Looking for New Opportunities: Sang Ye and the Discourse of Multiculturalism

Tim Kendall

I don’t care what happens, I’m not going back, and no one in Australia can do anything to make me. Just try me: you can boil me in oil, cook me in soy sauce, pop me in a steamer, whatever you’ve got a taste for. Call me a slut if you like. Doesn’t bother me. “You’re a goddamn whore!” Yeah, and what of it! “The East Wind blows, the war drums roll; in today’s world, no one’s scared of anyone else.” Chairman Mao taught us Chinese not even to fear death. So why should I be scared of losing face? Just write it all down and to hell with it ... 1

In July 1996, Nikki Barrowclough published an article in the Good Weekend section of the Age titled ‘Lost in Translation’. The piece examines the ‘new wave’ of Chinese artists and intellectuals who came to Australia just before, or just after, the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Throughout the piece, Barrowclough dismantles the old stereotypes about Chinese inscrutability and examines the demands that are involved in operating between two vastly different cultural systems. In examining this sense of in-betweenness, ‘Lost in Translation’ suggests that these Chinese artists have all emerged from periods of dislocation and voicelessness with a new understanding of the cultures they operate between. The article identifies the authors Ouyang Yu, Sang Ye, Leslie Zhao and Lillian Ng; the visual artist Guan Wei; and the filmmakers David Zhu, Clara Law and Eddie Fong. Barrowclough explains that ‘[n]ot all the Chinese who have arrived (in Australia) in the past ten years belong to this group’.2 However, it is unclear what the designation ‘this group’ actually means; whether it refers to the category of artists and intellectuals she has interviewed, the time when they arrived, or whether it refers to both. This confusion appears to be replicated in Barrowclough’s selection of artists, for she has identified the Mainland Chinese artists Ouyang Yu, Sang Ye, Leslie Zhao, Guan Wei and David Zhu with artists from numerous parts of Greater China (and in some cases countries that lie outside Greater China) such as Lillian Ng (Singapore), Clara Law (Macau/) and Eddie Fong (Hong Kong). The distinction between the hua qiao or and the Mainland Chinese is an obvious one, but one that needs repeating. Those born and raised in have vastly different cultural and political histories to the Chinese living in Hong Kong, , Macau, Malaysia or Singapore. They have different motivations for coming to Australia, have entered under different arrangements, in very different circumstances and have vastly different expectations of Western culture. As artists they are influenced by different styles and traditions and as migrants they have developed a different relationship to both the local culture and to their (m)otherland.3 In elaborating on the acute sense of cultural isolation felt by many of these migrant artists, Barrowclough suggests that their sense of displacement or Jumping the Queue

