Racism in Australia

Now Playing: Rambling Man by Laura Marling (let it be known that I was who I am)

I've always found it fascinating that people are so offended when I say the truth. The truth that Australia is a deeply, deeply racist country.

Just the other day I was in the elevator at the State Library when this man, who I'd never seen in my life, suddenly barked at me

VIETNAM? ARE YOU FROM VIETNAM?

I told him I wasn't and wished the ancient elevator would hurry the fuck up.

WHERE YOU FROM THEN?

My ethnicity isn't generally something I like discussing in detail with strangers, so I just said the answer that infuriates these kind of people the most. 'Here. I'm from here. I'm Australian'.

He looked a bit taken aback by that, and then said, as if I was the slowest person on earth,

NO, BUT WHERE YOU FROM ORIGINALLY?

I'm sorry, but the ONLY people who have any grounds to say that are...Aboriginals. Seriously. Nobody ever stops a white person and asks them where they come from, and anyone who knows anything about Australian history knows that if you're white, you're just as foreign as I am. One of my best friends is white, but she also happens to be born in Italy. Nobody has ever interrogated her about the purely arbitrary geographical location of her birth.

I didn't answer, so he just started shooting countries at me. To be honest, I was kind of scared to say yes to any of them, not only because he was totally off (Do I look Cambodian? No.) but because he was pretty aggressive for what could have been a well intentioned if inadvertently racist query, so I thought he might have had a thing for one of those countries.

CAMBODIA?

PHILIPPINES?

JAPAN?

CHINA?

THAILAND?

MALAYSIA?

Mercifully, the lift finally shuddered to a halt and the doors opened, so I mumbled 'my dad's from Korea kcoolbye' and ran off.

The long story short of my ethnicity is that my dad is Korean and my mother is Singaporean, and ethnically Chinese. But why should I have to explain that to random strangers? Some of my friends can't even straighten that out - mostly because they don't care. I'm not a colour to them. I'm not 'the Asian friend', I'm just a friend.

I was born here, in the Perth Hills. I was raised right here, in the Perth suburbs. I go to an Australian school and I have an Australian passport and an Australian birth certificate and I have Australian citizenship and...fuck it, I can speak English better than most 'real Australians'. I've got the certificates to prove that.

Everyone wonders why I'm so cynical about Australia, why I don't really feel proud to be Australian, and why I don't feel very Australian. This is why. I'm as Australian as any one of you and I still get treated with disrespect. Asians have been in Australia since the goldrushes of the 1800s. Asian immigration has existed since the Indo-Chinese refugees of the Vietnam War and became especially great during the times of Hawke and Keating, which is when my parents migrated. Asian Australians are really nothing new, and we're just as Australian as white Australians.

What is with this fascination with 'where I come from'? Is it any of your business? Why do you need to know what ching chong country I come from? Are you that scared of  yellow peril? Are you afraid that I'm going to say 'Mars' instead of 'Korea'? Why does my colour give you the right to interrogate me about my personal information? I really don't get it. You can't make any judgements of me based on my colour, or my race, or my gender, or 'where I come from'.

I can't count the number of times I've been called an 'Asian cunt'. Most of the time it's unprovoked - other times it's been uttered if I trip over my own feet, or my bus card refuses to work, or if there's a spelling error or a typo in my work or whatever - anything that makes me less than perfect is immediately grounds to call me an Asian cunt. What the fuck?

'Go back to where you come from' is a common one, too - normally from tradies after I've rolled my eyes when they whistle at me from their cars - as if my presence as an Asian female is only worth it if I'm flattered by some disgusting obese redneck in wife beaters making obscene remarks at me. It's disgusting.

Don't tell me that I should be proud to be Australian, that I should feel Australian and all that shit. Because every time someone demands to know where I'm from, every time someone yells that I'm an Asian cunt and that I should go back to where I came from, I couldn't feel any less Australian, and I couldn't feel any less proud to be Australian. Australians and their racism disgust me.

I've joked before about having 'racist hormones' in that I generally tend to like white boys. I have friends of lots of races and religions and whatever, but I do know for a fact that Asian boys do not like me and so that feeling has become kind of mutual. When I was little and I first had a crush on a boy - white - one of the first things people said when they figured it out was that I was Asian, and so nothing would ever happen. Never mind that there were lots of mixed race kids with Asian mothers and white fathers - it's actually quite a common phenomenon in Australia. I was made to feel like I was unworthy of all these white boys purely because of my race, and that only because of my race these boys wouldn't look twice at me. This was the general consensus of eight year olds, for crying out loud. Our country is so fucked even the most innocent say the most screwed up things.

But do you know what the worst part is? The denial. The preface to most racist rants are 'I'm not a racist, BUT'. First of all, that's, um, bad grammar. It is 'I'm not racist, however', not 'I'm not a racist, but'. Australians refuse to admit how racist they are, and are offended whenever we point out evidence of racism. I'm not making this shit up - I wish I was. I wish I didn't get called an Asian cunt. I wish I don't get interrogated and receive dirty looks because I'm Asian. I wish Australia wasn't such a racist country.