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Being an ABC: an Australian-born Chinese
Disclaimer: I was born in Australia to parents of Chinese ancestry, and brought up in this country; as such, my perspective is that of an Australian and the phrases and terminology I use may not carry the loading that they do in other countries. If I cause offence with something I say, I sincerely apologise (it was certainly not meant) and will attempt to rectify the offence once informed.
Terminology: In Australia, the term 'Asian' refers to persons of Chinese, Japanese, and the South East Asian descent. Just so the Brits don't get confused.
--
On Saturday night, I was out for a friend's birthday party and had the question posed of me: "What's your background?"
The question tends to get asked in various ways: "Where do you come from?" is the fumbling question of choice for someone who doesn't have a grasp on the politics of background culture. "What's your ancestry?" is the more polite form used by people who've thought about the minepit of answers available in "Where do you come from?", with the more direct, "Are you [insert nationality here]?" being employed by a few people - all Asians, interestingly enough.
In Australia (and Canada, and I imagine America and the UK and everywhere that's a lodestone for immigrants), there's a wave of people like me: first- or second-generation Australians made up of children born to immigrant parents. We're born in the country, we grow up in the country, we speak the language - and often don't learn our background language, are educated, take jobs, woo spouses, buy houses, and have children of our own.
Often, we think we're no different to any other woman or man born and bred in the country; different, yet equal. We expect the same rights, the same courtesies, the same degree of respect from our fellow citizens.
We don't always get it.
My childhood was relatively sheltered; I grew up in Sydney suburbia that was mostly white, at a primary school where my sisters and I were the only Asians in our year, but our family attended a Chinese church and our playmates were children like us - of Chinese ancestry, born in Australia, speaking English, with white-collar parents.
Secondary school (years 7-12) was a public, government-funded school, but one which took the top students out of an entry exam. As might be expected, there was a rather large percentage of children from Asian and Indian backgrounds. My year was, perhaps 15% Asian and Indian (Chinese/Japanese, South-East Asian, Indian/Pakistani) rising to about 20-25% in our last two years.
Other than a name-calling incident in primary school ("Ching-chong Chinaman! Chuck 'em down the dunny-can!") and a few sneers while catching the train home with my (mostly Asian) group of friends ("Spot the Aussie!") - the more obvious signs of racist sentiment - I don't recall any incidents with an underlying racism from my peers or teachers.
Perhaps the multicultural make-up of the school, combined with the school's focus on academia, shielded me from the more subtle forms of racism. Maybe I was subject to racist prejudice and simply never noticed the imbalance.
Certainly, when I left school and encountered a social crowd formed mostly of white Australians, many of whom came from the more insular country towns, it was a shock to realise that I was being paired up with another guy all the time because "we were both Asian", and that I was excluded from one social group of girls because the events organiser felt that I "wasn't like them".
The other 'non-white' people - a Nigerian man, an Indian man, and the Chinese-Malaysian (the Asian man with whom I was expected to immediately bond) - all of whom spoke with the accents of their background countries - never ended up socialising with the group. I suspect the main reasons I was rendered 'acceptable' was because I spoke 'Australian', ie. without a non-white accent, and was willing to meet them on their ground of drinking and socialising.
This tends to gel with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
strangedave's essay on racial acceptance in Australia: that white people often think they aren't racist because they're friends with a person of colour who's very much like them in upbringing, education, and outlook.
And I'm much like most gwai-lo (foreigners, non-Chinese) in upbringing, education, and outlook, although the colour of my skin is very much not white.
I am an Australian-born Chinese - a 'banana'; yellow on the outside, white on the inside. I've never personally heard the term used in a negative way, although that doesn't preclude it being used so. I think that, in the circles I've been in, it's always been acknowledged as something that's to be expected: we're Asian on the outside, but we're brought up in a 'white world' and given 'white values' and 'white thinking'.
In short, the colour of my skin is largely mitigated by the fact that my language and mental processes are 'white' and so white people don't have to adjust their perceptions to meet me. I don't challenge 'white perceptions'; that's why they accept me more easily than they can accept black people or Mexican Hispanics, Muslims, and the French.
It's not a conscious thing on my part; this is the way I was brought up. Maybe it's 'wrong' to be an Australian-born Chinese: to be yellow on the outside and white on the inside. Maybe it's 'wrong' to be perpetuating the ingrained belief that 'white is right/better/the default' - a message of supremacy far more insidious than anything the KKK preaches. Is it an unconscious 'social climbing' of the race ladder, is it something that can't be helped and shouldn't be worried about? Is it both?
There are a handful of white people - mostly Christian missionaries, aid workers, and diplomats - who go into non-Western countries and absorb the culture. But only a handful. And most of them are given 'status' for being white.
