama has been talking about going to China for years. The one thing preventing her from going is the money; she claims she can't afford it, despite the long-held theory circulating around the family that she actually has millions secreted away in bank accounts and expensive jewellery. Once, after years of her nagging, dad organised a fortnight-long package tour to China for her, all expenses paid. The week before she was due to go, Tiananmen Square happened and, although she received a full refund, dad never did see that money again.

I lean forward slowly and pick up a magazine. Mama doesn't seem to notice. I usually try to avoid women's magazines because reading them makes me feel like my brain is leaking out one ear, and the fact that I write for one only makes me feel even more foolish for getting sucked in by them. But sometimes, at doctors' surgeries, hairdressers or my aunt's house, there are no alternatives.

As always, my attention is snagged by some glossy photos and hyperbolic advertorial and I suddenly realise that I am too old, too fat, too unsuccessful to even be allowed to tum the pages, filled with the CVs of the young and successful.

"Jodie, 23, is head of marketing at Some Up and Coming Firm, and here are her tips for a high-flying career ... "; "Larissa, 21, set up her own theatre company when she was still in high school and is now taking her latest show to London's West

End ... "; "Bianca, 19, began designing IT infrastructure as part of her undergraduate degree in computer science and now commands up to $400 an hour from blue chip Jee42 clients."

"Jasmine, 26, didn't know what she wanted to do until last year. After a number of aborted attempts at careers in music, film, interior design and hospitality, she decided on becoming a writer. She is currently squandering her talent writing for a top lifestyle magazine about trends in home interiors, but what's artistic integrity next to a regular pay cheque?"

"What you write again?" Mama cracks open another pumpkin seed with her teeth and spits the salty shells into her hand. There is already a small mountain of empty shells on the coffee table.

"Stories." I keep my eyes on the magazine. Some fashion thing about using obis and re-worked kimonos to accessorise jeans. Interesting. I wonder if my editor has seen this; no doubt she'll tell me I have to write something similar on Monday because I'm Asian and ought to know all about it even though obis are Japanese and I'd hardly know what to do with one except perhaps use it to strangle her.

"About what, your stories?"

"About people, about life. Relationships, that kind of thing. They're hard to explain."

I'm suddenly desperate to avoid Mama's unrelenting gaze so I hold the magazine up slightly, but I can feel her stare worming its way through the covers and forcing me to put the magazine down. I'm always reluctant to talk about my writing with the Jee43 family; they understand it even less than the reading.

"You make lots of money doing this?"

"No."

"Then why you doing it?" Mama peers at me in astonishment over the top of her glasses.

"Because it's what I want to do. I want to tell stories, I want to be a writer." I correct myself. "I am a writer."

"How you pay bills then?"

"I work for a magazine." I realise I should have started with this and worked backwards when the subject of my work came up. I keep forgetting Mama measures worth in monetary terms. Well, it's less me forgetting than hoping she will forget.

"What magazine?"

"Here," I rifle through the stack of glossies under the glass coffee table and pull out the February issue of urbane. I am sick of the smug sight of it. "This is it. See?

Here's my story from last month, from Chinese New Year." Jee44

"Chinese New Year!" Mama perks up, recognising something at last. She scrunches up her nose, deep in concentration, as she flicks through the pages of artfully draped red silks and gold satins. "What this about?"

"Decorating. Fashion. To give people ideas about making their houses look different." I try to think of more words she might latch onto. Words that might make my job sound acceptable. "It's very popular these days."

"You write this?" Mama says after a while.

"Yes."

"Not enough words. Too many pictures." She cracks open another pumpkin seed.

"You paid well?"

"Not too badly." I hope she won't ask for specifics and, to my surprise, she doesn't.

I keep expecting her to start scolding me, or to move on to the topic of marital status, but we simply sit side by side, looking down at the magazine.

I figure we've done enough bonding for one day. The sound of the ceiling fan doing lazy loops is starting to drive me insane and I suddenly want to get out of the house.

I stand up; if I move quickly and decisively I just might escape. Jee45

"Fashion." Mama declares, and I look down at her, bewildered. She tosses the magazine back onto the table. "This not fashion. This suppose to be Chinese house, is it?"

I sink back down onto the rattan sofa.

"My house not look this way." Mama leans forward and rubs her finger on the pictures, as though she expects the mock-Chineseness will come off. "My friend house not look this way either."

I know her house in KL doesn't look like that. Her house looks like a dusty old bric­ a-brac shop, with everything kept for posterity and most of it not worth the space.

Faded reddish photographs of the children and grandchildren perch everywhere, like lichen scaling the walls and cupboard and shelves. There are four grandfather clocks, none of them showing the correct time. There are several fancy tea sets locked in a rosewood display case, but when we drink tea we use jam jars. The dining table always has food on it, whether plates of congealing noodles or a big tub of cold rice, just in case you feel peckish as you're passing by. When I stay at

Mama's house I never wear my contact lenses in the bathroom so I won't have to see the mould propagating in the crevices or the mosquitoes floating in the bath water tank or the white toothpastey film on the sink vanity. I've never been sure whether the dubious level of cleanliness in the home was a Chinese thing or a grandmother thing. Maybe Mama doesn't wear her glasses in the bathroom either. Jee46

"It's a kind of fantasy, Mama. Pretend." I flop back into the sofa's cushions.

"But why anyone pretend like this? Nobody live this way. Not even any rooms in my hotel like this." She puts her feet up on the red vinyl pouffe in front of her.

I know before she starts that this is the introduction to the same old story of how when she turned twelve her family packed her off to the city to become a cleaning girl in a hotel. She's told this story many times, usually to make her grandchildren feel guilty because we are so privileged, or to highlight what struggles she had to endure to bring her family success, single-handedly of course. I once tried to tell

Mama that my Australian grandmother had the exact same experience only she started working at the age of eleven, but Mama just shook her head and said,

"different for us Chinese. So hard working, but never complaining." I don't remember my Australian grandmother ever complaining; she'd just shrug it off and say that things were different then.

Mama is about halfway through the tale, just before the part where she gets promoted to the head of housekeeping and then meets my grandfather, who was head of banquets. "My boss one day takes me upstairs, to the top floor, to the best room in the hotel. Ai-yoh! So beautiful! Everything so expensive, I was almost scared to touch. He tell me I am in charge of this room now, so I was very careful and I cleaned so well. It was much better than this room," She points at the magazine again, then snaps it shut and pushes it across the coffee table as though it offends her. "All the other girls at the hotel, so jealous. They hated me, because I Jee47 was just a new girl. Being in charge of Edward's room was big responsibility." She puffs up her chest and raises her chin.

I haven't heard this bit before. Who's Edward? I'm torn between delving into her story and running from the room to get the rest of the family so I won't have to listen anymore. Then it occurs to me - I must be the young character in an Amy Tan novel, torn between east and west. I'm not sure I want to play that role, but Mama is waiting patiently for my response, her eyes darting surreptitiously towards me only once, so I sigh and take up the script.

"So, Mama, who was Edward?"

Then she does something odd, like she's been waiting to answer this question her whole life. She fumbles with one of the many remote controls on the table beside her and clicks the television to mute. This is as shocking as if she had suddenly pulled off her blouse; the television is never muted. "Edward was a famous man, very wealthy, very successful. He was feh, like you."

"Feh?" I repeat the chopped syllable loudly, my cheeks growing warm. "Fat?"

"No! No fat. Feh. Feh, like you." Mama rubs her finger on my pale forearm just as she had the magazine.

"He was white?" Jee48

"So pale, like he never go outside. His nose was sunburn, all red. But very handsome. He saw me in the lobby and told my boss he want me to look after his room. No other girl. He want me. One day when I'm cleaning he ask, do I like jul­ ry. Of course, I said. Of course. Even poor people like my family, we value jul-ry.

Important to have these things, and always best quality gold, best quality jade.

Even if you are poor, important not to look poor."

Mama pauses and looks at me sharply, but it is more through force of habit than genuine disapproval. She always scolds me about my clothes. If anything, it makes me more determined to dress, in Mama's opinion, like a boy from the kampong.

Today, of course, is no exception and I stick out my legs in their faded jeans just to provoke her.

"Even if I am only a maid, I never behave like the other girls, which is why Edward give me this and why I have never taken it off." She holds up her arm and the plain jade bangle she has always worn rattles down to her wrist. I remember coveting it as a child, turning it round and round on her brown arm, rubbing the cool green smoothness with my fingers, trying to pull it down off her bony wrist. I always assumed my grandfather had given it to her. I doubt she ever told him about this dubious Westerner and the origins of her prized bangle.

"Was this before or after you met yeh-yeh?" I ask pointedly. Jee49

"Oh, before, before."

"Did you spend much time with this Edward?"

"Oh! Cannot. He was too important. Wealthy." She dispels any lesson about changing your luck that might have arisen from her story. "Also, he had a wife in his home country. But before he left, he told me about those earring. Then he went home and I never saw him again." Mama closes her eyes. The sounds of the room gradually fade back into hearing, the ceiling fan still looping crookedly, the incessant tick of the clock on the wall, and Mama's deepening nasal breaths as she starts to doze.

I'm confused. I nudge her a little too roughly. "Mama, wake up. What earrings?"

"You know those earring. Rare one, from Shanghai. Priceless, five diamonds, like this." Mama draws descriptive squiggles in the air with her finger, her eyes still closed. "Ai-yoh, you know! Everyone know."

So this must be the bit in the story where I go off on a quest of self-discovery, a journey that will change my life, that will show me my true place in the world. I almost laugh, I feel the cliches tumbling down into the silence one by one, and I lean forward to hear what she will tell me next.

"Market time!" My cousin Jono suddenly throws open the front door with no apology Jee 50 for his lateness. "Hey Mama! Everyone's in the car. Come on, cheh-cheh, time to go." He pulls on my arm.

"Wait, Jona, Mama's telling me a story."

Mama blinks, waking from her thirty second nap.

"Anh? Market? Anh." She struggles out of her chair and shuffles across the room to get her bag.

"Wait, Mama, what happened next?" I call after her, but the old woman keeps walking. It would seem my true place in the world is in a pack of Lims, moving as one through Paddy's Market. Amy Tan has a lot to answer for.

*

"What kind of name is that?" The new receptionist leans on my desk and hands me a form to sign. I'm trying to sort out the Everest of paper on my desk so I can leave and I'm already late to meet Daniel, but my auto-responder kicks in.

"Chinese. I'm half-Chinese." I glance up at her. The new receptionist looks to be straight out of school, her dark hair scraped back, her eyebrows plucked to within a fraction of ridiculousness, and her sharply cut suit suggesting she is not planning to remain a receptionist for very long. Jee 51

"You don't look Chinese," the girl says flatly, hands on her hips, head on one side.

"Your eyes aren't Chinesey at all." She dismisses me with a shrug and turns away.

I go back to clearing off my desk, but after a moment she turns back. "Well where are you from, then?"

"Australia."

"No, where were you born?"

"Sydney."

"No, I mean where does the Chinese come from?"

"My father is from Malaysia."

"So you're half-Malaysian," the girl corrects.

"No, I'm half-Chinese. He's Chinese Malaysian. He's Australian now, anyway."

"How can he be?"

"He went to university here. He's lived here longer than he lived over there."

persist to the blank wall of the girl's gaze. "He has an Australian passport." Jee 52

"So?"

"I'm sorry, what was your name?"

"Despina."

"I can see we're going to get along really well." I intend sarcasm, but the fact that

Despina has already walked away dilutes the effect somewhat.

I give up on my desk and grab my bag. I almost make it to the lift, but when the doors open Luisa, my editor, stalks out in a cloud of Chanel No. 5, her enclave following at an obsequious distance.

"Jasmine, before you go, walk with me. I've got a meeting in five." She grabs my arm and I obediently fall in step beside her, speeding past the pale ranks of office cubicles. "I'm getting fed up with white and bone and camel and all that neutral crap, and it's been a while since we did a full issue on Asian chic, so I'm sending you to Singapore. See what you can dig up. Just keep all your receipts."

"What kind of thing do you want? I don't have to go overseas to get it, do I?" I blurt out. A couple of the lackeys glance at each other, horrified and amused that I dare to argue with our boss. They are even more aghast when, instead of yelling at me, she throws her arm around my shoulder. I don't know why I'm her pet; it's not a Jee 53 spot I'm comfortable with, but then shooting myself in the foot isn't particularly pleasant either, so I try to keep my mouth shut.

"I need Oriental, I need mystery, I need new fabrics, new surfaces. You're finding me a new way of packaging the same old thing." She winks and lets go of my shoulder, which throbs with the memory of her red lacquered nails. "You need to go to the source - well, as close to the source as I'm prepared to send you. Bring back some pieces, take some photos, write something fabulous. We'll do it as part of our

'staffers abroad' section."

"I didn't know we had a 'staffers abroad' section."

"Wedo now."

"Oh. Well, are you sure I'm the best person to send?"

Luisa halts in the middle of the corridor and sighs, as if being extremely patient with a recalcitrant child.

"Do you have anything else on in the next few days?"

"Well...no ... "

"Do you have a current passport?" Jee54

"Yes, but..."

"You'll find the right angle, I know you will. People loved that Chinese New Year thing you did." She looks at me, her head slightly tilted. "You're a doll." She pats me on the cheek, turns on her black Dior heels and disappears into her office.

Cursing, I run back to the lift and make it to the Forbes in record time, even though the taxi gets stuck in George Street traffic. It's raining softly, but I leap out at the

QVB and run down the slick pavement for a block, praying I won't slip over. The bar is crowded but I spot Daniel straight away, and watch as he traces wet circles on the bar with the bottom of his glass. He yawns and checks his watch and fleeting moment of guilt claws at me before I remember I gave up trying to arrive anywhere on time long ago; I try to get my breath back so it doesn't look like I tried.

"I'm not that late." I sidle up beside him, tendrils of cigarette smoke from the surrounding tables attaching to me like suckerfish.

"Finally!"

"Like you have anything more important to do." I order a beer and perch on a bar stool beside him. "What have you been up to?"

"This and that." He shrugs. Jee 55

"You've been at the casino all day, haven't you?" I can see he has been watching a gaggle of girls across the bar , which is why I can't help prodding and he can't help a snarl flickering across his face.

"I haven't been to the casino all week. I went to the art gallery."

"Anything good?" I don't wait for his answer, mainly because I don't believe he was there. "Someone told me I should go and see the Asian art collection."

Daniel snorts. "Why?"

