Sometimes I’m resentful not because people are disrespecting my culture, but because I’m bitter about what I don’t know. This face and this name give rise to assumptions about access to culture I haven’t always had. At other times, I stubbornly refused to learn: speaking Chinese is only cool or impressive when you’re not Chinese. As a child I was dismissive – why bother when I already have the name and the face?
For years I was embarrassed to speak Chinese in public. It might be urbane for Kevin Rudd, but people might think I couldn’t speak English. Like many non-Indigenous people of colour, I used language to legitimise my presence in this country. I offered my Australian accent like an excuse for my face. The accent is crucial; more important than any other measure of linguistic competence, it offers immediate protection. But this is only for the bearer, the soon-to-be-disillusioned offspring of adult migrants whose voices were stuck in another country. My generation was promised equality after assimilation; mostly, we sold our parents out.
Now I work in a call centre. No name, no face. Customers hear my accent and confide their relief that they haven’t got someone in India, the Philippines. I tell them, shaking, that I can end the call if they feel the need to be racist. I want to say, ‘This is China speaking, she just sounds like you now.’
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My generation was promised equality after assimilation. And for a while there I believed it: I read Blyton and Blume, and later Plath and Salinger. And I loved them as I should. I forgot Chinese word by word and let my tongue grow wooden. And I hardly noticed because I always had more to say to my friends than to my parents. I waited for strangers to stop asking where I came from, and they kept me waiting. I went to the place I didn’t remember that I’m supposed to have come from, I looked at my grandparents’ bookshelves and the gaps in their photo albums and I thought about culture, loss, change and time. When I was four an ocean crossed me. If it hadn’t, I still wouldn’t be in the same place I came from.
It took me until adulthood to realise that nothing would ever erase my Chineseness. It’s not in my name, my face, what I know, my family’s stories or even my blood. It’s all of my body and out there, in the world. A place in the world that follows me wherever I go.
Two years later, when the whitest boys are learning Mandarin around me, flinging cultural history at my face as if to impress, this still reverberates.
