Indian Odours and Other Asianisms

Alice Pung - Growing Up Asian In Australia, Melbourne: Black Inc, 2008

By Jay B. Panicker

A cacophony of giggly girls, and other miscellaneous sounds of children at play fill the classroom. Amidst all the noise, an exhausted Sister takes her routine nap with her head slumped on the teacher’s desk. This time, her mouth is wide open, saliva collects around it in a little puddle. In an arbitrary moment, a friend and I come up with the ‘ingenious’ idea of placing a piece of chalk into her gaping mouth (it seemed like a funny idea at the time). We make our way to Sister’s desk. The class is silently watching our stealthy movements. The fresh chalk feels smooth in my palm. We are poised, barely an inch away from our prey, when my friend whispers from behind me: ‘You smell really nice for an Indian.’ I couldn’t be more grateful to my mother. Every morning, whilst I did my colouring on the floor of her room, she would rub the excess Lancôme Miracle on me. Apart from being a time of many firsts, as Melbourne based lawyer, Alice Pung mentions in her latest anthology, Growing Up Asian In Australia, growing up is also a time for being (brutally) honest, and where we form perceptions of ourselves, and others. My friend’s comment shaped my identity as an Indian who is as Indian as India Arie. I was particularly obsessive about the way I smelt. Friends knew me by my scent(s).There were times when my father would choke in the car, because he found my Impulse too overpowering. In 2006, Pung provided a fresh voice to the Australian literary scene with her autobiographical novel, Unpolished Gem. She is back again, along with a fleet of Asian Australian writers. Pung has brought together in the anthology works from a range of artists. It features a combination of poetry, autobiographical prose, and cartoons detailing the Asian Australian experience. It explores the adversities of living in conflicting cultures, Asian and Australian - the former being the antithesis of the latter. The varied authorship of the anthology brings an assortment of voices together. Pung has categorised the works around loose themes such as ‘Strine’, ‘Pioneers’, ‘Battlers’, ‘Legends’, ‘The Hots’, ‘Folks’, ‘The Clan’, ‘Homecoming’ and many more. ‘Strine’ is an integral part of most Asian cultures. Like many Asian Australians, I have been bilingual all my life. I speak English most of the time, and reserve my native Tamil for weekly long-distance calls to my grandmother. Despite the years of Tamil tutoring my mother forced on me, my conversations with grandmother are stilted, peppered with English. In the anthology, ‘Strine’ deals with similar issues, providing insight on moving through a second language, and of parents’ struggle to embed a little native-culture in their kin. It costs Amy Choi the loss of her grandfather to appreciate her native tongue. The bane of Ivy Tseng’s Saturdays were gruelling Chinese lessons, imposed by her father. ‘Pioneers’, ‘Battlers’ and ‘Legends’, indicative of national pride, were selected by Pung with ‘a certain irony’. The traits are no longer confined to those with ‘white faces’. Asian Australians are becoming a part of Australia’s history. ‘Pioneers’ explores the courage and strength of people who come to Australia in search of a better life. I suppose in every such family there is a ‘Pioneer’. I, for one, admire my great grandfather’s amazing courage for running away from his home at a tender age. It features Ken Chau’s political poems, and Francis Lee’s moving autobiographical account of leaving all that he knew in Hong Kong to come to Australia in 1961, otherwise known as the Upside Down Year. ‘Battlers’ tells of extraordinary families that, despite the odds, achieved goals through persistence, and determination. In many ways, Asian Australian families have battled for their place, and sense of identity in a white dominated society. Lily Chan explains the ordeal of having her home morph into a Chinese restaurant by night. Kevin Lai and Matt Huynh also portray graphically a family’s losing battle to bankruptcy. Pung’s ‘Legends’ are far from Elvis Presley types; rather, they are the most ordinary of people. Phillip Tseng writes of his legend father who has an uncanny ability to predict upcoming deaths. Cindy Pan experiences a connection with the dancing legend of an old man through ‘Dancing Lessons’. Shalini Akhil fantasises about becoming an Indian Superwoman who makes perfectly round rotis, just like her grandmother. Sexuality, love, and other matters of that ilk are featured in ‘The Hots’. We take a profound look at how Asian constraints loosen up when faced with less conservative norms. We come across exotic Portuguese-Filipino, Xerxes Matsas whose family’s virility did not rub off on him. Lian Low orchestrates her first kiss in an award winning film production. In her ‘Big Life’, Jenny Kee recounts her days as play girl. Folks are anything but the Asian Australian teenager’s rant about his or her conservative, frog-in-the-well parents. Asian Australian writers look up to their parents in admiration for their struggles. Simone Lazaroo writes about her father’s last days, enduring a mysterious ‘Asian Disease’. It also explores a parent’s own grievances as children grow to become different people altogether. A mother’s own struggle and failure are explored in Vanessa Woods’ ‘Perfect Chinese Children’. ‘The Clan’ relates to the (changing) Asian norm where parents must stay together, and forever feuding families. I personally can attest to the latter; family reunions were usually rounded off by a drunken spat or two between the elders. Benjamin Law recounts his experience with parental separation, while Ken Chan writes about feuding families from a child’s perspective. 'Homecoming' features accounts of Asian Australians returning to ancestral homes. Kylie Kwong relates her experience of being the first in her lineage to visit her ancestral home in China. Blossom Beeby takes another touching path to find her Korean roots and her biological mother. Pung has also included a section, ‘Tall Poppies’, featuring profiles of inspirational Asian Australians like Shaun Tan and Anh Do. Despite the term’s negative connotations, Pung aims to cast a new light upon what is referred to as a model minority. Far from being a plethora of rants on the adversities of growing up as a minority, Growing Up Asian In Australia provides a hearty, wholesome, and humorous look at what it is like coming from a dual cultural background. If anything, the book provided me with the insight that race, colour, and the way we smell aren’t the measure of a person. Next time, I’ll go easy on my Estée Lauder. Jay B. Panicker is a Singapore born and bred Creative Writing student at Queensland University of Technology.