"They thought I'd be interested in it."

"What, because your dad's Chinese? I couldn't think of anything more boring."

Daniel lights a cigarette, flicking his zippo shut with a satisfying clink. "It's so fussy.

It has no relevance."

"You might not like it, that doesn't mean it's irrelevant."

"How is a watercolour of some prophet in a robe standing on a mountain relevant to me? Besides, if you were that interested you would have seen it by now." Daniel blows an arc of smoke over my head. Jee 56

"I did see it."

"And?"

"I didn't like it,"

"So why are you late? New developments in the feng shui crisis?" He is only encouraged when I stick my tongue out at him. "'Secrets of the Orient - new ways with bamboo!"'

"I just write what I'm told. Luisa won't let me write about anything else. I'm the resident expert apparently, and even then she only wants the version of Asia that'll sell." I frown, glancing across the bar at those girls, whose high-pitched shrieking seems to plug straight into my brain, and I notice with some annoyance that Dan is still keeping an eye on them. "Anyway, people aren't interested in reading about what it's really like. They don't want to know about the open sewers and the toilets where you have to pay twenty cents to squat over a hole in the ground."

"So that's the whole of Asia in a nutshell? Questionable sanitation?"

I glare at him for a moment. "I'll admit not everyone has the same experiences as

me, but people only want the veneer of authenticity. They want the brightly

coloured saris and cheongsams, the little Buddha statues and the cheap wood

carvings they smuggle through customs in their hand luggage." Jee 57

"You have absolutely no faith in your audience."

"People like Luisa have no faith in the audience. And to make matters worse she's sending me to Singapore to source stuff for the next issue."

"God knows why; you don't even look the part. Hell, even I look more Chinese than you." Daniel laughs again, and then grabs my arm. "I've just had a brilliant idea.

What if I come too?"

Now it's my turn to laugh but I can tell he's serious because he's forgotten all about the girls at the other end of the bar. "You come to Singapore?"

"Yes me."

"You're finally giving in your dad? You hate Singapore."

"I don't hate it, I'm not giving in, I need a holiday." He flicks his zippo open and shut a few more times, chewing on his lip as if he's trying to convince himself. "And anyway, this isn't about me, this is about you and your inability to write."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

He dodges my half-hearted punch. "You wrote all those brilliant short stories, you Jee58 were going to write a novel, and then you gave in to the ... l don't know ... the Sunday supplement."

"It's not the Sunday supplement. And it pays my rent." It doesn't sound as convincing as I hoped.

"You can do better. You know you could make a fortune writing about 'the Asian thing', if you did it properly," he says conspiratorially, as if he's the first person to have come up with the idea.

"But I don't care about it!" I bang my bottle down on the bar a little too vehemently, and the beer froths up around the lip. "Everyone else seems to find it fascinating, but I really don't care about being half Chinese. Do you?"

He furrows his brow for a moment, then shrugs. "No, not really."

"I know I should, but I don't. I know there's a niche there I could exploit, but I don't want to."

"So write about that." He ignores my angst and nudges me in the shoulder with his beer bottle. "We'll go to Singapore for a week. You do the magazine work, and then you have to write me five thousand words on being half Chinese, whether you care about it or not. Your challenge is to avoid all the Sunday paper cliches." Jee 59

"What are you, my tutor?"

"See if you won't get it published straight away." He folds his arms across his chest and sits back. I can't think of anything more ridiculous, but since I'm going anyway I might as well make him miserable too.

"I don't know whether to be flattered or outraged."

"Be both." He grins. "So when do we go?"

*

We've been in Singapore for three hours and already I'm regretting it. I should have thought more carefully before letting Daniel come with me. He's a terrible travel partner; he always wants to do something.

And I'm still pissed off with him for abandoning me to the mercy of the perfectly manicured blonde sitting next to us on the plane. She spent most of the trip telling me about how well she spoke Cantonese and that she was "such a Sinophile".

After the first hour I felt like belting her across the head with my book, by the fourth hour I was ready to use the emergency exit. When she first starting talking to me,

Daniel just lazily smiled at me before turning up the volume on his headset and closing his eyes. I felt like belting him with my book too. Something about confined spaces and vacuous conversation brings out my well-honed social skills. Jee60

Daniel refuses to listen to my jetlagged excuses for staying in the hotel room and he drags me through town to Newton Circus, a sprawling complex of food stalls surrounded by traffic and a few token palm trees. It has changed a lot since I was last here. The dingy, dim and overcrowded hawker centre of my childhood has been replaced by a guidebook-rated slice of Singapore. Now everything is tiled and precise, the gutters are clean and the stalls brightly lit. The little men in coats lined with counterfeit watches seem to have disappeared; I'm almost disappointed that I haven't been asked to buy a fake Rolex yet.

But something is still here, something exciting. Rows of stalls huddle together under fluorescent tubes, sizzling oil and the squawking hawkers smothering the traffic sounds from without. The dank salt smells of the seafood stalls collide with the sharp spices from the curry houses. Huge chilli crabs drift by on plastic plates, held aloft by tiny Chinese women with rolled up sleeves. But it is the sharp charcoal and spitting fat of the satay that lures me; the rich, warm, tantalising aroma of roasting beef being wafted towards me by a large man fanning the flames with pandan leaves.

"Hey, hey, hey. Welcome, welcome. Sit, sit." A tiny woman flaps her hands at me as I hesitate near the stall. We sit down at a tiled concrete table, slick with the spills of previous diners; there are four such tables in a cluster, only one other occupied.

The woman yells out something to her husband, who continues to tum the satay sticks over the angry fire, giving no indication that he is listening to her. Jee 61

She turns back to us and wipes the table down with one broad stroke of a dirty dishrag. "You eating satay tonight? Rosie look after you." She smiles broadly.

"Beer? You want beer? Tiger Beer, best in Singapore." Without waiting for an answer Rosie yells out to the woman at the next stall who disappears and returns seconds later with two large frosted mugs. "You want satay or not? Beef?

Chicken? Mutton? How many you want?"

I twist around to look at the next table. The tall man with his back to us is just about to finish, his plate laden with empty sticks.

"How many did he have?" I point at his plate.

"This boy eat enough for two. He my special customer." Rosie slaps the man's shoulder and he glances at her, half smiling. "Twenty. You start with twenty." She shuffles away and calls to her husband again.

"She's persuasive, isn't she?" I have a swig of icy beer, and wipe the greasy film of sweat off my top lip with the back of my hand. Daniel is staring over my shoulder and suddenly leaps to his feet. "What?"

"Patrick!" Daniel shouts.

"Who's Patrick?" Jee 62

I tum around to follow Daniel's stare. The man at the next table pauses, his last satay stick halfway to his mouth. His head turns slowly and he drops the stick onto his plate.

"Dan!" He leaps up and the two men embrace. "What are you doing here?"

"Holidays." Daniel doesn't mention me, but Patrick glances at me just long enough to acknowledge I'm there. I bet he thinks I'm some chick Daniel picked up on the flight over. Way to go, man!

They seem to have forgotten I am sitting here as they exclaim and grin and clasp each other's shoulders like they are long lost brothers. Patrick looks just like all the other rich kids I've ever come across, particularly rich ex-pat kids. His muddy blond hair is calculatedly unruly. The stubble on his chin indicates a certain lack of respect for the rules of daily grooming, but is not prominent enough to cause offence. He wears long khaki pants and a loose white shirt, with the designer logos discreet but visible.

"We're only here for a few days, but we should all go out." Daniel scribbles our hotel address down on a scrap of paper and I feel a peculiar brand of jealousy, childish and petulant, bubbling up in me.

I sigh pointedly. Patrick glances at me again. "Oh, sorry, don't let me keep you." Jee63

"No, don't worry about it. This is Jasmine, by the way. Jasmine, Patrick. Patrick and I went to school together." With any encouragement Daniel probably would have been bounding around like a puppy.

I tum slightly and shake Patrick's hand, but I don't stand up. "Pleased to meet you."

"Likewise." Patrick turns back to Daniel and squeezes his shoulder. "I'll drop by tomorrow night, we can have dinner. Nice to meet you Jasmine." I almost miss it, but he winks at me and grins. Does he think he can charm me so easily? I just scowl childishly at him as he walks away.

*

Daniel goes out in the morning to visit his family, just after breakfast. He wears a trail in the ash-coloured carpet of our hotel room with his anxious pacing, and I am relieved that he doesn't want me to go with him. I'm just glad I'm not in KL, doing the same thing with my own family.

I pretend to work for about an hour, in case he changes his mind and comes back, but eventually I succumb to the lure of the pool. Rising behind it are the pink and grey tiers of housing development flats, stretching down the street like mouldy honeycombs. Skyscrapers of a more commercial kind lurk behind them, glittering and glossy, crowding out the sky and encroaching on the humdrum down below. I Jee64 swim a few token laps, splash around a bit, and spend longer than I normally would have lying on a wobbly deckchair in my black swimsuit. I wouldn't call it an attempt to get a tan; my skin is either white or red with very little variation in between. Just as I decide I have baked long enough and it might be time to jump back into the cool water, a shadow sneaks across the page of my book.

"Jasmine."

I can't see the man's face. He is standing in front of the sun and is a huge black shape, ringed by light.

"Don't look so alarmed," He steps to one side and I realise it is Patrick, from the night before. I struggle to sit upright while trying to maintain a shred of dignity as the deckchair rocks unsteadily beneath me.

"What are you doing here? I didn't think we were meeting till tonight."

"Had nothing else to do. Figured Dan might be at a loose end." He gracefully stretches out on an adjacent deckchair which doesn't, incidentally, wobble at all, and puts his hands behind his head.

"He went out a while ago, I'm not sure where. I'll tell him you came by."

Patrick turns his head to look at me. Despite the fact that I have been happily lying Jee65 half naked in the sun for an hour, I suddenly feel the need to cover up and reach for my sarong. He just lies there, almost leering at me as if I'm some cheap pin-up existing solely for his gratification. I briefly wonder what type he normally goes for - tiny Chinese women? Blonde athletic Americans? Skinny French girls? - and then all I can think about are my white chicken legs, my stinging shoulders, and my lumpy body that doesn't fit in any of the clothes they sell in this country.

"So what's the deal with you and Dan?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"I like to know where people fit. In the scheme of things."

"We grew up together." I knot the sarong around my middle and grab my book.

"You lived in Singapore too?"

"No," I cobble together a rough history in my head that will hopefully remove the need for further questions. "Our dads migrated to Sydney at the same time,

Daniel's from here, mine from KL. They became best friends at uni, both married

Aussies. Daniel and I spent our whole childhoods together until we were thirteen, then he moved here. When he came back to Australia we just kind of picked up where we left off." Jee 66

"So you're half Chinese?"

"Yes. And so is he."

"Yeah, I know." He hardly moves as I clamber up off the man-eating deckchair.

"You don't like me, do you?

"I don't know you."

"That's not what I asked."

"I've had enough sun."

"Do you want to grab a bite? Seeing as Dan's not here. May as well get some enjoyment out of the afternoon." He stands up and plants himself right in the middle of the path. My options are to either jump in the pool, hurdle three deckchairs or wait until he lets me past.

"I've got to get some work done."

"Aren't you here on holiday?"

"Daniel's on holiday. I'm doing research for my magazine." Jee67

"What kind of thing?"

"Interior design, Chinesey stuff." I try to avoid anything specific and just end up sounding vacuous.

"So you come all the way here, spend half an hour at a hawker centre and the rest of the time in a generic hotel room that could be anywhere in the world?" Patrick raises an eyebrow.

"What's wrong with that?"

"You still need to eat, don't you? Come on, I know where we can get some excellent chicken rice."

I'm not going to get rid of him, I know it. And the longer he regards me with that half-mocking smile, the more my resolve starts to melt. The way he looks at me is unsettling and flattering at the same time, direct and unabashed. He doesn't look away, like most people would, when I try to brazen out his stare. I could almost be convinced that he thinks lunch with me is a hard-won prize, a highly covetable pastime, but it isn't vanity that makes me acquiesce, it's the thought of chicken rice.

Honest. If I was better at this game I would think of some way to thwart his obvious belief in his own charm, but I have to admit I've been taken in by the crocodile's welcome grin, like the song says. Jee68

I get dressed and we head to a nearby food court, under a shopping mall with a

Starbucks on the comer. We walk in the shade of the shophouse verandas, all crumbling stone bearing faded Chinese characters in red and yellow paint. There's a meat shop, with squares of sticky red pork hanging in the window next to soya stained ducks. A shop selling incense and lucky red paper fancies spills out onto the pavement beside a shop selling rice cookers and microwaves. A couple of battered roller doors shroud the next shops we pass, then the effervescent tooth­ rotting pop of Britney Spears assaults us from a CD shop.

At various intervals along the footpath, old women in brightly patterned polyester sit on stools in the shade of the awnings, chewing indeterminate substances. They call and cackle to one another from time to time, but are mostly isolated in their own little kingdoms, their rectangles of concrete, keeping watch outside the family business. I can see my own grandmother in the hunched over bodies, the squinting suspicious eyes, the constant eating. If my uncle ever opens the restaurant he dreams about, you can bet Mama will join the ranks of these matriarchs, sitting under an awning on a plastic stool, criticising the passing trade.

A photograph of one of the women would be perfect, if I could capture the world­ weariness, the sweaty blend of poverty amidst the high rises and glittering department stores. It's exactly the sort of thing Luisa wants to go with the article, some stamp of authenticity to go with the blatant cultural rip offs. I stop in front of a herbalist, and its sentinel swivels her eyes in my direction without turning her head.

I can smell the sharp aniseed and dusty ginger from inside, the glass fronted Jee69 cabinets full of shrivelled roots and powders barely visible in the dimly lit shop.

"Excuse me, do you mind if I. .. ?" I hold up the camera. I have never gotten used to the artifice of the camera. It's a sign of not belonging, of finding too much interest in the everyday. The woman just sits, chewing her cud, as I try to line up the shot.

What I saw as I walked along and what I see now through the lens don't match, I can't find the reason for the photo anymore, and now I'm aware of Patrick looking at me as well. I can't do it. I lower my head and, stumbling to catch up with Patrick, I hear the woman's hyena laugh and the shouts of the other women echoing between the crumbling concrete pillars.

"Research?" he comments as I pass him, my cheeks hot.

