Locating Asian Australian Cultures by Tseen Khoo

Author:Tseen Khoo [Khoo, Tseen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317969976
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2013-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Plato’s foreigner, like the migrant in Chinese Australian writing, is an expatriate in a patriarchal culture, an ex-patriate: s/he has left behind or separated from the Father and the phallogocentric authority of the Father. In this separation lies the threat and the freedom of the expatriate: to ask the question that cannot be asked by those who are ‘at home’ in the Father’s symbolic domain. The epistemological freedom to ask the question implies also the ethical freedom to deliver judgment, and in this lies the threat posed by l’étranger, ‘the Outsider’, who is now ambivalently located ‘Inside’.

It is in this dynamic relationship of threat and authority that we can interpret Lazaroo’s use of the motif of the repeated question as she characterises the ambivalent friendship between her unnamed Eurasian migrant protagonist-narrator and the narrator’s Anglo-Australian school friend, Sue. The character of Sue epitomises all that the patriarchal Australian culture-of-the-Father demands of the adolescent feminine subject. She is blonde, bronzed, and part of the surfing subculture that Lazaroo depicts as a pseudo-sacred artefact of contemporary Australian cultural values.

At school, the narrator is not so much ostracised as simply ignored by Sue and her popular crowd of friends. However, it is Sue who greets the narrator, on her first morning at the new school, ‘Hullo, Tropical Barbie Doll’ (77), just loud enough for the whole class to overhear. This is a reference to the childhood Barbie games these two girls, then neighbours, would play. Early in the narrative, the narrator tells how Sue had a California Barbie that bore an uncanny resemblance to Sue’s own mother, and how, in order to make the doll resemble the narrator more closely, Sue ‘squashed the small purple (lilly pilly) fruit onto her Barbie doll’s protuberant breasts ... "This is how they dress in Oobla-Oobla land where you come from", she explained’ (29). The significance of popular material culture in the novel has been addressed by Dorothy Wang (2000); here, I want to draw attention to the way in which the unthinking racism of the child, as she objectifies her friend in this way, is offset against the qualified reassurance she offers when the words ‘ASIANS GO HOME’ appear emblazoned on the bus shelter across the street from the narrator’s house. ‘Don’t worry, you don’t look like a slope or a boong’, Sue tells her (27). As Robyn Morris remarks, in Lazaroo’s work ‘white dominance remains paramount to conceptions of ‘the nation’ and ‘foreignness" (2005: 286). The internalised perception of somatic racial difference and of differences within that difference (Asians opposed to Aborigines, ‘slopes’ opposed to ‘boongs’) that inflects Sue’s reported response to the imperative that Asians ‘go home’ signifies the complex intercultural space within which the narrator is situated, and within which her Anglo-Australian neighbours situate themselves.

When Sue unexpectedly telephones to invite the narrator on a trip to the beach, the question that immediately arises is: why? The narrator does not know; the boys who crowd around Sue do not know. As Shirley Tucker observes,

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