Did you know that Australian-born Chinese missionaries going into China are treated as 'lesser' than their white counterparts? They're Chinese, say the locals, just like us, what could they possibly have to teach us that we don't already know?
There are hundreds of thousands of people like me in western countries the world around. People who come from a particular ethnic background, but who were born and bred in another country and who've taken that country and culture as their identity base. Racially, we appear different, but in our minds, we identify as 'white' with an added bonus of a non-Western background: meat and two-vege, perhaps, but finely sliced in a stir-fry, with chilli and rice noodles and oyster sauce.
Truthfully, I haven't yet worked out what being a 'banana' means when it comes to racial identity. Is there a wrongness in the way I was brought up - a little Chinese girl with an Aussie accent? Am I coasting on a 'nearly-white privilege' ticket that is granted to me because I 'fit' in Western society? How does this affect the way I view other persons of colour - people whose skin shades are darker than mine, whose behaviours and speech patterns and ways challenge my comfort zone?
Asstrangedave said in his post: "It is easy to fool yourself that you aren't racist when what you really mean is you can overlook skin colour if they act just like you."
--
Disclaimer: I was born in Australia to parents of Chinese ancestry, and brought up in this country; as such, my perspective is that of an Australian and the phrases and terminology I use may not carry the loading that they do in other countries. If I cause offence with something I say, I sincerely apologise (it was certainly not meant) and will attempt to rectify the offence once informed.
Terminology: In Australia, the term 'Asian' refers to persons of Chinese, Japanese, and the South East Asian descent. Just so the Brits don't get confused.
--
On Saturday night, I was out for a friend's birthday party and had the question posed of me: "What's your background?"
The question tends to get asked in various ways: "Where do you come from?" is the fumbling question of choice for someone who doesn't have a grasp on the politics of background culture. "What's your ancestry?" is the more polite form used by people who've thought about the minepit of answers available in "Where do you come from?", with the more direct, "Are you [insert nationality here]?" being employed by a few people - all Asians, interestingly enough.
In Australia (and Canada, and I imagine America and the UK and everywhere that's a lodestone for immigrants), there's a wave of people like me: first- or second-generation Australians made up of children born to immigrant parents. We're born in the country, we grow up in the country, we speak the language - and often don't learn our background language, are educated, take jobs, woo spouses, buy houses, and have children of our own.
Often, we think we're no different to any other woman or man born and bred in the country; different, yet equal. We expect the same rights, the same courtesies, the same degree of respect from our fellow citizens.
We don't always get it.
My childhood was relatively sheltered; I grew up in Sydney suburbia that was mostly white, at a primary school where my sisters and I were the only Asians in our year, but our family attended a Chinese church and our playmates were children like us - of Chinese ancestry, born in Australia, speaking English, with white-collar parents.
Secondary school (years 7-12) was a public, government-funded school, but one which took the top students out of an entry exam. As might be expected, there was a rather large percentage of children from Asian and Indian backgrounds. My year was, perhaps 15% Asian and Indian (Chinese/Japanese, South-East Asian, Indian/Pakistani) rising to about 20-25% in our last two years.
Other than a name-calling incident in primary school ("Ching-chong Chinaman! Chuck 'em down the dunny-can!") and a few sneers while catching the train home with my (mostly Asian) group of friends ("Spot the Aussie!") - the more obvious signs of racist sentiment - I don't recall any incidents with an underlying racism from my peers or teachers.
Perhaps the multicultural make-up of the school, combined with the school's focus on academia, shielded me from the more subtle forms of racism. Maybe I was subject to racist prejudice and simply never noticed the imbalance.
Certainly, when I left school and encountered a social crowd formed mostly of white Australians, many of whom came from the more insular country towns, it was a shock to realise that I was being paired up with another guy all the time because "we were both Asian", and that I was excluded from one social group of girls because the events organiser felt that I "wasn't like them".
The other 'non-white' people - a Nigerian man, an Indian man, and the Chinese-Malaysian (the Asian man with whom I was expected to immediately bond) - all of whom spoke with the accents of their background countries - never ended up socialising with the group. I suspect the main reasons I was rendered 'acceptable' was because I spoke 'Australian', ie. without a non-white accent, and was willing to meet them on their ground of drinking and socialising.
This tends to gel with
strangedave's essay on racial acceptance in Australia: that white people often think they aren't racist because they're friends with a person of colour who's very much like them in upbringing, education, and outlook.And I'm much like most gwai-lo (foreigners, non-Chinese) in upbringing, education, and outlook, although the colour of my skin is very much not white.