The food court is like any other in Singapore, found under just about every mall or shopping district. It is crammed with office workers and schoolkids moving in packs, the walls lined with nameless outlets dispensing curries, teppanyaki dishes, noodles and all-you-can-eat-for-five-bucks Chinese food. The big fast food chains always like to distance themselves from the local cuisine; I glimpse a McDonald's logo further down the corridor and notice most of the tourists heading that way.

I sit down at a damp, sticky table, while Patrick disappears to get the food. I need a cloth or paper napkin to wipe the table down, but as usual there is nothing, so I hail down a passing Malay cleaning woman clad in ill-fitting beige pants and a patterned head covering. She looks at me dispassionately then pulls a dirty rag from her belt. Jee 70

She moves the stickiness around on the table and, with a backward glance, slops away in loose sandals. Patrick sidesteps her as he heads to the table, bearing a tray laden with plates of Hainanese chicken rice.

Patrick lays the food out on the table. "So are you and Dan together?"

"None of your business." I don't know why I want the question of me and Daniel to remain unanswered, but I don't want to clarify it with Patrick, who just smirks and slides the empty tray onto the next table. I try to change the topic to something safe. "So what do you do for a living?" I take a fat chunk of chicken breast and carefully peel off the white, dimpled skin, laying it to one side.

"You can eat the whole thing, you know." He seems amused.

"I hate the skin like that, all fatty and cold. It's revolting." I dip snowy flesh into the soy and ginger and raise the chopsticks to my mouth. "Will you stop looking at me and answer my question?"

"Nothing much. I dabble in the stock market occasionally. Singapore's an

interesting place to be for a trader."

"So you're a trader?"

"No." He is obviously enjoying my frustration, but relents. "Basically I don't do Jee 71 anything. My father's a diplomat, he's been in southeast Asia for the last twenty years or so. The family is well compensated," he says glibly, as though it's completely normal. It explains a lot about his general demeanour, I suppose, the fact that he's never worked or worried or wanted for anything, and probably has diplomatic immunity.

We eat, unspeaking, until all the rice is gone and all that remains of the chicken are the bony, grey pieces that neither of us like.

"Do you ever want to go home?" I ask eventually.

"This is home."

"No, but I mean, back to Australia?"

"Why?"

"Because it's where you're from."

The Malay cleaning woman returns to collect our empty bowls and plates. Patrick regards me coolly over the top of the cleaning woman's head, who makes a point of wiping the table in front of me and then shuffles away.

"Australia is where my family is from. I've lived in Singapore for twenty years, I don't Jee 72 even remember living anywhere else. This is home."

"But you don't belong here," I protest and he laughs, which only makes me want to push the point further. "You don't look like a local. You don't sound like a local.

You may have grown up here but you went to an English school. You probably live in a rich area, surrounded by ex pats, am I right?"

"Yeah. But how is it different to a Chinese person migrating to Australia?"

"A Chinese person migrating to Australia doesn't live like you do."

"I just happen to live in a place that provides me with a comfortable lifestyle. Why would I want to move to Australia, just because my parents grew up there?"

"So you're happy soaking up all the benefits of being an ex-pat, but you want to pretend you're a local?"

"If it's such a big deal, why aren't you living in KL? Your dad grew up there, didn't he?"

"Yes, but that's not the point."

"Did you come here to prove something?" The smile is gone now, replaced by something more like a sneer. "Here's a newsflash for you: nobody feels like they Jee 73 belong, no matter where they come from, no matter where they live. You're nothing special, you haven't cornered the market on alienation just because you're half­ half."

"I'm not here to prove anything. I told you I'm here for work." I reply hotly.

"And does it piss you off that they typecast you? That they think you've got some sort of cultural insight because you're half Chinese?" He leans across the table and

I catch a cold glint in his eye that shocks me. "You know once they probably would have called you a mongrel?"

I stare at him for a long moment. I reach into my pocket, drop a handful of coins on the table to pay for my meal, and walk away.

I roam the city, angry but aimless. I catch the MRT into the city centre and wander around the endless vistas of upmarket shopping centres. There isn't much to distinguish one from the other, or even to distinguish them from the malls back home. I walk down to the riverside and watch an Indian man with a snake doing tricks beside the Merlion. The white Merlion used to balance alone on its fishtail at the river's mouth, welcoming visitors to the island; now it's surrounded by buildings and bridges, almost obscured in the march of progress. The snake charmer waves his uninterested charge in my direction, but I can't even muster enough enthusiasm to act frightened. He moves on to some Japanese tourists who shriek satisfyingly. Jee 74

The seeds of doubt are starting to germinate and I start to wonder whether Patrick is right. Am I really trying to prove something? The thing that annoys me the most is the implication that I should be more interesting than I am, just because my father's Chinese. No one here or in Malaysia thinks I should be more interesting because my mother's Australian; here it's more a liability than an asset.

In fact, here they would probably find Patrick more exotic than someone like me.

He's white and wealthy and good looking and from a powerful family. In Australia he would just be another rich kid, he'd live in Sydney's Eastern suburbs, drive a flashy car and be indistinguishable from all the other spoiled brats who ever graced the social pages. At least here he's got more chance of sticking out, more chance of being considered special.

Maybe I should just surrender to Luisa's preconceived idea of who I am and what I represent, maybe I should take advantage of my own conspicuousness. I'm lucky that I don't look too much like one thing or another, so I can choose what image I want to put out, so why am I complaining about being asked to do something that requires so little effort? I should just be like Patrick, laid-back and unconcerned about my place in the world, just taking the good things for granted and enjoying myself to the hilt. You want Oriental chic, Asian mystique? Sure, I can get it for you

- best price!

It got dark without me noticing. I have no idea what time it is, but I am tired and hungry and longing to lie down in the silent, hermetically sealed hotel room. I have Jee 75 taken some lacklustre photos throughout the afternoon and I compose a clicheed travelogue in my head as I walk back to the hotel. I almost consider turning back when I get there and see Patrick leaning up against the glass wall, but he has already seen me.

"Dan's been looking for you," he says as I approach.

"What are you doing here?" I growl.

"We're going out tonight, remember?" He tries to grab my arm as I push past him, but I shake him off and keep heading for the lift. "Look, just forget about it.

Pretend this afternoon didn't happen."

Daniel spots me and crosses the marble lobby, a scowl on his face. "Where have you been?"

"Working." I get into the lift.

Daniel holds the door open and his expression softens slightly. "Come on, if you've been working all day you'll need to eat."

"I need to just chill out for a while," I wave him away. "but you go ahead."

It's almost too far to get to the room. I stumble down the corridor, and drop the Jee 76 plastic key card three times before finally getting the door open. I crawl onto the bed in the darkened room, and let out a long, deep sigh of relief. It's very cold in here, the air is crisp and dry. I can hear a low thrum of traffic outside, but nothing else. My bones settle, my muscles stretch out. It is such a relief to be in the dark, in the quiet, alone.

The door slams open against the wall and Daniel strides in.

"Come on, get up," he grabs my hand. "I'm not leaving you to wallow in here. You almost fooled me."

"I wasn't joking," I sit up wearily. "I don't feel like being out."

"We won't stay out late. Come on."

It's like when I was a teenager, being dragged somewhere by my parents, being forced to get along with whatever other teenager was around, being expected to show my enthusiasm even if I felt none. Patrick seems to mirror my feelings precisely; he is quiet as we walk down to Clarke Quay, his hands in the pockets of his baggy trousers, his expression uninterested.

Daniel chatters away enough for the three of us, about seeing his family that

morning. He had dutifully gone and eaten lunch with his grandparents, who were a

lot less intimidating than he'd remembered, and he seems uncharacteristically Jee 77 enthusiastic about the whole experience, like he'd gone to the dentist for root canal therapy and all that was needed was a filling. I doubt he'll let his dad know how painless the whole thing was, but I can't help smiling all the same to see him so relieved.

I realise he's starting to walk like Patrick. His stride is long and unhurried but with a certain economy of movement, all designed to look as cool as possible in this sweltering heat. I, on the other hand, have not mastered any such techniques and still feel the sweat thickening on my skin as I scurry to keep up with the two men.

We cross a bridge into Clarke Quay and it's obviously the place to be, judging by the groups of young locals, eager-faced tourists and office workers with loosened ties thronging along the promenade under strings of candy-coloured lights. Every bar and restaurant in the snaking line of shophouses is full to overflowing, and even the railing along the riverside is crowded with laughing people.

We stroll through the sweaty crush and I'm starting to relax; it's impossible to be surly in this atmosphere of holiday and carnival. In fact I feel quite mellow by the time we've had dinner and a few drinks at the Crazy Elephant, a timber-clad bar with maps on the walls and a ridiculous jungle theme. Patrick regards our short, giggling Singaporean waitress with a laid-back, indulgent smile, and she makes a point of brushing up against him every time she brings a drink over, which I find amusing, to say the least. I can see why the girl likes him, he's not unattractive and is certainly charming, but it makes me laugh when I think about how he almost had me fooled; I don't know why I let such a charlatan get me so agitated. He's hardly a Jee 78 threat at all now that I've seen him unmasked.

I even agree to a game of pool with him, after I beat Daniel three times. Daniel has been knocking back the beer all night, which always makes him garrulous, and now is rambling on about the house off Bukit Timah Road he lived in all those years ago, but I've been paying more attention to beating Patrick and have hardly heard a thing he's said.

He lurches over and taps me exaggeratedly hard on the shoulder. "I said, don't you think that's weird?" His dark eyes are unfocused and slightly bleary.

"What is?"

"That my house isn't there anymore."

"Did you expect it to be?" Patrick slams his cue into the white ball and it bounces off the table. I retrieve it and smugly line up my last shot.

"Well...yeah." Daniel looks confused.

"That's how it is here, Dan, you know that," Patrick says, prowling around behind me. "Buildings come and go faster than you can blink."

"But now there's nothing, not even new buildings, just this wide plain of grass," Jee 79

Daniel arcs his hand over the green felt of the table. "Like the house never existed.

It's just weird."

"I suppose it is. But why do you care?" I smack the white ball into the black, which bounces off all four sides of the table and comes to rest in the middle. Damn. "I didn't think that nostalgia stuff mattered to you."

"It doesn't."

Patrick misses the black entirely and sends the white ball into the corner pocket. shout and punch the air.

"I win again!"

"And I thought I was the competitive one," Patrick pours me another glass of beer.

"Top up, Dan?"

Daniel sways elegantly into the bar stool and fumbles to keep it from falling over.

"Actually, I'm not feeling so good."

"Yeah, you're a bit...green," I lay the back of my hand on his forehead like a parent does, but I don't even know what I'm feeling for. Besides, I know he's feeling green because he drank about three jugs of Tiger on his own and had a plateful of prawns to himself at dinnertime. Jee80

"Think I should go and lie down," he weaves out to the pavement and Patrick runs over to prop him up.

"Pay the tab - we won't get far," Patrick tosses me his wallet and they stagger off into the crowd.

I follow them at a distance, away from the Quay and back to the hotel. I stumble into our darkened room to find Daniel sprawled on the bed snoring slightly, Patrick slumped on the floor with one of Daniel's square-toed boots in his hands. He drops it on the floor with a thud and wrestles with the other one.

"You're going to pull his leg off," I chide, kneeling down to help ease the boot off. slouch down next to him. "Here's your wallet."

He reaches out and grabs my hand with the wallet. His hand envelops mine completely, and he has a strong grip, despite his drunkenness. When I tum my head slowly to look at him his gaze is as focused and direct as ever and the tenuous camaraderie we had built up over the evening dissolves. I'm still holding

Daniel's boot in my other hand and I shove it at Patrick as I scramble to my feet.

He lunges after me, pushes me up against the wall, his hands pulling at my clothes, pressing into my flesh. I am surprised to feel his skin is feverishly warm; I always thought he'd be cold blooded. He is kissing me clumsily, his mouth groping for Jee 81 whatever it can touch, missing my lips most of the time and getting my cheeks, my nose, my chin. I struggle to breathe, the lights outside tilting the wrong way, the wall slipping away from me.

Then just as suddenly, he stops. Daniel rolls over on the bed muttering something in his sleep. Patrick keeps his distance as long as Daniel moves, but he is staring at me hungrily. I feel a tremor of nervousness in the pit of my stomach, and I can't move. I don't yet know whether I want to. As Daniel's breathing quietens, Patrick steps towards me.

He is slower this time, leaning in, breathing in, closing his eyes and resting his cheek against mine. I turn my head and kiss him, my aim truer than his. We turn a dance of looping steps and now he is against the wall and I am the one pressing against him, his arms encircling me, crushing me close.

I want to hurt him, but I am not strong enough. I bite his lip and he bites back. My fingers grip his head, entwined in his hair. I force my face against his so hard our noses squash together, our features distort. He half smiles under my aggressive attack, as if indulging me, so I stop. I rear my head back, trying to take him in at such close range. The blood rush starts to subside and I realise what I'm doing. try to pull back further but his grip is strong and he won't let go.

"I don't want this," I mumble. Jee82

"You don't know what you want, do you?" he curls a tendril of my hair around his finger and tugs on it. I know he doesn't really care what I want, it's all about what he wants. He kisses my neck and I feel a chill run down the length of my body.

"Not this," I firmly push him away and, predictably, the sneer I saw at lunchtime creeps back onto his face.

"Just playing games, then?" his fingers curl around my arms and press, harder and harder, until I wince in pain.

"Let go."

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as if wiping me off, and pushes himself away from the wall. "Real Chinese girls are smaller than you anyway. Don't know what I was thinking."

I stare at him, past him, my eyes fixed to a point on the scuffed wall. I feel like my skin has frozen, like my internal organs have solidified, like the slightest movement will smash me into irretriveable fragments. He looks down at me for a moment, and without looking at him I know his expression will be disdainful, scornful. He turns and steps over me, closer than he needs to be, but I don't lean back. I can't move.

It seems an eternity before the door thuds shut behind him, an eternity before I can exhale. Jee83

Daniel snores loudly, and I start to liquefy.

The heat washes over me in a wave, my cheeks burning, my heart pounding. I bite back the rising tides of panic and anger that mingle in my gut, the mixed urge to run after Patrick screaming obscenities or to curl up in a dark comer and sob. I try to stand up, but my arms and legs quiver mutinously.

It is then that I look down at the carpet and see Patrick's wallet, which he never actually pocketed. I pick it up carefully, turning it over in my hands. It is solid, packed with cards and receipts and money. It feels dangerous, like it might explode or scald. I clamber to my feet and lurch over to the window. It doesn't open very far; I suppose no one has need to open windows when there is air conditioning. But it opens far enough.