‘translation’ manifests in new methods of cultural expression. She is particularly interested in the ways that these artists manage to ‘find their way’ in both cultures. It is in this context that Barrowclough suggests that at some time in the future these authors may ‘change the face of Australian literature in the same way that Indian writers like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh have done in Britain’.4 This way of positioning migrant cultural production is deeply problematic and raises questions about the way that migrant identity is understood in multicultural countries like Australia. It reveals the way in which difference becomes appropriated by, and positioned within, the multicultural state. It suggests that successful migrant writers become repositioned as alibis to Australia’s cultural diversity, alibis to multiculturalism. The Rushdie/Seth/Ghosh comparison is not only extravagant but also awkward, for there are a whole range of contingencies and specificities that separate these British, British-Indian, American writers from the Chinese migrants mentioned here. The Mainland Chinese who came to Australia in the late eighties and early nineties would appear to have little in common with Salman Rushdie — an Indian Muslim from Mumbai (Bombay), educated in England and a product of British (post-)colonialism. The comparison appears to have been made because writers like Rushdie — symbols of migrant acculturation and integration — have become celebrated for having found their way in the cultures they operate between. What this comparison also suggests is that there are, in principle, two identities that are made available to migrants: the migrant becomes part of a model minority (and a celebration of multicultural hybridity) or is rendered voiceless and consigned to an invisible migrant ghetto. Within such a schema, Chinese culture can either spill gracefully over the dragon-painted walls of Chinatown (itself an Anglicised form of Chineseness) or it can remain obfuscated and contained within. There is little opportunity for migrant identity to exist outside or between these poles of representation. There is little room for ambiguity. The migrant stories contained within ‘Lost in Translation’ are in danger of becoming narratives about Australian multiculturalism and the artists risk becoming enveloped by the non-specific and all-embracing rhetoric of multicultural munificence. Barrowclough’s comments form part of a discourse that seeks to identify the way that migrants add to the rich mosaic or tapestry of multicultural Australia. In adopting this position, Barrowclough effaces or neutralises the insurgent and seditious aspects of Sang Ye and Ouyang Yu’s writings. Ouyang Yu chooses a position different from that awarded to him by Barrowclough. While it is true that Yu’s poetry endeavours to negotiate the different stages of translation that take place between China and Australia, his writing is also critical of the Australian literary and academic establishment, it seeks to expose the insidious racism of western liberals and operates at the boundaries of political (in)correctness. Further, throughout his writing, meaning does not always or ever become clear but remains unstable, and this instability is often seen to result in cultural isolation. In The Year the Dragon Came (1996), Sang Ye broke with conventional migrant representations to deliberately and comprehensively overturn stereotypes about Chinese migrant identity. Both Sang Ye and Ouyang Yu produce work that seriously undermines the claims of the multicultural lobby; both expose the stories that have been omitted from, or lost, in the official translations. It is perhaps for

70 Tim Kendall this reason that critics claim that much of their work ‘does not make comfortable reading’.5 It has been suggested that The Year the Dragon Came is ‘a profoundly disturbing book for Australians to read’ and reviews warn of it creating controversy both inside and outside the Chinese community.6 Linda Jaivin, who delights in the ‘spicy, prickly’ content of the book, claims that it will: [S]hake up those whose ideas of multiculturalism have more to do with colourful ‘ethnic’ customs and foreign soap operas on SBS than with the harder issues of ethical and cultural clashes between the dominant and immigrant communities.7 Jaivin expects that the book will also cause controversy within the Chinese community because of the way the text ‘show(s) the ugliness within the family to people on the outside’.8 This expression is Jaivin’s translation of a Chinese expression that is something like — ‘don’t hang your dirty washing in public’. This sentiment is reinforced by Sang’s interview with the Old Cadre. The Old Cadre insists that: ‘We can’t have these people going abroad and letting us down and our country down and our socialism down. Maybe they’re overseas Chinese. Maybe they don’t believe in socialism. But they’re still descendants of the Yellow Emperor. They can’t let our ancestors down’.9 Both Jaivin and the Old Cadre firmly distinguish between the inside and the outside and both gesture towards representing the Chinese as one big de-facto family. Each of these responses makes mention of the uneasy or disturbing character of Sang’s text. In claiming that it makes uncomfortable reading, the interviewee, editor and critic all make reference to what is understood as constituting acceptable, or if not acceptable, comfortable public discourse. Sang Ye’s stories are considered to make uncomfortable reading because they offer numerous examples of racial and cultural conflict and thereby challenge the boundaries of discursive acceptability. In dismantling the thick walls that separate the Chinese community from middle Australia, Sang Ye has challenged two different cultural taboos: he has undermined the official narrative of Australian multiculturalism as government policy and stirred up the ‘ugliness’ that exists within the Chinese community. It is expected that The Year the Dragon Came will create controversy within the Chinese community because Sang Ye has made visible or audible, narratives that are typically omitted from, or silenced by, the discourse of multiculturalism. In challenging the distinction between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the acceptable and unacceptable, Sang Ye has not simply exposed the big family to a good public airing, but has offered an alternative history of the migrant experience of Australia. In Speaking for Themselves Sang Ye says that: You can only speak like this to Chinese, you know. The Australians are dogs. Can’t expect them to understand. Our “Taiwan compatriots” aren’t much better, in fact, they’re complete fuckwits. The only thing they know about is pussy — yellow pussy ... [In Shenzhen] I finally decided to “liberate myself”. Everything was a matter of PR no matter what company you ended up with. You were just making money for other people. If I had to sell myself, why not be my own boss? So in late ‘86 I became a hooker. Called myself a “tour guide”. I showed them the sights all right!10