I am an Australian-born Chinese - a 'banana'; yellow on the outside, white on the inside. I've never personally heard the term used in a negative way, although that doesn't preclude it being used so. I think that, in the circles I've been in, it's always been acknowledged as something that's to be expected: we're Asian on the outside, but we're brought up in a 'white world' and given 'white values' and 'white thinking'.
In short, the colour of my skin is largely mitigated by the fact that my language and mental processes are 'white' and so white people don't have to adjust their perceptions to meet me. I don't challenge 'white perceptions'; that's why they accept me more easily than they can accept black people or Mexican Hispanics, Muslims, and the French.
It's not a conscious thing on my part; this is the way I was brought up. Maybe it's 'wrong' to be an Australian-born Chinese: to be yellow on the outside and white on the inside. Maybe it's 'wrong' to be perpetuating the ingrained belief that 'white is right/better/the default' - a message of supremacy far more insidious than anything the KKK preaches. Is it an unconscious 'social climbing' of the race ladder, is it something that can't be helped and shouldn't be worried about? Is it both?
There are a handful of white people - mostly Christian missionaries, aid workers, and diplomats - who go into non-Western countries and absorb the culture. But only a handful. And most of them are given 'status' for being white.
Did you know that Australian-born Chinese missionaries going into China are treated as 'lesser' than their white counterparts? They're Chinese, say the locals, just like us, what could they possibly have to teach us that we don't already know?
There are hundreds of thousands of people like me in western countries the world around. People who come from a particular ethnic background, but who were born and bred in another country and who've taken that country and culture as their identity base. Racially, we appear different, but in our minds, we identify as 'white' with an added bonus of a non-Western background: meat and two-vege, perhaps, but finely sliced in a stir-fry, with chilli and rice noodles and oyster sauce.
Truthfully, I haven't yet worked out what being a 'banana' means when it comes to racial identity. Is there a wrongness in the way I was brought up - a little Chinese girl with an Aussie accent? Am I coasting on a 'nearly-white privilege' ticket that is granted to me because I 'fit' in Western society? How does this affect the way I view other persons of colour - people whose skin shades are darker than mine, whose behaviours and speech patterns and ways challenge my comfort zone?
As
strangedave said in his post: "It is easy to fool yourself that you aren't racist when what you really mean is you can overlook skin colour if they act just like you."--
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it still gets my dander up, though; those embarassments that supposedly share my national-ancestry.
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Among the friends I grew up with, it was something of a joke, not an insult.
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(please don't kill me)
well, the people who would've used it offensively, are whom I meant.
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okay
*hugs*
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This, and a lot of other things you mentioned touched home with me. I suppose as a black American growing up in the Southern United States I would have encountered more incidents of prejudice growing up, but then I thought maybe I was oblivious. I don't think this was necessarily a bad thing, because as a child I'm glad I didn't have to worry about such things.
I didn't go to school with children of another race until (about half white and even fewer Asians) middle school (6-8 grades). It wasn't until I was in high school (back to a predominantly black school) that my eyes were opened to the idea that people may treat me better—or worse—because I happened to have light skin.
So yeah, I'm still trying to get my head around it all. My parents didn't raise me to think of race even though later I learned that they had certain ideas about the race of the person I should marry (weird).
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My cousin T had that problem: her (very traditional, very conservative) father once told her that if she married a white boy, he'd lose a daughter. About six or seven years later, his older daughter moved in with a white man, which was a terrible shock to the family (not just that he was white, but that they didn't get married first). Now, they're married with two children, but I think it was a bit of a shock to their system.
T ended up marrying a lovely Chinese guy...who's shorter than her by several inches.
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I am looking at our Olympic team right now. The field hockey team has five players that wear turbans. Our best fencer actually won a medal for China before she became a Canadian citizen. Our most famous wrestler has gone home to Nigeria to "do for Nigeria what Canada has done for me".
My impressions of Australia (and please keep in mind that there are the impressions of a 13-year-old in 1997, just as Pauline Hanson was coming on the scene) was that racism was much closer to the surface than it was in Canada. I didn't meet a black person until I was about 5 (and apparently what I said to my mother was "Mummy! Look at that woman! She is so beautiful!"), and didn't encounter my first Asians until high school...but I was also raised in a family where basketball, baseball, the Olympics and football were akin to religion, teaching tolerance and world unity and an aristocracy of talent instead of heritage.
I sort of lost that somewhere in the middle. The Olympics make me verbose.
Anyway, I understand what you went through as a child, though I can only slightly empathize because my differences from my schoolmates were social and not physical. It's a tough road for all of us, I think, for whatever reason, and tolerance and fair play is something that cannot be overtaught.