The wallet spins easily out of my hand, opening as it arcs out through the air. Long after the wallet has disappeared from view, scraps of paper flutter out behind it like tickertape, like the tail of a fast-burning comet.

I don't know if Patrick saw it as he left the building. In some ways, I'd like it more if he hadn't. It is more satisfying to think of his identity strewn across the pavement for anyone to see, for anyone to pick up, for anyone to ignore and step over.

The thick humid air pushes at me, rushing in from the window. The smell of

Singapore pervades, even up here, that sweaty, salty, slightly tainted smell that the Jee84 air conditioning does its best to erase. I breathe it in, huge lungfuls of it. The tension of the rainclouds always hovering above, the oppression of the heat, the unwieldy density of the city; it all crowds out the rushing noise in my head, so that by the time I close the window and draw the curtains, I feel almost completely calm.

I lie down on the bed next to Daniel and regulate my breathing to his quiet snores. do not cry. "Complicated Entanglement": questions of identity in Asian Australian women's writing Jee86

"Complicated Entanglement":

questions of identity in Asian Australian women's writing

Introduction

Over the last decade a number of novels by 'young' Asian Australian women writers have been published to critical acclaim and have won prominent literary

prizes. These novels, by writers such as Hsu-Ming Teo, Hoa Pham and

Simone Lazaroo among others, have gained prominence because they offer a

recent and easily accessible literary representation of contemporary Asian

Australian experience. They have emerged out of a cultural silence and purport

to give 'voice' to this experience, thus contributing to the niche market of

'multicultural fiction'. Yet this market seems to have more to do with importing

and recycling the generic 'diaspora' narrative of Asian American fiction, made

popular by writers such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, than it does

with providing a wider representation of the complex and pluralist local cultural

identity.

In this thesis, I will examine the social, cultural and political issues surrounding

the development of Asian Australian identity in Australian contemporary fiction.

I will use three novels published in the last decade by Teo, Pham and Lazaroo,

in order to identify some of the constraints faced by writers dealing with notions

of ethnic and cultural identity. Through reference to the theory of contemporary

cultural theorists such as len Ang, Tseen-Ling Khoo, Jacqueline Lo and Sneja

Gunew amongst others, I question how Asian Australian identity in literature is Jee 87

constructed and presented, and how it changes when filtered through concepts of diaspora, multiculturalism, and ambivalent hybridity.

The concept of hybridity is the most productive of these. While not without its own problems, as a term hybridity allows identity to become more fluid than one

solely based on diaspora and multiculturalism, particularly when viewed from an

ambivalent perspective. For the purposes of this thesis I will be using len Ang's

definition of hybridity as a "heuristic device for analysing complicated

entanglement" (Ang: 17), arguing that ambivalent hybridity allows for the formation of a complex cultural identity, and for multi-layered engagement with

that identity in a time when lines between what it means to be 'Asian' and

'Australian' are becoming increasingly blurred. I suggest that more complexity

can be found in the examination of different permutations of Asian Australian

identity, and describe some of my own experiences as a writer of dual Asian

Australian heritage. Whatever direction this genre of writing moves in, it is vital

that these narratives and engagements are continually questioned and re­

evaluated. If Asian Australian fiction is to adequately represent, or indeed

contribute to, the range of cultural diversity in Australia, it needs to engage with

a more mobile sense of identity. Jee 88

Multiculturalism: the imagined Australia

The emergence of an Asian Australian presence in contemporary fiction has

been enabled by the prominence of multiculturalism in public discourse. len

Ang defines multiculturalism, in essence, as "the official and informal ...

acknowledgement of the co existence of multiple cultures and peoples within

one space, generally the space of the nation-state" (Ang 2001 :14), and (with

Jon Stratton) as "a form of symbolic politics aimed at redefining national

identity'', but stresses that it is hardly an uncomplicated path to choose to bring

about social change (95). While multiculturalism can provide a means to

discussing various cultural identities that operate outside the hegemonic culture,

there is the danger that it can restrict those other ways of being by keeping

them isolated by their difference, preventing their location within the mainstream

identity.

In Australia's national history Asians have long been typecast as a threat to

mainstream Australia, with the Yellow Peril looming large in the national

consciousness and contributing to the introduction of discriminatory legislation

such as the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901. For much of our history there

has been little visible Asian Australian identity represented in the national

culture, at least not much that Asian Australians had any connection with or

control over. Jacqueline Lo argues, "If Asians were defined as Others whose

intrusions into both the symbolic and political space of Australia had to be

vigilantly repelled, then they could not be regarded as a legitimate part of

Australian culture without a major shift in the dominant political and social

attitudes" (Lo et al 2000:1 ). Without ownership of their representation in Jee89

Australian society, Asian Australians were unable to articulate any identity for themselves.

The abolition of what had become known as the White Australia Policy in 1966

and the introduction by the Whitlam and Fraser governments in the 1970s of

'multiculturalism' as governmental policy in Australia saw the first major shift in

Australian social attitudes. According to Lo, this enabled a move to "a new

emphasis on the productivity of cultural difference located at the level of

ethnicity" (2000:159), but still produced the effect of forcing migrants to

assimilate, to discard their difference in order to fit in. The new multicultural

policies, supposedly centred on removing race as a selection factor for migrants

and making permanent citizenship easier to obtain, were also mainly aimed at

European migrants, which did not create much potential for a recognised Asian

Australian identity to flourish. Another problem with this multiculturalism, as

Sneja Gunew points out, was that "Australians were asked to think in terms of a

migrant/ethnic 'problem' which led inevitably to the construction of migrants or

ethnics as themselves the problem" (1994:5), a position that did nothing to

erase the negative portrayals of Asian Australians in the national

consciousness.

The second major shift, and one that had more specific implications for the

Asian community, came in the early to mid-1990s, with the renewed embracing

of an Asia-focused multicultural policy by Paul Keating's Labor government.

Keating was keen to foster close economic and cultural connections between

Australia and Asia, seeing the strengthening of the Asia/Australia relationship Jee 90

as vital to prosperity in the region. In his 1992 speech titled "Australia and Asia:

Knowing Who We Are", Keating asserted that "the success of multiculturalism in

Australia, and increasing immigration from Asia, have stimulated our awareness

of Asian societies and improved our standing in the region" (1992). Keating

later stressed that he "never believed that Australians should describe themselves as Asians or that Australia is or can become part of Asia", but he

continued to emphasise the importance of a "closer engagement" with Asia that went deeper than a solely economic relationship, and reflected "a genuine

desire for partnership and real involvement" (1996a). Keating's opinions had

obvious implications for potentially changing the image of Asian Australians

from that of a faceless threat to a people helping to shape and re-shape

"Australia's sense of itself' (1996a).

However, the ideal of Keating's postmodern, postcolonial, transnational

Australia was little more than an "imagined Australia", one which len Ang had

been temporarily entranced by:

A quiet euphoria took hold of me when I found that my status as a well­

educated Asian migrant added significantly to my cultural capital in early

1990s' Australia ... I never thought I could ever experience my migrant

identity as an asset rather than a liability, but this was made possible in

the cultural ideological configuration of 1990s' Australia ... of course, my

self-interested euphoria ... turned out to be premature and short-lived,

as the eruption of Pauline Hanson's movement made it all too painfully

clear (Ang 2001 :155-6). Jee 91

As Ang notes, it is clear that Keating's policies would not provide the solution to the problem of recognising Asian Australians as valid contributors to Australian

society. The government's multiculturalist rhetoric failed to solve many of the

problems of Australian citizens attempting to live 'together in harmony', and may

have been too aggressive for the palate of the 'average' Australian, as it quickly gave rise to a backlash both socially and politically. 'Political correctness',

because of its perceived ability to squash criticism of the 'other', increasingly

began to be seen as a risk to the dominant Australian identity. Mark Davis

notes that "[c]omplaining about 'political correctness' soon became an

orthodoxy more cliched than the supposed 'political correctness' itself' (48).

Keating lost the 1996 election to the conservative John Howard, whose "dislike

of the very word 'multiculturalism' is so great that he would have preferred to

scrap it from the national vocabulary" (Ang and Stratton 2001 :97), and Pauline

Hanson's One Nation movement began to generate controversy on many

issues including immigration and multiculturalism, signalling a dramatic change

in Australia's social and political climate.

Hanson framed multiculturalism as something to fear and resent, a tool being

wielded by the 'politically correct' to bludgeon Australian 'values' out of the

culture in favour of non-white, unassimilated ghettoes of immigrants. With her

views based on "common-sense" and her "experience as a mother of four

children, as a sole parent, and as a business woman running a fish and chip

shop" (Hanson 1997), Hanson aligned herself with the average, 'mainstream'

Australian, but exploited the fears of the very people she claimed to protect. Jee 92

In her maiden speech to Parliament, Hanson charged that "a type of reverse

racism is applied to mainstream Australians by those who promote political

correctness" and then went on to say that policies of multiculturalism should be

"abolished" and immigration "halted". Her famous quote, that "we are in danger of being swamped by Asians", conjures images of a fragile and vulnerable

Australian society being threatened by a populous and voracious 'other', who would take away Australian jobs, increase crime rates and drug use, and threaten Australian family values. She prefaces that extraordinary statement with the phrase "of course I will be called a racist, but ... ", in rhetoric that

Wenche Ommundsen calls "racism as culturalism" (2000:104). Hanson grants

immigrants one concession, but with a cost: "I do not consider those people

from ethnic backgrounds currently living in Australia anything but first-class

citizens, provided of course that they give this country their full, undivided

loyalty". Ang says that with comments like this, Hanson "exemplifies the

continuing force of the hegemonic assumption that 'Australian' culture/identity

and 'Asian' culture/identity are mutually exclusive, antagonistic categories" (Ang

2001: 123). From this viewpoint it seemed impossible to be both Asian and

Australian at the same time, leaving people of dual cultural heritage with no

claimable identity.

This enforced separation of ethnic backgrounds is wryly expressed by lndrani

Ganguly in her prose poem "Fitting in": Jee 93

Everybody's ethnic I said. Oh no they replied You're ethnic only if you

have special food, music and dance Exotic costumes and funny customs.

Well you have cork hats and bush dances Waltzing Matilda and bring a

plate mate. That's not ethnic they said That's just Australian (1999:72).

Paul Keating was no longer Prime Minister when he gave his address titled 'The

New Australia' at the University of New South Wales in 1996, but he decried

Hanson's perpetuation of the "myth of the monoculture", asking

How could there be one model of Australianness with which we could all

identify? Who would decide it? Would it ever change? How? Would it be

an urban, suburban or rural Australianness? Male or female? ... From

the earliest times of European settlement, Australia has been a work in

progress, redefining itself, shifting its image of what it means to be

Australian in response to the changing world (1996b).

As both Ang and Keating highlight, Hanson's monocultural utopia left no room for any sort of complex, multi-faceted identity. Despite Hanson's fall from popularity and her subsequent public discrediting over electoral fraud, these problems are still evident in the attitudes of the current Howard government.

Under John Howard, the Liberal government has been "less sensitive to issues of regional diplomacy'', with Howard adopting much more conservative regional foreign policies than his predecessor and remaining "unequivocal in his declaration that Australia is not a part of Asia" (Lo et al 2000:2-3). Asian Jee94

countries in the region are also quick to separate Asia and Australia, with

Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong recently remarking that "when there's more Asians going to Australia and the population is over 50 per cent

non-white and the rest white, then maybe you'll be regarded as Asians", to which Prime Minister Howard responded with the reactionary statement,

"Australia will never define its place in any part of the world other than to

behave as we are" (Allard 2003). This is evidence that there is still pressure on

both a national and an international level to separate 'Asia' from 'Australia', which leaves Asian Australians in as difficult a cultural and political position as they have ever been.

The debate over multiculturalism and Australia's national identity obviously

influenced artistic output and the reading of 'ethnic minority writing', to borrow

Gunew's phrase (1994:12). Yiyan Wang, lecturer in Chinese Studies at the

University of Sydney, defines multiculturalism in Australia as "a process in

which the mainstream selectively incorporates the ethnic, according to the

dominant values", but only if the ethnic appeals to the mainstream (Wang 119).

This can be a "double-edged sword" for the ethnic artist, who has to traverse

treacherous terrains of white cultural norms and ascertain what steps will win

inclusion into Australian culture, while still retaining the 'otherness' that defines

their cultural identity.

Nowhere was this double-edged sword more clearly illustrated than in the

Darville/Demidenko affair. The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about the

Jewish Holocaust supposedly written by the daughter of a Ukrainian migrant, Jee 95

won high profile awards - the Vogel, the Miles Franklin and the Australian

Literature Society gold medal - and was the subject of much debate concerning issues of ethnicity and authenticity, even before it was revealed that Demidenko had falsified her Ukrainian identity and that parts of the book were allegedly plagiarised. Once these revelations were made public, the outcry against

Darville was fierce, but the backlash did not stop with her. Writers from all ethnic backgrounds would have felt the effects of Darville's hoax, as sections of the mainstream press cynically insinuated that all ethnic writers were only trying to capitalise on the climate of 'political correctness' and popular rhetoric of

multiculturalism. This cynicism is evident in The Age columnist Terry Lane's

attack on Demidenko, where he claims to have discovered a recipe for awards

success: "[The Hand that Signed the Paper] is written by a young (score one

point) woman (move close to the top of the queue) of 'non-English speaking

background' (home and hosed)" ( qtd in Davis 216).

Samantha Miles takes a tongue-in-cheek stab at the fashion for championing

ethnic identity as a means to success in her piece "postmodern girl":

an ethnic.

that's what i want to be.

an ethnic of ethnic background.

oh no not like that helen demi person ... Jee96

but the thing is you realise it's so easy to have an identity when you're in

a subculture (134)

The piece, despite its obvious satire, still reflects the culture of cynicism that

had sprung up around this time, and the difficulties faced by ethnic artists in their attempts to represent their cultural identities. Whatever the motives behind the Darville/Demidenko affair, as Davis points out, "no local hoax has ever

reflected adversely on the primacy of white identity. It is non-whites who are

inevitably asked to defend a position in terms of white concepts of cultural

identity, and who ... tend to end up bearing the brunt" (222-3).

The Darville/Demidenko backlash clearly demonstrates the problems with a

reading of ethnic minority writing. Sneja Gunew asserts that the content of

Darville's book "was already less important than its reception and the ways in

which this reception catalogued a number of the problems bedevilling the

reading of minority literatures" (1996:163). These problems include notions of

cultural authenticity and the culturally authoritative voice, which I will explore

later in this thesis.