71 Jumping the Queue

In 1997 Diane Giese published a book of interviews with Chinese-Australians — Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons — which contains interviews with the generation of Chinese who came to Australia somewhat earlier than those included in The Year the Dragon Came. Many interviewees speak of the racism they encountered when they arrived, and Australia is represented as having emerged from such a history. In contrast to the ‘new Chinese’ who arrived in Australia in the late 1980s, these Chinese-Australians are now successfully established in their careers and professions, and their stories follow a typical formula of struggle, integration and success. Giese’s text represents another conventional or ‘comfortable’ positioning of migrant identity and locates itself within those discourses of acceptability mentioned earlier. When President Jiang Zemin came to Australia in October 1999, he was presented with a book titled Outstanding New Migrants from China. It had been written by John Zhuang and Minshen Zhu, the editors of a newspaper based in Sydney, and contained a succession of stories about model mainland migrants who had succeeded Downunder. As the title of the book suggests, the editors had also produced a conventional collection of migrant histories that were also predicated on those comfortable categories of representation mentioned above. The Year the Dragon Came has no interest in inheriting or reproducing these types of positions, and most members of Sang’s motley pack (drifters, rat-bags and god-fearing Christians) have no interest in providing civic or professional credentials. There are neither submissive Asians nor model minorities found here. Sang’s interviews shake up ideas about migrant acculturation and cultural exchange and the book raises awkward questions about racism, reinvigorates debates on immigration, while seriously problematising concepts of multiculturalism and inclusive citizenship. In talking about the Chinese as a migrant group, one of the interviewees mentions the concept of the sibuxiang. She claims that ‘we become like the sibuxiang, a mythological Chinese creature that looks a little like this, a little like that, but defies categorisation’.11 In this context, the chimera or shape-shifter, the sibuxiang, becomes a metaphor not just for the migrant experience, but for this collection. Because Sang Ye does not seek to represent any kind of essential or authentic migrant experience, The Year the Dragon Came challenges notions of a fixed national and ethnic identity; it provides a space for a series of conflicting and contesting migrant voices. Sang Ye is an oral historian. Much of his work draws on the themes of displacement and belonging. In 1984 Sang Ye and Zhang Xinxin travelled throughout China collecting personal histories and published these interviews in a New York Chinese language newspaper. Later published as Chinese Lives, these interviews document the lives of ordinary Chinese people and their experiences of living in modern China. When compared to The Year the Dragon Came this text is a more conventional anthropological-style oral history that allows peasants and ‘working-class’ people to express their experiences of modern China. The book is not only a testament to the resilient spirits of a people emerging from the experience of the Cultural Revolution, but is also a portrait of China’s ethnic, social and cultural diversity. While the authors introduce each interview with a background statement, Sang and Zhang allow the characters to speak for