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There's been a strong 'white Australia, white allies' thread running through the country for some time, actually. It looked like we'd mostly gotten over that in the 80s-early 90s, but it was only buried in a shallow grave and Hanson and her cronies resurrected it.
Our current PM has more cosmpolitan views in that area since one of his children has a spouse of Chinese descent. He's fluent in Mandarin - addressed the Chinese President in Mandarin when Hu Jintao came to visit Australia and was the Shadow Foreign Minister for a while before he rose in the Labor party.
Obviously the greater positivity towards non-white cultures is mitigated somewhat by economic, political, and ethical considerations, concern over terrorism and the increasing social marginalisation of young non-white males and their anger over it (and how the anger is played out), but I think he's a good way ahead of our last PM as far as 'open-minded to other cultures' goes.
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... it's kind of late and I'm really hoping that I got my point across. Time to step away from the comment box! (I got here from
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That's true.
I guess this is the term that I've used to describe my situation. It's not entirely correct, just the perspective I have regarding my cultural background and my upbringing.
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A lot of stuff in your post really resonated with me, despite the fact that I'm, you know, from a different continent. Great post. :)
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it still gets my dander up, though; those embarassments that supposedly share my national-ancestry.
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Among the friends I grew up with, it was something of a joke, not an insult.
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(please don't kill me)
well, the people who would've used it offensively, are whom I meant.
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okay
*hugs*
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This, and a lot of other things you mentioned touched home with me. I suppose as a black American growing up in the Southern United States I would have encountered more incidents of prejudice growing up, but then I thought maybe I was oblivious. I don't think this was necessarily a bad thing, because as a child I'm glad I didn't have to worry about such things.
I didn't go to school with children of another race until (about half white and even fewer Asians) middle school (6-8 grades). It wasn't until I was in high school (back to a predominantly black school) that my eyes were opened to the idea that people may treat me better—or worse—because I happened to have light skin.
So yeah, I'm still trying to get my head around it all. My parents didn't raise me to think of race even though later I learned that they had certain ideas about the race of the person I should marry (weird).
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My cousin T had that problem: her (very traditional, very conservative) father once told her that if she married a white boy, he'd lose a daughter. About six or seven years later, his older daughter moved in with a white man, which was a terrible shock to the family (not just that he was white, but that they didn't get married first). Now, they're married with two children, but I think it was a bit of a shock to their system.
T ended up marrying a lovely Chinese guy...who's shorter than her by several inches.
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I am looking at our Olympic team right now. The field hockey team has five players that wear turbans. Our best fencer actually won a medal for China before she became a Canadian citizen. Our most famous wrestler has gone home to Nigeria to "do for Nigeria what Canada has done for me".
My impressions of Australia (and please keep in mind that there are the impressions of a 13-year-old in 1997, just as Pauline Hanson was coming on the scene) was that racism was much closer to the surface than it was in Canada. I didn't meet a black person until I was about 5 (and apparently what I said to my mother was "Mummy! Look at that woman! She is so beautiful!"), and didn't encounter my first Asians until high school...but I was also raised in a family where basketball, baseball, the Olympics and football were akin to religion, teaching tolerance and world unity and an aristocracy of talent instead of heritage.
I sort of lost that somewhere in the middle. The Olympics make me verbose.
Anyway, I understand what you went through as a child, though I can only slightly empathize because my differences from my schoolmates were social and not physical. It's a tough road for all of us, I think, for whatever reason, and tolerance and fair play is something that cannot be overtaught.
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There's been a strong 'white Australia, white allies' thread running through the country for some time, actually. It looked like we'd mostly gotten over that in the 80s-early 90s, but it was only buried in a shallow grave and Hanson and her cronies resurrected it.
Our current PM has more cosmpolitan views in that area since one of his children has a spouse of Chinese descent. He's fluent in Mandarin - addressed the Chinese President in Mandarin when Hu Jintao came to visit Australia and was the Shadow Foreign Minister for a while before he rose in the Labor party.
Obviously the greater positivity towards non-white cultures is mitigated somewhat by economic, political, and ethical considerations, concern over terrorism and the increasing social marginalisation of young non-white males and their anger over it (and how the anger is played out), but I think he's a good way ahead of our last PM as far as 'open-minded to other cultures' goes.
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... it's kind of late and I'm really hoping that I got my point across. Time to step away from the comment box! (I got here from
no subject
That's true.
I guess this is the term that I've used to describe my situation. It's not entirely correct, just the perspective I have regarding my cultural background and my upbringing.
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A lot of stuff in your post really resonated with me, despite the fact that I'm, you know, from a different continent. Great post. :)