Multiculturalism was far too rigid, conservative and exclusionary to be adequate

as a formulation of cultural identity. Multiculturalism also had the potential to

hinder its development beyond a facile, superficial acceptance of 'other' cultures

and certainly did not produce a wide range of representations of that cultural

identity through artistic production. As Gunew notes: "[m]ulticulturalism in Jee97

Australia is acceptable as a celebration of costumes, customs and cooking. It is not acceptable as high culture" (1994:22).

As the rhetoric of multiculturalism became more widespread in the 1990s, questions arose concerning the demand that many immigrants assimilate into the dominant Western culture. It became difficult to be identified as 'other' and

not claim ownership of that identity, as Ang highlights:

my own notional Asianness had started to haunt me, as it were. In a

social atmosphere in which 'who you are' ... became an increasingly

prominent pretext and motive for political association and cultural self­

assertion, it became inescapable for me to 'declare my interest'

(2001 :10).

William Yang, a Chinese Australian photographer and performer, talks about

the ambivalence of being identifiably Asian in Australia in his performance piece

Blood/inks, which charts the diaspora of his extended family across Australia,

America and Europe. Yang highlights the shift in attitude between his and his

parents' generations: "My mother always thought that being Chinese was a

liability, she wanted us to assimilate, and in the process the Chinese side was

lost and unacknowledged. I went through a process of claiming my Chinese

heritage" (Yang 2003).

Olivia Khoo makes an interesting point about Asians in Australia in her

discussion of the recent critically acclaimed film, Japanese Story. She decries Jee98

the film's "vision for Asian-Australian relations, where Asia is 'in' Australia, but

Asians are not of Australia" (15), a vision that echoes the attitudes of political leaders discussed earlier. Khoo's article demonstrates that it is not only in the field of literature that Asian Australians are struggling to find a valid identity.

She observes that "counter-representations [of Asian Australian identity in film] are beginning to emerge" (15) but acknowledges that the process of developing new Asian Australian identities is a slow one. In the field of literature, multiculturalism enabled the emergence of Asian Australian writing, but provided a restrictive paradigm for exploring cultural identity. Jee 99

Constructing Identity: work in progress?

identity is a work in progress, rather than a 'role' or 'sense of self given

by cultures, constructed by individuals, or secured unproblematically

from the passing down of residual cultural resources (Luke:47).

Cultural identities are not static entities with fixed meanings, or simply a collection of stereotypes and cliches that can be used to satisfy the mass market's appetite for 'otherness'. Even within an ethnic group, the meaning and usage of that identity can differ widely according to age, gender, sexuality, region, and socio-economic status. Neither are these identities solely the product of a hereditary history, even though they owe a large portion of their makeup to their origins. Cultural identities continue to coalesce, undergoing constant transformation. "Far from being fixed in some essentialised past,"

Stuart Hall argues, "they are subject to the continuous "play" of history, culture and power'' ( 1990:225).

A great deal of the problem comes down to the very definition of an 'Asian

Australian identity'. While such a broad term covers a variety of experiences, it is also an unfortunate generalisation that can lead to confusion and misinterpretation. As columnist Jane Sullivan notes, "one obvious difficulty with the Asian Australian label is that it's so wide as to be almost meaningless"

(2000:10). Even the term 'Asian Australian' is misleading, as so often it implies

'Chinese Australian' (Chan:52) when in fact it should encompass a whole host of cultures. Or, as Tseen-Ling Khoo argues, "the imposed visual stereotype of Jee 100

'all Asians look the same' is conflated with cultural expectations that all Asian women necessarily write the same way" (2002).

Although identity can be seen as a work-in-progress, there is a danger of it becoming reified and fixed. Ang highlights the difficulty present in using cultural

identity as a prop when she says, "many people obviously need identity ( or think they do), but identity can just as well be a strait-jacket. 'Who I am' or 'who we

are' is never a matter of free choice" (Ang 2001 :vii). This is important in terms

of literature, where writers might find themselves constrained by the very

'difference' they use to define their work, because as Jacobs argues, "identity

may be claimed or ascribed - and the latter is a significant problem that Asian­

Australian writers confront" (2002). This complicates the presentation of an

identity in literature. Might Asian Australian writers, bound by this identity

"straight-jacket", choose the path of least resistance and write a less 'truthful'

representation of Asian Australian identity in order to satisfy the dominant

culture?

The prevailing image of an Asian Australian identity tends to be linked to

diaspora, which is the main theme in much Asian Australian writing. Although

the embracing of diaspora can create an ethnically empowered identity, it can

produce more problems than solutions. The diasporic identity prevents the

development of a complex hybrid model by keeping the Asian quite separate

from the Australian, and clouds any attempt to present any identity other than

one based on notions of being anchored to a 'homeland' that is not 'here'. This

is when, as Ang notes, "the idea of diaspora becomes a dispowering rather than Jee 101

an empowering one, a hindrance to 'identity' rather than an enabling principle"

(Ang 2001 :34).

Ultimately, an Asian Australian identity defined by diaspora can never be more than a yearning for what has been lost, for "wherever the diasporic are not"

(Khoo 1996b:17). This 'looking back' prevents any kind of move towards a multi-faceted Asian Australian identity and, as I will explore later on, it leads to very static representations of Asian Australians in creative works.

Hybridity: complicated entanglement

The concept of hybridity has been extremely popular in the field of cultural theory and postcolonialism and offers a more complex discourse than multiculturalism or diaspora in terms of defining identity, implying "a blurring or at least a problematizing of boundaries and, as a result, an unsettling of identities" (Ang 2001: 16). The blurring of boundaries between 'Asianness' and

'Australianness' enables many possibilities for cultural identity, but usage of the term 'hybridity' is not without its own problems.

Jacqueline Lo discusses the two different ways hybridity can be seen - as a

'happy hybridity', with "little sense of tension, conflict or contradiction" in cross­ cultural encounters, or as an intentional form of political intervention with the

"potential to unsettle and dismantle hegemonic relations" (2000:153). In the former sense, hybridity contributes as little to developing cultural identity as diaspora or multiculturalism, implying a smooth, frictionless state of benign Jee 102

acceptance. The latter definition of hybridity is much more useful in the negotiation of a cultural identity, even as it questions the construction of that identity, preferring Ang's "complicated entanglement" (17) to a neat, self­ contained identity.

Viewing hybridity from an ambivalent perspective helps to steer it towards the intentional form Lo describes. Ambivalence allows the hybrid position to be

used as a political tool rather than a smoothing out of difference, taking the

hybrid identity from a passive state to an active, politicised one. It also

describes the feeling of immobility that can result from trying to go in two

directions at once, without necessarily condemning that position. It prevents

hybridity from becoming as narrow and confining as notions of diaspora or

multiculturalism.

From this ambivalent viewpoint, hybridity is an awkward state, a precarious

position of sameness and difference united in a single moment, a constant

struggle between movement and stillness. The hybrid is a paradox, a

contradiction - an identity that is a united whole, while simultaneously being

fragmented. The hybrid identity contains the blending of two cultures while also

embodying the resultant conflict; it represents harmony and discord all at once.

This intentional, ambivalent hybridity can enable more control over how identity

is presented. Ang highlights this when she observes: "if I am inescapably

Chinese ~Y descent, I am only sometimes Chinese by consent. When and how

is a matter of politics" (36). Ang is acutely aware of her ambivalent position, Jee 103

presenting herself as a "migrant intellectual", "living in translation between Asia and the West" (4). In the last thirty years her positioning has changed dramatically due in part to the loss of "lamentable Third World connotations" in the global perception of Asia (5), and with the rise in the value of her cultural capital. Ang notes that the "Australian infatuation with Asia - after more than a century-long rejection - rearticulated and recontextualized my own Asianness in

unprecedented ways" (7).

Hybridity becomes important in an increasingly globalised society, where the

boundaries between "us and them, between the different and the same, here

and there, and indeed, between Asia and the West" (Ang 2001 :3) are blurred

and in some cases non-existent. It could, in fact, be argued that there are no

'originals' from which a hybrid can be formed. Despite this, the metaphor of

hybridity allows for more fluid identities to be produced. For example, in the

case of the problematic Chinese Australian diasporic identity, "hybridity marks

the emancipation of the diaspora from 'China' as the transparent master­

signified of 'Chineseness': instead, 'Chineseness' becomes ... the raw

material for the construction of syncretic identities suitable for 'where you're at"'

(Ang 2001 :35).

Literature's role in the construction of identity

Although it seems unfair that work by ethnic minority writers should be judged

under a different set of rules, the potential risk of misinterpretation means that

writers may have to handle their subject matter carefully. If Asian Australian Jee 104

writers use their control over the presented identity to good effect, "they may

effectively defamiliarise understandings of local conditions and encourage fellow Australians to see differently'' (Jacobs 2002). However, there is also the

danger that writers presenting a two-dimensional version of cultural identity

could reinforce stereotypes and lead the reader to believe the work accurately

represents the nuances of the culture depicted, without necessarily

understanding or further exploring its context.

Gunew notes that it is all too easy for hegemonic perceptions of cultural identity

to define which voices are heard:

within the context of multiculturalism ... certain people are elevated very

quickly to those who speak for a// immigrants: in terms of funding, and in

terms of the dissemination of their work, etc. As a result, you don't hear

about the rest, because 'we have covered that', and those few token

figures function as a very secure alibi (Spivak and Gunew 195).

This highlights the fact that ethnic minority writers need to be acutely aware of

the context of their work, even if they attempt to resist it. This is particularly

important in the case of high profile books that win literary awards and receive

government funding, a few of which I will be examining later in this thesis.

As poet Ouyang Yu has pointed out, writers of Asian origin have been living in

this country for nearly as long as white Australians (Sullivan: 10). Why then, has

it taken so long for any accepted form of Asian Australian literature to develop, Jee 105

or to be made available to a mainstream audience? Why is it only becoming popular now, and why are the works being published limited to the almost exhausted vein of the diaspora narrative?

The influence of overseas Asian/Western literature on the emergence of Asian

Australian literature cannot be ignored. Sullivan notes that "[w]hen Sydney writer Lillian Ng first sent her novel Silver Sister to an agent, she got a knock­

back ... the agent told her no Australian publisher would want this kind of story.

Then came Jung Chang's Wild Swans ... Ng's book found a publisher and won a Human Rights award in 1997" (10).

While the American model of diaspora narratives told in a confessional/

pseudo-autobiographical style opened up new paths for Asian Australian writing

and made publishers and the public more receptive to notions of Asian

Australian identity being represented in literature, it is not a relationship without

problems. Tseen Ling Khoo identifies a potential over-saturation and

subsequent over-familiarity with this type of writing:

The gradual development of a corpus of Asian women's writing in

Australia ... is partially eclipsed by the overwhelming number of

Chinese-American publications and the substantial amount of criticism

they have inspired, particularly along a feminist axis. Considering the

range of critical work performed in the USA and Canada in these literary

areas, studying Asian-Australian literature can engender a feeling of

ennui (2000:164). Jee 106

Khoo names Jung Chang, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston and their

multinational publishers as being the main proponents of Asian American

literature. Amy Tan is one of the most popular writers in the genre of ethnic

minority writing, with her career built on the telling of generational diaspora

stories concerning characters tom between the binaries of east and west, old

and young, traditional and modem. The Joy Luck Club is the most famous of

her novels, which interlaces the narratives of four modem-day Chinese­

American women with those of their mothers and their grandmothers. There

are journeys back to the 'homeland', China, whether actively or through

remembrances, and reconciliation in each woman's story to a contentment and

acceptance of her role in modem day America. Tan's subsequent novels, The

Kitchen God's Wife and The Bonesetter's Daughter both follow similar patterns.

Wenche Ommundesen points out that the success of books like these "signals

that western audiences, whatever their motivations, are receptive to stories of

China and of Chinese culture in diaspora" (95). The Amy Tan model of

narrative has also emerged in Asian Australian fiction in recent times, and a

handful of books that have garnered critical acclaim and literary awards

potentially represent the entire Asian Australian experience in the eyes of

publishers and the reading public. A notable example is Hsu-Ming Teo's Love

and Vertigo, which tells a story already very familiar through writing such as

Tan's. Jee 107

Asian American identity is, of course, not without its own problems. Trinh Minh­

ha questions whether Asian American artists are endorsing or re-appropriating the labels that have been given by 'the West'. Regardless of the answer, she

believes "second class" Asian Americans are empowered by examination of these issues, allowing "them not only to assume without shame their denied

cultural heritage, but also to conceive of identity as a political marking rather than a mere inherited marking" (15-16). The next questions, however, are, how

are these political markings being used to further develop that identity and how

is authorial agency potentially affected by social and economic forces?

A reality that writers of any form of literature find difficult to overcome is the

labelling of their work and preconceived ideas about their work based on these

categorisations. In the instance of Asian Australian writing, this problem is even

harder to circumvent, as writers are not only dealing with the constrictions of an

imposed genre, but have to grapple with questions concerning the ethnic

identity and the cultural situating of their work. Tseen-Ling Khoo is careful to

emphasise that this writing has the power to alter perceptions of Asian

Australian identity, but that it must not be seen to represent the entire Asian

Australian experience: "one piece of work is but one Asian Australian woman's

story, and so is not every Asian Australian woman's tale" (1996a:28).

A superficial summary of Asian Australian writers currently being published

reveals sub-genres within the main blanket genre of Asian Australian writing.

This includes writing by Australian authors about Asia, as well as writers of

Asian Australian background. In a paper presented at the ANU Asian Jee 108

Australian Identities Conference in 1999, Alison Broinowski defines three key author groups in current "Australian fiction about Asia":

1. "Non-hyphenated" Australian writers

This group includes non-Asian authors such as Nicholas Jose and

Christopher Koch, who write about Asian Australian issues from a white

Australian perspective. Broinowski believes that this author group is

shrinking, however, " . . . as though they can no longer compete with

today's new, diasporic, Asian Australian novelists (usually women) for

grants, publishers, media attention, and invitations to writers' festivals"

(Broinowski 1999)

2. Asian Australian authors writing about contemporary Asia

Broinowski mentions authors, such as Arlene Chai and Lau Siew Mei,

whose work "exploits the mythologies and stylistic conventions of Asian

cultures, in their contemporary settings", ignoring Australia "almost

entirely". Although not mentioned by Broinowski, writers such as Ding

Xiaoqi and Wu Jian Guo also fall into this category, writing from Australia

about life in China during the Cultural Revolution (Ommundsen:96).