72 Tim Kendall themselves. This text is described as having had a phenomenal impact in China and is considered to have presented something more true to life than almost anything previously published there. The technique used by Zhang and Sang is drawn from the work of Studs Terkel. Terkel, who wrote the Preface to Chinese Lives, describing it as a ‘stunning, delightful, disturbing, and altogether revelatory oral history’. Terkel inherited this form of oral history from the Swedish anthropologist Jan Myrdal.12 In 1962 Myrdal published his interviews with people from the province of Shaanxi in Report from a Chinese Village. In May of 1987 the Literature Board of Australia and the Australia-China Council invited Sang Ye to Australia. The Finish Line: A Long March by Bicycle through China and Australia is a record of that trip. Sang Ye settled permanently in Australia in 1989. Like Chinese Lives, The Year the Dragon Came utilises the interview form. In the book’s Preface, Sang Ye explains that he conducted one hundred interviews with those ‘heirs of the dragon’ living in Australia during the late eighties and early nineties, and that he has selected the sixteen most interesting stories for this volume. Why has Sang employed the same form for these two different histories? Chinese Lives was a much larger history and its format gave expression to the great diversity of histories contained within the text. Sang Ye and Zhang Xinxin had also appeared to use the interview format in Chinese Lives to avoid any binding editorial meaning. This may have prevented the text from being censored as meaning came to function rather ambiguously in a book of sixty-five interviews. It seems that Sang chose to use the same form because of his commitment to the descriptive and subversive power of ordinary people’s histories. Ten years after the publication of Chinese Lives, this type of oral history has become a distinctive part of Sang Ye’s narrative style. Like Chinese Lives, The Year the Dragon Came uses the experiences of ordinary people to undermine ‘the grand empty rhetoric’ of the state;13 in this instance however, these migrant histories problematise the grand narrative of official Australian multiculturalism. While drawing heavily on the subjects’ sense of displacement, the interviews in The Year the Dragon Came articulate a mixture of vulnerability, desperation, rage, fear, angst, prejudice, ambition and self-interest. These personal histories continue to engender the ‘unvarnished reality’ that is found in Chinese Lives, and Sang identifies a pathos and verisimilitude that is frequently lacking in conventional or empirical histories. The front cover of The Year the Dragon Came explains that ‘[t]hese stories read like fiction ... but this is not fiction’. Such a claim would appear to suggest that these stories have all the qualities of a crafted and constructed narrative and all the vitality and poetry of fiction. While this is a testament to Sang Ye’s ability to elucidate the poetry of the everyday, he appears to have merged Myrdal, Terkel and Chinese Lives with a powerfully unconventional history of the Chinese in Australia. As a result, Sang Ye has managed to collapse the boundaries that exist between, history, fiction and anthropological reportage. The comment ‘reads like fiction but is not’ prompts readers to consider what genre the text belongs to. Does one identify it as fiction, non-fiction or simply not- fiction; do we call it oral history, interview, life history or documentary fiction? It appears that Sang Ye deliberately challenges the formation of generic boundaries

73 Jumping the Queue and identifications. Further, he breaks with these individual, normative categories in order to develop a hybrid from which he can offer a diverse range of migrant experiences. The text operates at the margins, looking beyond the conventional generic categories to form a new type of history. As an oral history, the text is also determined to expose the way that the mythical is closely related to the biographical. This returns us to Barrowclough’s claim that a migrant’s cultural isolation manifests in new methods of cultural expression. This in turn suggests that there may be a correlation between an author’s relationship to the dominant culture and their choice of narrative or genre. For the migrant, there may be a reluctance to accept dominant narrative conventions and an impetus to develop emergent or hybrid narrative forms. There are numerous examples when hybrid or marginal literary genres have been developed in order to expose different subaltern voices (that is, protest, resistance and testimonial literatures). While this division equates major and minor genres with dominant and subaltern voices, it also suggests that form is ideological and can be mobilised to articulate difference. A conventional generic classification ‘fiction’ may be seen to rob the text of its power to engage readers in the social and political present, while a claim to non- fiction may offer the work an element of political or social representation but may not acknowledge the subtleties of narrative, the problematic nature of subjectivity, the contingencies involved in the processes of interview and translation. In this context the ‘orality’ of the text becomes important. While Sang Ye does not allow the orality of the text to become displaced by the written form, it is also the thing that grants each story its own completeness, independence and distinctiveness in voice and character. This is facilitated by the richly idiomatic translations of the China scholars Linda Jaivin, Geremie Barmé, W J F Jenner and others. The strength of the translations lies in their ability to (re)create the distinctive voice of each subject, allowing each interview to maintain its own textual and stylistic individuality. Carole Boyce Davies claims that the ‘primary theoretical question posed in identifying life stories, orally narrated and transferred to print, is the problem of authority and control over the text’.14 While any text constructs truth selectively, the interview provides the opportunity for speech and content to be used rather more tactically by the author or editor. Throughout the text, Sang appears to limit his level of editorial intervention. Having said this, it would appear that the titles he chooses for each interview might well reflect an editorial position. Nonetheless, Sang is mindful not to allow the views of the recorder to have precedence over the views of the recorded. He includes interviews that directly engage with the contingencies of the editorial process. At other times, the comments of interviewees problematise editor-subject relations as the subjects seek to assert their own editorial control, thereby challenging or destabilising Sang’s editorial agenda. We find ourselves asking whether Sang is a collector, facilitator or interlocutor, or whether he is himself a subject. This in turn leads to questions about whether the text has a single author or whether it is a collaborative, multi-authored series of voices. There are two interviews in which the interviewee talks of the collection as a whole: ‘New Headaches for an Old Cadre’ and ‘Quotations from Mini-Mao’.