3. Asian Australian authors focusing on diaspora naffatives

By far the biggest sub-genre of Asian Australian writing is the migratory

or diaspora story. Issues of integration, assimilation, and the conflicts

arising between the merging of two cultures are explored by authors

such as Simone Lazaroo, Lillian Ng and Ouyang Yu, one of the few Jee 109

Asian male writers Broinowski identifies (Brian Castro is a notable

omission from this list).

Authors themselves may not have intended to reinforce preconceived ideas

about Asian Australian identity or to copy the American model. However,

material chosen by publishers to satisfy a market influenced by current cultural

stereotypes and the subsequent marketing of these novels as representative of

a generic Asian Australian experience may have crowded out other voices and

identities. The bulk of writing by Asian Australian authors is by migrants, or

Australian born Asians, dealing with first generation migrant parents and the

aforementioned diaspora model. There does not appear to be a great deal of

writing from 'mixed race' or second and third generation non-Anglo-Celtic

writers on the subject of what it means to be Asian-Australian. Does this mean

the topic is just not relevant to these writers? Obviously there are issues to be

dealt with that differ from those raised by this diaspora narrative, as highlighted

in the work of Simone Lazaroo. Broinowski admits that we may be reaching a

point where "'being Asian' is no longer new ... the diaspora stories have almost

had their decade" (Broinowski 1999). This should leave the way open for new

works addressing the different kinds of issues encountered by Australian born

Asian Australians, or Asian Australians of mixed parentage. The reality,

however, is that even since Broinowski's paper in 1999 there has not been

evidence of a concerted push by publishers towards getting works of this type

out into the marketplace, reinforced by Khoo's observation that the

"predominance of heavily publicised autobiographies and confessionals Jee 110

encourages few deviations in reading perspectives across the entire range of

Asian women's writing" (2000:166).

Identity crisis: examples in contemporary Asian Australian fiction

I will be looking at three texts which each involve politics of diaspora in their

narratives, and which are pertinent examples of the constraints placed on the

Asian Australian identity by the diaspora narrative. Hsu-Ming Teo, Hoa Pham,

and Simone Lazaroo are three writers whose work has been critically lauded in

recent years. Hsu-Ming Teo was born in Malaysia in 1970 and immigrated to

Australia with her family in 1977. Hoa Pham's Vietnamese family immigrated to

Tasmania before her birth in 1972. Simone Lazaroo was born into a Eurasian

Australian family in Singapore in 1961 and her family immigrated to Perth in

1963. All three women were born in Australia or migrated when they were still

quite young (I have chosen not to include in this thesis writers who migrated to

Australia as adults, such as Beth Yahp and Lillian Ng). All three have

completed tertiary degrees in Australia, and all three have won prestigious

awards for their novels. It is curious, therefore, that despite having lived in

Australia for the most part, or all of their lives, these writers focus on diaspora

narratives, as can be demonstrated by looking at three of their recent novels -

Love and Vertigo, Vixen, and The World Waiting to be Made.

All three novels chart a similar progression, which begins in the female

narrator's country of origin (Singapore, Vietnam or Malaysia), examining her

expectations of Australia and the subsequent journey between countries. The Jee 111

narrator's settlement in Australia is then explored, along with the dispelling of her preconceived ideas about the new country, and her struggle to fit into

Australian society. The progression ends with the narrator's eventual return to her country of origin in search of answers about her identity, to find that there she is also considered to be an outsider because of the way living in Australia has altered her.

These books have been highly acclaimed, each receiving government funding and winning major literary prizes. Teo received funding from the Australia

Council to write Love and Vertigo, won the 1999 The AustralianNogel Literary

Award, and was highly commended in The Sydney Morning Herald Young

Novelist of the Year award in 2001. To write Vixen, Hoa Pham received support from the Varuna Writers' Centre in the form of an Australian Arts Council mentorship scheme in 1999, as well as a grant from the Australia Council in

2000. She was a joint winner of The Sydney Morning Herald Best Young

Novelist of the Year, 2001, and was shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards for

Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction, Fantasy Division, in 2000. Simone

Lazaroo wrote The World Waiting to be Made with the assistance of grants from the Western Australian Department for the Arts and the Australia Council. She went on to win the TAG Hungerford Award for Fiction in 1993, the Western

Australian Premier's Book Awards, Fiction Award in 1995 and was highly commended in The AustralianNogel Literary Award in 1993.

These writers have obviously been critically well received, but the specific nature of their contribution to public discourse on Asian Australian identity must Jee 112

also be assessed. Why have these particular books been so well-received?

Are they opening up new paths using the diaspora narrative as a starting point, or are they solidifying the position that new Asian Australian writers are expected to take? What are the potential ramifications of this being the only definition of Asian Australian identity in contemporary fiction?

In Love and Vertigo Teo gradually constructs a picture of a family unable to

communicate, alienated from each other by being transplanted into another

culture but also because of the family history they carry with them. She does this by shifting the narrative from past to present, from Australia to Singapore to

Malaysia, from mother to daughter. Tea's narrator, Grace, introduces Asia to us

through her Australian eyes - "I was determined not to belong, not to fit in,

because I was Australian, and mum ought to be Australian too" (3). The novel

moves on from this point to follow Grace's search for answers about her family

history, her attempt to understand what drives her mother, Pandora, to suicide.

Teo explores the relationships between Grace's parents, between Grace and

her brother, and between the older and younger generations of the extended

family. These sketches, however, appear not to have any lasting impression on

Asian Australian identity, other than to reinforce the stereotypes of Asian

women identified in mainstream culture.

Hoa Pham's style in Vixen is a blend of almost absurd fairytale elements with

realism, which can be both effective and unsettling. Vixen belongs to the genre

of ethnic minority writing, but also makes use of magic realism, a style

popularised in the 1990s by Latin American women writers such as Isabel Jee 113

Allende and Laura Esquivel. Pham uses the South East Asian myth of the fox fairy, a spirit able to take the form of a woman or a fox, as a metaphor for the

split cultural personality of Asian migrants to Australia. She sets up binaries of

spirits versus humans, Asian culture versus Australian culture, urban dwellers versus rural dwellers, and uses these binaries to explore questions of belonging

and identity in an environment where the narrator feels out of place on a

number of levels. Pham's blending of genres allows her narrator a level of

observation and self-reflexivity that might not be possible with a conventional

narrator, but ultimately the book does not have enough weight to lend any real

credence to an Asian Australian identity; rather, it reiterates the figure of the

exotic Asian woman and the mysterious Asian Other.

In The World Waiting to be Made Simone Lazaroo creates a complicated

portrayal of a family that doesn't really fit in anywhere. She sets the story in

Perth during the mid 1970s to early 1980s, when the social repercussions of the

White Australia policy were still being felt across the country. The book adds

another facet to the typical migration story by virtue of the fact that the family

migrating is Eurasian Australian and already dealing with issues of split cultural

identities before they even set foot in Australia. The narrator's parents are "both

in-between people" (Lazaroo:262), the father from a Eurasian family in Malacca,

with Asian and Portuguese ancestors, and the mother an Australian. The

children are the definitive in-betweens. In The World Waiting to be Made,

Lazaroo outlines the issues faced by a person with a mixed background, and

the notion that it is possible to claim multiple identities, yet belong to none. Jee 114

However the diaspora narrative still figures in her book, overshadowing some of the subtler points she has to make about hybrid identities.

Although none of these authors claim their work is purely autobiographical, the

use of the first person gives the books an 'authenticity' of voice that would not

be so strong if the stories were narrated in the third person. The notion of

'authenticity' thus becomes a complicated issue for writers such as Teo, Pham

and Lazaroo, and it becomes necessary to ask why they have chosen to use this form. Ang frames this question when she defines autobiography as

a more or less deliberate, rhetorical construction of a 'self for public, not

private purposes: the displayed self is a strategically fabricated

performance, one which stages a useful identity, an identity which can be

put to work. It is the quality of that usefulness which determines the

politics of autobiographical discourse. In other words, what is the identity

being put forward for? (Ang 2001 :24)

In Love and Vertigo, Teo seems to have a problematic relationship with this

notion of implied autobiography, as the reader is taken in by the narrator's

seemingly truthful voice only part of the time. Grace's voice sounds most

authentic when she is talking about herself and her own experiences. This

device is disrupted by an inconsistency in the narrator's perspective, the voice

jarring when she is relating the intimate details of other characters' lives. The

narrator's omniscience distracts from the believability of her voice - there is no

sense that the stories she is telling have been related to her by a relative, like Jee 115

shared secrets. The narration for the first half of the book is impersonal and distant, so when Grace reappears mid-way through the book both as character and narrator, it dislocates the reader.

Pham's fox fairy, as a magical character, is obviously more distanced from the

reader and not autobiographical, but the use of first person and the character's

lack of a name give the book the authoritative feel of a memoir. Opening with

"[t]here are many myths and stories about fox fairies. But the only ones I can tell are mine" (Pham 1 ), draws the reader into the narrator's confidence, and the

closing reiteration of "[t]hese are all my stories" (255) reminds the reader that these were personal experiences that have been shared.

Lazaroo acknowledges that her own experience "inspired" the writing of The

World Waiting to be Made (10), but stresses that it is a work of fiction. Her

unnamed narrator shares a similar Eurasian background to Lazaroo's and her

voice is so clear and intimate, it is not difficult to believe in its autobiographical

'authenticity'. The seduction of the first-person narrator for marginalized writers,

as Gunew suggests, is that "story-telling, narrative shaping, gives an illusion of

power and control over one's life" (1983:18). But just because Teo, Pham and

Lazaroo choose this strategy does not mean that we can assume their work is

autobiographical. Gunew stresses that use of the first-person does not

automatically indicate autobiography, but an audience's desire to make that

assumption "is so strong that it will not be deterred by overt expressions to the

contrary" (19). Jee 116

Gunew suggests that the convention of conflating the first-person voice with

autobiography is part of "the blending process which shepherds migrant writers through a narrow gateway of the authentically ethnic" ( 19). Khoo calls the

perceived authenticity of first-person narratives a stereotype linked to "the

assumption that Asian women's stories are necessarily 'confessional' narratives

in the forms of auto/biography'' (2000:164). She asserts that the genre of

autobiography and confessional restricts the interpretation of Asian Australian

identity as much as a reliance on diasporic Chinese narratives excludes "many

other groups from hyphenated Asian communities" (166).

In a conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gunew goes a step further

by saying the perception of authenticity stems from the way the dominant

culture receives the ethnic identity. The only way of dealing with this constraint

is to question what is missing from that identity:

One way of doing this (if one has knowledge from a particular culture), is

to say: But look, this is what is left out, this is what is covered over; this

kind of construction is taking place, this kind of reading is being

privileged or, these series of readings are being privileged; and then to

ask, What readings are not privileged, what is not there, what questions

can't be asked? (Spivak and Gunew 195-196)

The fact that so much Asian Australian women's writing, even if not

autobiographical, implies authenticity and sometimes seems to be based on

actual events shows that these are stories which have their foundation in Jee 117

experience. I wonder, however, why they seem to be the only stories. Gunew

suggests that the familiarity and "sameness" of the marginalized voice "is largely the result of the undifferentiated way it has been situated by the dominant culture. It comes back to the question of who issues the licence to

speak and under what conditions" (1983:17-18). She also reminds us that first­

person migrant narratives are only part of a larger body of contemporary

experience:

The authentic voice ... is always a problematic category which can only

ever be partially defined. In the case of migrant writing it is not

synonymous with the discursive formation of 'multiculturalism'. Neither is

it merely reducible to the rhetoric of conviction, the first-person mode ...

It is only one area of the archipelago of migrant writing (20).

Are there not experiences and narratives from second or third generation non­

Anglo-Celtic writers or Asian Australians of 'mixed race' that do not fall into this

diaspora narrative? Do we always have to look back to other times and places

in a constant negotiation and renegotiation of time and geography? What about

the present, what about people living their day-to-day lives now, in this time and

place?

The dominant diaspora narrative in Asian Australian women's writing implies

that migration produces, among other things, narratives of loss and a lack of

belonging, and that Asian immigrants are often yearning to return to their

'homeland'. This narrative obviously does not represent the experiences of all Jee 118

migrants, let alone all Asian Australians, yet it seems to be the only one that appears frequently in contemporary Asian Australian fiction. That is not to say that those stories are unimportant or irrelevant: they have shaped the identities of several generations. What I am wondering is why do they continue to dominate, as though the hybrid identity cannot exist in its own space? At the

moment hybridity in Asian Australian fiction must be tied, anchored to the past

and all those who came before, like the ghosts of ancestors who need to be

shown respect.

In Love and Vertigo Grace describes her father's initial decision to move the family from Singapore to Sydney as heroic, but one that ends years later in her

mother's suicide. She wryly notes, after much complaining from her father, that

"[i]mmigration is an act of sacrifice on the part of your parents that you can

never atone for'' (196). This sentiment is echoed in The World Waiting to be

Made, where the narrator's family does not survive migration intact. Despite the

father's desire to live an 'average Australian' life, he himself is pulled in opposite

directions by the demands of his Asian background and his Australian wife. His

solution is to file for divorce and start again with a new, 'modern' Australian wife

who has nothing to do with his Eurasian past.

Pham describes the effects of immigration on a range of characters in the

Vietnamese migrant community in Melbourne, including: the conscientious

university student; the young man sent to study in Australia who becomes a

heroin addict; the wife beater and his terrified spouse; the opportunistic waiter

looking for a 'traditional' wife; and even, in the guise of an old Chinese fox fairy, Jee 119

the gold rush immigrant from the nineteenth century. The narrator acknowledges a blurring of her own identity upon her arrival in Australia. This

blurring of identity is perhaps why, when she first arrives in Melbourne and

people assume she is Chinese, she does not bother to correct them. Even though she rails against it, she has become part of the Asian community whose

individuals, from a white perspective, have no unique qualities to distinguish them from one another.

Sri Lankan writer Yasmine Gooneratne asserts that the 'immigrant experience'

will form part of an immigrant writer's thinking "if they are first- or second­

generation Australians, as much a part of them as the images and techniques

they may have absorbed in other lands and from other cultures" (54). This

influence is undeniable, but problems arise when these writers do not move on

from the position of thinking only of Asian Australian identity as defined by

diaspora.

The diaspora narrative concludes with a pilgrimage-type journey to rediscover a

lost heritage. In all three novels, the narrators return to Asia in an attempt to

make sense of what they have lost, to find answers, and perhaps to reclaim part

of their identity. The return visits are marked by sadness, disappointment and

frustration.

Teo's Grace encounters a world she finds difficult to reconcile with her own

identity, or that of her parents. The closing chapter of Love and Vertigo sees

Grace make a tenuous reconciliation with her father, but we are not left with a Jee 120

feeling of resolution, either within the family or within Grace herself. We have trawled through the family's turbulent history, peopled with tortured and

eccentric characters, but essentially we end where the story began. As Grace

says, "questions still remain unanswered" (287) and there is no sense that she

is any closer to finding out what those answers are.

The main problem as I see it is with the way Teo handles her material. She has

gathered together a potentially fascinating group of characters, events and

issues, but she rattles through them almost like a newspaper report, listing

event after event with only brief forays into the interior thoughts and feelings of

the characters, like a play synopsis. Her descriptions read like an inventory of

exotic images but without further explanation, such as the hawker centre in

Singapore, with its:

char kway teow, steamed fish with ginger and shallots, chicken and beef

satay with peanut sauce, gado gado and pohpiah. Little dishes of sliced

chillies drenched in soy sauce dotted the table. Chopsticks clicked and

people chattered and slapped at mosquitos (Teo:145).

The novel falls easily into the familiar rhetoric of ethnic minority writing, and

indeed has much in common with Amy Tan's work - as in Tan's The Joy Luck

Club, Teo tells the stories of a past generation pre-migration, from the

perspective of a young woman trying to reconnect with her Asianness, while

resenting its imposition on her adopted Western life. Teo does not reveal any Jee 121

new insights to a contemporary Asian Australian identity, but defines her characters by their diasporic experience and its repercussions.

Vixen's narrator returns to Vietnam to find a place she hardly recognises, full of tourists and soulless restorations of old monuments. The fox fairy experiences

a feeling of displacement in her own country, having left behind an Australia that

is very different from the one she first arrived in. Its effects on her identity are

not easy to hide. A Vietnamese girl tells her:

Australia changes you. Everyone can tell you are not local. And they'll

leave you alone. Just give them cigarettes if they bother you. And take

presents. Aspirin and chocolate. It's really cheap here, but they'll

appreciate it back home (Pham:204).

The fox fairy now belongs neither in Australia, nor in Vietnam, and is expected

to behave like a Westerner upon her return to Vietnam. The narrator's decision

not to return to Australia speaks of a failure in her migration, a succumbing to

the endless 'looking back' of the sojourner that has haunted her existence in

Australia and prevented her from ever fitting in.

Lazaroo's narrator is similarly caught between the expectations of her Asian

relatives of what she should be, as an Australian, and her own perception of

what she should be, as an Asian. Despite Lazaroo's bittersweet exploration of

Eurasian identity, the book still contains the familiar 'pilgrimage' back to Asia to

recover something in the narrator's identity that has been lost: "I had to find a Jee 122

way of honouring not only the death of Eddie and a baby, but all the other parts of my life that had been lost to me. And the only way it seemed to me I could do this, was to go in search of Asia" (209). It is not until the end of the book and this journey to Asia in a chapter tellingly titled 'Salvaging the Inheritance' that the narrator finds any peace. Her infamous Uncle Linus, himself an outcast due to his eccentricity, is the first person to acknowledge the difficult position she is

in: "you have left the in-between people of Singapore and Malacca, and now

you are ... in-between being Eurasian and Australian. This is difficult for you"

(258). This observation leaves the narrator with renewed insight about her

identity for her journey back to Perth, and this obvious self-revelation reinforces

the narrative's return to the diaspora template. In all three novels, there is a

sense that nothing good can come of the merging of an Asian culture and an

Australian one. The only products of such a union are bitterness, alienation and

a profound sense of loss.

The books also portray the tension between multiculturalism in theory and

multiculturalism in practice. They show the lived results of the developing

policies of multiculturalism in Australia and the failure of these policies to

provide solutions to the very real problems encountered by migrants. In Love

and Vertigo, the Patriarch enjoys the benefits of multiculturalism but clings to a

belief in assimilation, despite its impossibility: "he would gladly give up his

Malaysian citizenship to become an Australian" ( 181 ). He tries to force his

children to become as Australian as they can be. Grace questions the validity

of assimilation, but as a young girl does not reject it, preferring to align herself

with her father: Jee 123

... to be 'fair' was to be white-skinned ... 'Advance Australia Fair' was

pregnant with all sorts of uneasy implications. Was it only white

Australians who were supposed to advance? Or did 'Australia Fair'

mean that only white people were Australians?

Like the Patriarch, I wanted desperately to assimilate. I wanted to wash

myself into clean whiteness, bleach myself into Advanced Australian

Fairness. Instead, I pissed my pants and was considered a dirty little

Chinese girl (Teo:183).

Teo clearly demonstrates the failure of multiculturalism as government policy to effect positive change in the everyday lives of Asian migrants. Rather, it created new tensions that were impossible to resolve.

The more subtle effects of multiculturalism and assimilation can be seen in the way all three books discuss home decor. The home space is presented as one of the major factors in creating a new, assimilated image for the migrant families. Success and belonging is seen as possible in the mimicking of the average Aussie house, with an emphasis on space and neutral colour schemes, sometimes featuring key pieces of Asian furniture and/or a leather lounge, seemingly the most ostentatious status symbol in terms of interior decorating for migrant Asian families. Jee 124

The interior of the Tay house in Love and Vertigo represents a battle of wills between husband and wife:

She wanted reproduction Provencal country furniture ... [the Patriarch]

then went off to order some chunky mid-priced Keith Lord furniture and

the requisite Asian leather sofa in peach tones to appease her because

she was female and had pastel-loving DNA ... he got the whole house

carpeted, wall to wall, in synthetic beige pile. Beige was a good neutral

colour ... it formed a bland and soothing background to the emotional

turbulence of his life (Teo 7-8).

The fox fairy in Vixen visits the house of an Australian Vietnamese family who

arrived in Australia with nothing but "made their own luck":

We step into the lounge room onto plush apricot carpet ... they have

everything -video, disc player, gleaming black stereo and TV. On the

walls are mother-of-pearl panels, depicting birds and flowers. There is a

silk scroll painting of a hazy woman in an ao dai ... I sit on the new

brown leather couch set, resisting an urge to dig in my fingers to see

what it is like (Pham 205-6).

Lazaroo writes a whole chapter on the confusion for the migrant family over

what kind of house to build, unable to choose from the staggering array of early

seventies kit home styles. The goal for the narrator's father is "to ascertain

what style of home was most Australian, so that when he built his own home it Jee 125

would guard against our classification as Alien" (Lazaroo 63). The family are

"silenced by the beiges and creams" in the colour schemes of a friend's home, but when it comes to finally choosing their own house there is no competition:

One day my father read out an advertisement that rang with magic for

him. He read it out as if it were an incantation:

True Blue Romeo, where art thou? Open plan living for Australians who

love living in the land of wide open spaces ... for True Blue Aussies with

a taste for international sophistication, this one includes at no extra cost

a bidet.

This last phrase was probably the most alluring one in the advertisement

for my father ... 'So will this house make us real Australians?' my twin

sister asked cynically (Lazaroo 65-66).

In all three works, despite the attempt to create a strong, Aussie family home, it

would appear that the family unit itself cannot remain intact following migration.

Teo's Pandora ends up committing suicide. Pham's fox fairy is exiled and her

only friend Chen, also a fox fairy migrant, starves herself to death. The parents

in Lazaroo's novel divorce, with the Malaysian father seeking a younger,

blonder Australian wife. The loss of the familiar seems to represent a loss of

the ability to communicate, and as each character tries to deal with feelings of

alienation, they retreat into a mode of self-absorption that ultimately destroys

their relationships with one another. Jee 126

In her article, "About face: Asian-Australians at home", Lyn Jacobs notes:

A further issue is the on-going fetishism of the •exotic' face where

sexually exploitative representations are reiterated . . . or where ethnic

appearance masks rather than reveals identities ... Has there been a

genuine aestheticising of ethnic or 'other' cultures where positionality is

appreciated rather than merely interrogated? Or are colonial attitudes

about 'face', ethnicity, gender and race still firmly in place? (Jacobs

2002)

Lazaroo questions this colonial attitude in The World Waiting to be Made. The narrator ends up on a float in a parade celebrating Broome's multiculturalism, dressed as a mermaid alongside other 'typical' female representatives of multicultural Australia "chosen for the way in which their appearance reflected

Vic's idea of one ethnic group or another" (197). Vic, the PR man, calls the float

"[t]he Triumph of Broome, the triumph of Australia's integration with Asia" (196) but none of the women roped in to participating feel triumphant, except for

Gloria, the Festival Queen. Gloria is also Eurasian, but the way she capitalises on the sexualised stereotype of her Eurasian background confuses the narrator:

Had [Gloria] grabbed at opportunities to overcome natural attrition, to

save her from the pits of her too-hard-to-define and too-easy-to-despise

ethnicity? Had she modified her Eurasian face to a more marketable

international face because she was afraid the forces of natural attrition Jee 127

might slough her away otherwise? . . . Like me Gloria had migrated to

Australia. Where to resist natural attrition, ethnics like us had either to

hold together with our own precious few in communal dagdom; or learn

how to appear more knowingly and sophisticatedly international than

other Australians (199).

In her essay 'Hybridised Demonology in Asian Australian Women's Writing',

Shirley Tucker describes this episode in the book as exposing "the way in which multicultural festivals can subvert the antiracist sentiments they are meant to celebrate and instead become vehicles for the expression of racist and sexist ideologies" ( 154).

Whereas Gloria seems confident in her choice of identity as a glamorous and exotic Eurasian, Lazaroo's narrator has spent most of her life trying to construct

"the correct face to wear" (95), but finds no solace in any of her attempted guises, whether as a typical Aussie girl straight from the pages of Dolly magazine, a mysterious Mata Hari when dealing with men, an Asian medicine magician (bomoh), a teacher in an Aboriginal settlement near Broome, or in trying to please her Eurasian relatives on a return visit to Singapore and

Malacca. She identifies her difficulty as stemming from her Eurasian background as much as from the migration to Australia, and the fact that her family has always defied ethnic categorisation: "Nobody knows what hat a

Eurasian should wear. Most of them are descended from so many different races, they would have to wear at least five hats" (209). Jee 128

Dorothy Wang finds the ending of The World Waiting to be Made to be

somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, she argues, the narrator comes to

"the realisation of the lie at the heart of assimilation myths" (44), but does not

reject this lie outright. Wang asks, "does the narrator's newfound awareness differ significantly from the 'enlightenment' sought in New Age moments that

characterise quests for 'Secrets of the East'?" (44) Indeed, while Lazaroo

attempts to demystify the stereotype of the exotic Asian woman and tries to

construct identity as a saleable commodity, she can't help to some extent

perpetuating the very myths she is trying to expose.

This is even more obvious in Vixen. Hoa Pham says her decision to use the

device of the fox fairy in Vixen was as a result of her own feelings of culture

shock on a family visit to Vietnam. "What I was aiming to do was deconstruct

some of the orientalism around our Western expectations of Vietnam and, in

particular, Western expectations of Asian women" (Keenan 2001:10). But the

exotic woman is still present in this work, despite Pham's desire to subvert this

image. She is strong, independent and more than capable of taking care of

herself, yet she chooses to be seen as a courtesan in the Emperor's court at the

beginning of the book, and remains an attractive, mysterious young woman

throughout the book, even as those around her age and wither. The Chinese

fox fairy, Chen, chooses an older, frumpier guise in her Ballarat seclusion, but

even Chen's 'true' woman's form is beautiful and youthful, which the

Vietnamese fox fairy admires: "her hair midnight-black, almost blue, her figure

slender, almost a mirror of mine. Her skin is whitened, her teeth and nails

perfect. She has slightly plumper breasts under the low cut of her dress" (119). Jee 129

This is a case where the aestheticising of 'other' cultures is actually reinforcing

stereotypes rather than subverting them.

In Love and Vertigo there is a sense that Grace feels shackled by her position

as a woman in a Chinese family, despite her Western pretensions. Grace finds

it hard to understand and empathise with her family, and has an almost

patronising response to their quirkiness and quaint traditions, even as they

constrain and frustrate her. When she relates details of her own childhood the

memories are infused with pain and the humiliation of looking and sounding

different, but her recounting of the family history is from a perspective of

superiority, as though Grace feels that growing up in Australia has placed her in

a privileged position and her Asian relatives are somehow less sophisticated.

As a result, the reader is not invited to engage with Grace's family in any way,

just to view them from a distance as cultural curios the same way Grace does.

They are presented in two dimensions only, as familiar stereotypes of difficult

and eccentric Asian characters.

Shirley Tucker argues that Asian Australian women writers have taken over

production of spiritual mythology in their contemporary works, and have

"inexorably changed the images and the way we read the figure of the Asian

woman in Australia" (157). The three novels all employ South East Asian myths

and spirit figures to illustrate the points of difference between the cultures the

narrators have left and the different, alien Australian environment. This is a

common element in much writing by Asian Australian women, as Tucker

asserts: Jee 130

For many Asian-Australian women writers, social realignment has not

necessarily involved taking up an already constituted Australian identity

but has, instead, produced new positions outside the parameters of

existing social structures. To reflect these difficult interstitial positionings,

some writers portray their protagonists as being closely aligned with the

spiritual world ... thus enabling complex critiques that explore cross­

cultural issues of displacement, alienation and discrimination (155).

Teo describes the family's reliance on superstition, driving cars with '888' in the

number plate to encourage prosperity, arranging their offices according to the

principles of feng shui and worshipping a giant cod "for no other reason than its

sheer monstrosity and diabolical ugliness ... Surely something that big, that

black and that beastly must be evil and, hence, possess dark powers" (15).

She also uses the image of the Hungry Ghosts both as an illustration of

Pandora's unhappiness and as a metaphor for the entire family's

discontentment: "[The Hungry Ghosts] are outsiders, searching hopelessly for

food, fulfilment, acceptance, peace" (285).