74 Tim Kendall

In each of these instances the interviewee asks back, challenging the editorial process.15 Mini-Mao, a lawyer from Changchun, did not want to be included in a book with Chinese from Taiwan, Hong Kong and ‘illegals from Mainland China’. However, he agreed to be interviewed in order to promote his organisation, which had been attempting to promote the rights of Chinese students in Australia. He does this through preparing a draft of ten points that he then presents throughout the interview. He also requests that excerpts containing his indiscretions be cut from the transcript. (Ironically too, he complains about the chauvinism of the academic who was later responsible for translating this interview into English, Bai Jieming/Geremie Barmé.) The Old Cadre insisted on reading the transcripts from other interviews before agreeing to go on the record. His participation was prompted by the fact that he too had strong ideas about what should be included, he wanted to prove that ‘Some of us [Chinese] are decent’.16 Inevitably, any process of sorting and dividing involves an imposition of both form and purpose and a selection like this will contain a narrative of its own. The extraordinary variety of the collection makes it difficult to classify the individual stories. The diversity in character and attitude, and the range of background and experience, challenges any attempt at racial and cultural stereotyping. The text’s diversity invalidates any essentialised notions of race. While many of the individual interviews are full of bigotry and prejudice, as a collection, these histories reveal the ugliness that underlies attitudes of racial superiority. It is in elaborating these contingencies, ambiguities and uncertainties that Sang Ye has managed to establish an authorial and editorial presence. The Chinese sense of their own self-importance is strongly reflected throughout the text, and in his introductory remarks Sang Ye explains that in nearly all the interviews the interviewees referred to Australians as devils () or foreign devils (yang guizi) or used the slightly more polite form ‘foreigners’ ( or waiguoren). Sang Ye suggests that those interviewed were apparently oblivious to the fact that in Australia they may be the ones considered to be foreigners.17 This cultural conceit also seems to explain why so many of those interviewed construct a stereotypical schema: China is old and crowded, burdened with history while Australia is new, open and ahistorical. The speaker in ‘In Transit’ claims that ‘[w]e Chinese have five thousand years of history, five thousand years of civilisation; these foreigners are so uncultured’.18 Accordingly, Australians are antipodean or provincial and culturally and intellectually peripheral. This type of historical positioning (a rearticulation of the colonial view of Australia) is not innocent but is used throughout the text to explain/disguise many forms of bigotry. In claiming that these personal accounts can function as a history of the Chinese in Australia, Sang appears to suggest that all historical accounts have subjective foundations. Sang’s provocative selection includes a broad diversity of histories: the stories of refugees, entrepreneurs, academics, Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) and immigrants who came to Australia under the family reunion scheme. Each has a different reason for coming to Australia. One interviewee claims he will ‘get [his] kicks taking-out foreign devils’ while others seem to be engaged in some kind of race war. Some want security, others seek ‘the big-eight’ items.19 While the text concentrates on the