Lazaroo's narrator constantly refers to 'hantus' and 'bomohs' - evil genius

demons and medicine magicians - and throughout the novel she struggles

between acceptance and rejection of these powerful reminders of her Asian

heritage. Jee 131

Vixen's entire premise is based on the spiritual myth of the fox fairy. Pham tries to demonstrate the awkwardness of transposing the values of one culture onto another by using myth and mysticism, but this can often feel laboured and overdone. The loss of spirituality in urban Australia is one of the key differences the fox fairy in Vixen notes between Australia and Vietnam. In Vietnam, she is revered and worshipped and is accustomed to a position of high status, prized by those seeking their fortunes and good luck. In Australia, although the

Vietnamese "still honour their spirits and their ancestors" (Pham:115), nobody knows her true form and she finds it difficult to be content with her lower status, being treated as a dangerous outsider whether in fox or human form.

The fox fairy also comes into contact with an indigenous Australian ningaui spirit, who recognises her problems from her own experience as an outsider in her own country: "'You have to be respected to exist, mate. And they don't respect us until they're out bush and there ain't no one else"' (Pham: 186).

Despite representations of these spiritual elements as powerful, equated with independence and strength, their use in all three novels seems to anchor the characters to the familiar images of the Asian female that Tucker argues they are subverting. The characters struggle against these Asian ghosts and demons, but they are neither validated nor rejected outright and merely remain as stereotypical metaphors for the cultural struggles encountered by the characters. Jee 132

Christianity is synonymous with white cultural dominance in these books, a

position which is overly simplistic and which threatens to invalidate the

possibilities for Asian Australians to experience non-Eastern spirituality without

being somehow rendered 'inauthentic'. On her journey south, the fox fairy in

Vixen sees French Catholic cathedrals in Saigon and again in Sydney, but is

dismissive of them: "the French had brought missionaries and Catholics with them ... their faith seemed out of place to me, with no room in their doctrine for

spirits such as myself' (73). Her flatmate Hong advises her to keep her

Buddhist beliefs secret from the Australians, to "[l]isten to what they do and fit

in" (93).

Grace in Love and Vertigo speaks disparagingly of the "clean, bright, Omo­

white people" attending the Pentecostal church her mother joins. The church is

proven to be worthless in Grace's eyes when Pandora ends up having her

disastrous affair with the pastor and she remarks bitterly that "God had saved

our souls but he couldn't salvage our fraying family ties" (223). Lazaroo's

narrator sees her sister's religious leanings as little more than bright-eyed

fervour and feels resentful of her sister choosing Christianity as a solution to the

problems in her life: "This sister of mine had managed to stay such a good

Eurasian daughter in circumstances no Eurasian daughter I knew had ever had

to put up with, yet I'd become so bad" (206). There is a sense that spirituality is

something to be cherished and nurtured, but only if it is the exotic spirituality

that is so much a part of the Asian stereotype. The narrators see the 'Western'

version of spirituality as nothing but inferior blind belief and something to be

avoided. Jee 133

New directions

There are obviously many problems with these books and the way they present

Asian Australian identity. They ultimately do not offer solutions on where this genre of writing should now be heading, but the fact that they have been so

lauded raises a number of questions. Jonathan Rutherford observes that:

capital has fallen in love with difference: advertising thrives on selling us

things that will enhance our uniqueness and individuality. It's no longer

about keeping up with the Joneses, it's about being different from them.

From World Music to exotic holidays in Third-World locations, ethnic TV

dinners to Peruvian knitted hats, cultural difference sells ( 1990: 11 ).

Rutherford's tone may be cynical, but the point is relevant in the case of this

genre of fiction. Do some of these works achieve popularity and critical acclaim

simply because of their mysterious 'otherness'? Has there been a reversal of

response to works which use non-Western literary techniques and modes,

where readers now praise works they may not entirely understand, simply

because they offer a rudimentary introduction to this other culture?

The danger with trying to capitalise on cultural difference in fiction is that

because the audience is only engaging with the cultural identity on a superficial

level, it will eventually abandon one 'fad' and move on to the next, particularly if

the books being written do not show much individuality or deviation from the Jee 134

original template. This 'ennui' is evident in Louis Nowra's review of Love and

Vertigo. Nowra praises Tea's "wonderful debut", but finds the family history in

Singapore and Malaysia far more interesting than the subsequent migration, feeling that

[t]here is a sense of having read this sort of immigrant family story before

with the familiar problems of language and food, and cultural

misunderstandings ... The trouble is that Grace is boring compared with

her colourful relatives (Nowra:7).

Nowra's response highlights the fact that although Teo draws some memorable

characters, ultimately she does not offer any fresh perspectives on the

problems of contemporary Asian Australian identity. Tseen-Ling Khoo argues

that "Asian-Australian women's literature would benefit from more

contextualisation, diversification, and depth in its reception" (Khoo 2000:164).

This is certainly true, but a deeper critical reception cannot be realised without

publishers broadening the range of material they accept for publication, in a

reciprocal exchange with writers and theorists who challenge cultural

stereotypes constraining Asian Australian identity. However, in adopting this

position we must be careful not to remove all responsibility from the authors

themselves. As Khoo suggests, in discussion of Lillian Ng's novel Swallowing

Clouds, Asian Australian writers' potential "complicity with mainstream literary

discourses about Asian women and popular promotional strategies exposes the

precarious nature of marketing Asian-Australian literature" (166). Jee 135

These three books display attempts at moving in new directions, but Teo, Pham

and Lazaroo don't go far enough and in some ways waste many opportunities to subvert the stereotypes in Asian Australian women's writing. Teo is evidently

capable of writing shocking, beautiful sketches, such as her description of

Pandora's suicide:

[Auntie Percy-phone] stared ... at the spreading tide of blood that

thickened and darkened in the growing heat until Pandora lay in her own

black hole. All my life my mother smelt of soap and talcum power -

clean and child-like. In death she reeked of bitter violence and

disappointed dreams (279).

There is a breathtaking simplicity in the awfulness of the moment and its

aftermath. Teo's choice of narrative, however, blunts any points she might have

to make, and any originality in her writing style is overcome by the familiarity of

the narrative structure.

A short review in the Australian Women's Book Review praises the use of

magic realism in Vixen and is hopeful that it "promises new directions for

Australian fiction" (Brook). However the style does not promise much of a new

direction for Asian Australian fiction. The narrator's unsettled stay in Australia

and eventual return to Vietnam allow for valid commentary on problems of

migration, but do not further the development of an Asian Australian identity

other than that of a people in diaspora. Jee 136

Of the three novels I have discussed, I find Lazaroo's to make the furthest inroads into addressing a new, hybrid Asian Australian identity, both stylistically and thematically. Lazaroo's short, episodic style works really well in the construction of a hybrid identity in her book, as it reveals many facets in the representation of an identity that might be problematic in a more linear narrative. While there are still elements of the diaspora narrative in the novel,

Lazaroo's exploration of mixed cultural identities pulls the work away from the

stereotypes found in other Asian Australian writing and opens up new

possibilities for the genre.

Tseen-Ling Khoo places the responsibility for furthering the genre of Asian

Australian women's writing on both writers and critics:

For the presence of Asian-Australian women writers to be emphasised

and multiplied, more of their work certainly needs to be written,

published, and distributed. Sheer volume of texts, offering the authors'

many versions of Australian society, could recast Asian-Australian

women's writing as something other than novelty or tokenism for

publishing. However, critics must look closely both at what is written and

what it alters, appropriates, mediates, or contributes to current

discourses about Asian women and Asian women's literature (1996b:13-

14).

Continual questioning of work by Asian Australian women is as important as

having the work widely disseminated in the marketplace, as without a constant Jee 137

re-evaluation of what these works are saying about Asian Australian identity, there is the danger of creating new stereotypes. The potential diversity of the genre must be explored by writers and continually questioned by critics to avoid

Asian Australian fiction becoming little more than a cultural artefact, prized

solely for its exotic 'otherness' but having little impact on the way Asian

Australians are perceived in the world at large.

Conclusion

It is obviously difficult writing as an Asian Australian without touching on the

importance of migration and the Asian diaspora in the shaping of Asian

Australian identity. But within the diaspora narrative, it seems almost

impossible for writers to avoid stereotypes such as the overbearing patriarch of

the family, the exotic woman figure, and the journeys intended to find a 'true'

self. The problem may not necessarily be the diaspora narrative itself, but how

writers use it and whether they ever move on from it.

Wenche Ommundsen notes the dilemma of the Asian Australian writer

(speaking particularly of Chinese Australians):

The perceived need to ethnicise oneself may have as its primary

motivation the desire to counteract stereotypes, but, not surprisingly, this

undertaking sometimes falls prey to similar stereotyping processes,

myths of homeland competing with different versions of ethnicity

developed for diasporic consumption. The 'production' of Chineseness Jee 138

in diaspora is a process of recovery, discovery and invention, a

negotiation of available models for cultural belonging and an ongoing

evaluation of their usefulness in new contexts (94 ).

Ambivalence may be useful as a term here, but is not entirely unproblematic.

The ambivalent identity does not have to be defined by any one thing, and can

be harder to pin down, and by taking advantage of their ambivalence Asian

Australian women writers may be able to control the production of the identity they present. However this representation is never performed in a neutral

space, and its meanings are affected by the manner of its reception. Audiences will always inscribe their views onto a work and its creator, imbuing them with

values that neither can fully embody.

Dewi Anggraeni offers a way of reconciling the hybrid identity, by accepting the

ambivalent perspective:

I know that there will always be incidents that I cannot avoid: being told in

Indonesia that I am Australian; or being blamed by Australian

acquaintances for what the Indonesian Government does. But it doesn't

matter ... My cultural residence ... is deep down in my psyche, in a

place that overlaps both cultures ( 197).

Ambivalent hybrid identity is a product of the 'intentional' hybridity described by

Lo (2000:153), aware of its power and retaining the tension and conflict inherent

in the meeting of cultures. This ambivalent hybrid is more complex than one Jee 139

based purely on diaspora, because it enables layers of meaning. More options become available to the ethnic minority writer because it is possible to subvert fixed stereotypes, instead of accidentally stumbling onto or being trapped by them. A movable, fluid, ambivalent identity is one that is aware of the power of its context, with a knowledge of the political landscape enabling more control over the direction that it takes.

One aspect of Asian Australian identity that interests me particularly, and which

I see little evidence of in contemporary fiction, is one formed as a result of a

dual cultural heritage, or being Asian Australian and having no connection or

interest in the 'homeland'. These kinds of identity bring the hybrid state into

clearer focus, even if for the obvious reason that a person with one Asian parent

and one (Anglo-Celtic) Australian parent physically embodies the hybrid state.

I am interested in the validity of 'claiming' cultural heritage that one may not

actually feel a strong connection to, and this is when identity especially

becomes a political tool. I was born to a Chinese father and an Australian

mother, but was never made to feel that my Chineseness and my

Australianness had to be separated. I identified myself as a half-Chinese

Australian, and was raised with knowledge of both Southeast Asian and

Australian cultures. I was given Western and Chinese names, I ate Western

and Chinese food, my family celebrated Chinese New Year. As my father had

been an Australian citizen since before I was born, and we travelled between

Malaysia, Singapore and Australia frequently, I felt no special call or longing to

return back to Malaysia, his place of birth. Going back to Malaysia to visit family Jee 140

was never a pilgrimage or a momentous occasion; the visits were just like any other family gathering. Not looking recognisably Chinese, I did not experience many problems with racism and did not encounter anything similar to what len

Ang describes - the assumption that a Chinese appearance equals a proficiency

in Cantonese or Mandarin (Ang 2001: 21-23). The chief concern I felt in terms of my appearance was almost the opposite, that I would be lumped in with

every other Westerner who had jumped on the 'Orientalism' bandwagon in the

1990s because I did not look as though I had the 'right' to wear a cheongsam or to receive red packets (ang pow) at Chinese New Year, even though my

Chineseness was so ordinary to me as to be unremarkable.

While this is certainly not every Asian Australian's experience, in my case

'claiming' the Chinese part of my self was a gradual, almost reluctant

exploration prompted by feelings of frustration, and an answer to the implication

that I was squandering my 'otherness'. There seems to be a perception in our

society that if you have a point of difference in your cultural background, then

you should be capitalising on it. Upon hearing that my father is Chinese, more

often than not people will ask either "Do you speak Chinese?" or "Have you

been to China?" When I reply no, or say that my father is in fact Chinese from

Malaysia and so there is no reason for me to go to China, there is a palpable

sense of disappointment, as if my cultural credentials have been examined and

found wanting. At the same time, I feel a certain inadequacy about the gaps in

my knowledge of Chinese culture; I cannot speak Cantonese, I do not know

how to play mahjong, I do not know the stories behind many of the customs my

Chinese family observes, and feel irritated with the 'lifestyle' articles in the Jee 141

newspapers and magazines that seem to know more about the Chinese culture than I do.

The tension of this position interests me, and I am curious about how other

'mixed race' Asian Australians view their experiences, yet there is precious little contemporary writing on this topic, fiction or non-fiction. While not discounting the validity of the migration/diaspora narratives, there is potentially a lot of fascinating material to explore in ambivalent Asian Australian identities like this one. The conflicts generated by a 'mixed race' household, the reception of the

'mixed race' person in society, the claiming or not claiming of a particular identity - these things can use migration/diaspora as a springboard to new narratives without dwelling on it. The diaspora narratives have secured a place in contemporary Asian Australian fiction; now new forms and new narratives have to build on this foundation.

If there is no change and no new stories are told, then the concept of Asian

Australian fiction will gradually ossify and become irrelevant in the continual construction and redevelopment of Asian Australian identity. Asian Australian writers are positioned at a place where they can take the constructions that have already been established through the diaspora narratives, and even through the Asian American autobiographical/confessional genre, and build on them rather than trying to rework the same narratives again and again. Tseen­

Ling Khoo suggests that an element of unpredictability will help demystify Asian

Australian women's writing and give writers more freedom to negotiate "a wider range of subjects and narrative registers" (1996a:28). Rather than trying to Jee 142

simplify or repress the problems inherent in any discussion of hybridity, the way towards engaging with a more complex Asian Australian identity is to embrace the complicated entanglement, for writers to allow the possibilities in the

permutations of Asian Australian experiences to emerge.

We need a constant evaluation and re-evaluation of the present stories. We

cannot be content with whatever representation is accepted, because identity is

constantly shifting, constantly changing. To simply say 'we need a wider variety

of Asian Australian voices' isn't enough; we need to hear what those voices are

saying and constantly question them and their reception. Jee 143

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