75 Jumping the Queue lives of mainland (People’s Republic of China) Chinese, Sang also includes an interview with a Hong Kong and Taiwanese student. The interviewee from Hong Kong had immigrated with her family well in advance of the Hong Kong ‘hand over’ and the Taiwanese Buddhist came to Australia to study social work. These interviews reveal the radical differences that exist between those belonging to the nations of Greater China. By including these interviews, Sang reveals the different ways that these communities are imagined, the way that their sense of Chineseness manifests and the methods used by these different communities to distinguish themselves from one another: I arrived in Australia in late 1988. I went to English classes for six months. I’d done English at university and middle school, so they put me into the third level. I worked as a waitress and found an Australian boyfriend, but I soon split up with him. I never liked the prick, I was only interested in the fact that he was an Australian citizen. Because of 4 June [1989 — the Peking Massacre] they gave us an extra year, then an extra four on our visas. Residency for four years, no fucking worries at all. I went back to my old profession. No one made me, I wanted the money. Make hay while the sun shines, life is but a dream, a hundred years pass in an instant, etc. etc. I can make money and, boy, I can spend it too. My goal is to live a lot fucking better and happier than other people. I’m a shameless slut and I know it. Other Chinese students want face. You think washing dishes in a restaurant from morning to night gives face? Such hicks. They probably couldn’t sell themselves if they tried.20 The comment that ‘these characters are living right next door to you’ appears on the front-cover of The Year the Dragon Came and places these Chinese immigrants within an accessible suburban context. It suggests that middle Australia will inevitably have to negotiate some of the complexities that underlie the notions of (cultural) difference, immigration and multiculturalism. This comment implies that any seriously multicultural nation must move beyond the colourful ethnic parades that Jaivin satirises and towards a genuine understanding of the complexities that underlie cultural difference. Such an understanding would also involve an appraisal of the history of racism that lies behind the foundation of the Australian nation. In March 1984, in response to the number of migrants who had come to Australia from Asian countries, Geoffrey Blainey — Professor of History and former head of the Australia-China Council (1978-1983) — gave what has now become his most renowned speech to a group of Rotarians in Warrnambool. In this speech he suggested that there should be a reduction in the levels of Asians immigrating to Australia. Michael Hodgman, the Liberal opposition immigration spokesman, backed Blainey’s proposal and suggested that the opposition would win up to a dozen seats from the government on the immigration issue.21 Sensing that the immigration issue was a vote winner, the leader of the opposition, Andrew Peacock, then produced a quasi-Blainey immigration proposal. Shortly after the Peacock proposal, John Howard (then a senior opposition minister) made a speech in which he reassured the parliament of the Liberal Party’s commitment to a non- discriminatory immigration policy and called for a bipartisan approach to immigration. The result was that the Hodgman/Peacock initiative was unable to get much support and was rejected. The Australian press responded to the speech

76 Tim Kendall by claiming that Howard was destined to become the next leader of the opposition.22 In the following year, on 5 September 1985, Howard became the leader of the Liberal Party. In August 1988, some three years later and after a period of sustained public and press debate over immigration issues, Howard reversed his former position. In a radio interview on 1 August 1988, Howard said, ‘it would be in our immediate- term interest and supportive of social cohesion if it [Asian immigration] were slowed down a little so that the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater’.23 On 8 August, three Liberal back-benchers (Ruddock, Macphee and Hall) crossed the floor of the House of Representatives because they believed that Howard was ‘sponsoring a racially divisive immigration policy’.24 In drawing on Howard’s comments, Prime Minister Hawke moved a resolution that ‘no Australian government should use race or ethnic origin as a criterion in determining immigrant selection’.25 In an attempt to quell the immigration/race debate, the federal government released its National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia ... Sharing Our Future in July 1989. Based on the work of the Advisory Council on Multicultural Affairs, Hawke’s National Agenda defined multiculturalism in a prudent way. It states that immigrants had the right to an ethnic and cultural heritage but that all immigrants must be committed to Australian unity. While Hawke’s statement reflected a cautious negotiation of migrant rights, responsibilities and entitlements, it failed to reflect on the experiences of migrants living in Australia and had little relevance to the racism that was prevalent throughout the wider community. In the booklet published to promote the National Agenda, Prime Minister Hawke is found photographed with a selection of Australian children from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Hawke claims, ‘when I talk to children from a wide variety of backgrounds about their vision of our future, such definitions (i.e. multiculturalism) seem unnecessary. They live and enjoy multiculturalism at first hand’.26 While Hawke suggests that values such as multiculturalism are a congenital feature of the nation, the photograph suggests that immigrants are still identified on racial grounds and that their racialised identities (and narratives) can perform specific public/political functions. Ironically however, this essentially didactic text emerged as a result of an immigration debate that was deemed so divisive as to require a declaration of the government’s official ‘vision’. The promotion of cultural diversity was not only an attempt to erase recent expressions of racism but the Hawke vision also revealed the way that nationally divisive issues can be negotiated and regulated through the state-centred ideal of citizenship. The Hawke paper suggests that the local culture has the ability to transform (naturalise) immigrants into citizens and that by extension, citizenship becomes a guarantee of equal rights. This implies that racial conflicts can be resolved through acknowledging the collective values of citizenship and that citizens in turn become protected by the political and judicial functions of the nation. This project of nation building is clearly beset by a series of ambiguities, particularly as it relates to the category of the non-citizen. Nonetheless, Hawke’s National Agenda failed to address the problem of racism and therefore failed to resolve the debates over the racial and ethnic constitution of the nation.

77 Jumping the Queue

During this debate there had also emerged a section of the community that sought to discredit the state-sponsored vision of multiculturalism. This constituency claimed that Anglo-Saxon Australia had to resist an agenda that protected minorities at the expense of native white Australians. This attitude was represented by media commentators like Ron Casey who, in April 1988, in response to a caller’s claim that her husband could not get work through the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES), suggested that the man should undergo plastic surgery to make his eyes ‘slopey-slopey, one up, one down, take quinine to colour his skin and go to into the CES pretending to speak an Asian language’.27 Drawing on the growing public concern over levels of Asian immigration, Casey reproduces the idea that white taxpayers have become the real victims of Asian migrant welfare dependency. He also draws on the myth that the ruling elites are more concerned with the well-being of Asian migrants than they are with the well-being of Anglo-Australians. This response may be best described by Ghassan Hage’s phrase as a ‘discourse of Anglo decline’.28 Such a discourse emerged in the late eighties and became a feature of Australian social and political debate throughout the 1990s. One of the adherents to this discourse of Anglo decline has used The Year the Dragon Came to explain multiculturalism’s failure. In Among the , Paul Sheehan draws on Sang Ye’s uncomfortable oral histories to argue for a reduction in Chinese immigration to Australia. Sheehan, who claims that Sang Ye is ‘a delightfully friendly man’, appears disturbed by the self-interest and cultural insularity that is expressed by the Chinese in Sang Ye’s text.29 Citing The Year the Dragon Came, Geremie Barmé’s ‘To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic’ and comments by Wang Gungwu and Lee Kwan Yew, Sheehan claims that Anglo-Australians will become the victims of Mainland Chinese nationalism, chauvinism and .30 Reinvigorating the arguments of Blainey, Casey, Howard (and Pauline Hanson), Sheehan claims that Australians of British origin are now under siege by migrants, Aboriginals and multiculturalists. In Sheehan’s equation, Anglo-Australians are in danger of becoming the most downtrodden and voiceless members of the community, the victims of a reverse racism. In an attempt to resist this trend, Sheehan rearticulates the old national mythology that (Chinese) migrants will spill over the northern frontier of Australia, raid the treasure trove (or social security system), import the separatist violence of their homeland(s) and debase and erode the national character. Affronted by the insults that those in Sang’s text have dealt the host nation, Sheehan implies that migrants ought to profess their gratitude, or else, remain silent. The Year the Dragon Came is a valuable text because it operates outside both the discourse of Anglo decline (as articulated by Sheehan, Casey, Howard and Hanson) and the discourse of integration and acculturation (as expounded by the multicultural lobby of Barrowclough, Zhu, Zhuang and Hawke). In exploring what lies beyond, or within, these two normative categories, The Year the Dragon Came has managed to negotiate a more heterogeneous third space for speaking about the migrant experience of Australia.

78 Looking for New Opportunities: Sang Ye and the Discourse of Multiculturalism Tim Kendall 1 Sang Ye, The Year the Dragon Came, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1996. It is an oral history of the Chinese in Australia, this excerpt comes from Zhunbei ma ‘Are You Ready?’ pp 1-2. 2 Nikki Barrowclough, ‘Lost in Translation’, Good Weekend, Age, July 13 1996, p 45. 3 The terms Chinese, Chinese-ness and China are invested with a multitude of diverse meanings. Throughout this piece and unless otherwise stipulated, I use these terms to refer to the experiences of the Mainland Chinese who came to Australia during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the vast majority of whom were Putonghua speaking Chinese. 4 Barrowclough, op. cit., p 49.

268 Notes to pp 69-88

5 The phrase ‘do/es not make comfortable reading’ is used by Wenche Ommundsen to describe Yu’s poetry and by Neil James to describe The Year the Dragon Came. Ommundsen, ‘Not for the Faint-Hearted’, Meanjin, ‘The Asia Issue’, vol 57, no 3, 1998, p 598; and James, ‘On Our Post-Tiananmen Fiction’, the Australian’s Review of Books, April 1997, p 12. 6 Quotation from Anne McLaren, ‘Review: The Year the Dragon Came’, China Journal, vol 39, January 1998, p 197. 7 Sang, op. cit., p xii. 8 ibid. 9 ibid., p 16. 10 ibid., p 2 and 7. 11 ibid., p 160. 12 Sang Ye and Zhang Xinxin, Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, W J F Jenner and Delia Davin (eds), translation by the editors and Cheng Lingfang, et. al., Pantheon Books, New York, 1987, Preface. 13 Nicholas Jose claims of Beijingren: ‘To give an ordinary person the right to speak and be heard is itself subversive of a system where your place is determined by a hierarchy of power ... Individual realities undermine the grand, empty rhetoric that structures the Chinese state’. Nicholas Jose, Chinese Whispers: Cultural Essays, Wakefield Press, South Australia, 1995, p 94. 14 Carole Boyce Davies, ‘Collaboration and the Ordering Imperative in Life Story Production’, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds), De/colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Women’s Autobiography, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1992, p 3. 15 This idea of ‘asking back’ is drawn from Carole Boyce Davies, op. cit. 16 Sang, op. cit., p 164. 17 ibid., p viii. 18 ibid., p 45. 19 The ‘big-eight’ refers to those items that the Chinese could buy overseas and take back to China and avoid paying duty: sewing machines, stereos, televisions and so on. 20 Sang, op. cit., pp 11-12. 21 Greg Sheridan, Tigers: Leaders of the New Asia-Pacific, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1997, p 151. 22 ibid., p 153. 23 ibid., p 155. 24 Tony Wright, ‘The Dog Whistler’, News Extra, Age, 8 April 2000. 25 Sheridan, op. cit., p 156. 26 Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia ... Sharing Our Future, Australian Government Publication Service, Canberra, July 1989, p 1. 27 Sydney Morning Herald, 6 April 1988, p 1. 28 Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto Press, Annadale, 1998, Chapter 7. 29 Paul Sheehan, Among the Barbarians: The Dividing of Australia, Random House, Sydney, 1998, p 63. 30 Geremie Barmé, ‘To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic: China’s Avant-Garde Nationalists’, in Jonathan Unger (ed.), Chinese Nationalism, East Gate, New York, 1996.

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