ABSTRACT
As a Hong Kong Chinese Australian who has lived the majority of his life outside of China, I have many tales of the lived interiority of ethnicity to tell. The vast majority of these tales recount the dynamics between my ethnic body on the margin and the institutions of whiteness at the center, but one such tale that involved my grandmother reveals the possibility of an opposite structure. Multiculturalism and the policy of assimilation were firmly on the social agenda in Australia of the 1990s. At the high school I went to, Asians who only made friends with other Asians were frowned upon as self-segregating and unwilling to blend into local culture, so I made quite a conscious effort to befriend a roughly equal number of white Australian and Asian Australian friends. My grandmother on the other hand lived happily in Australia for over a decade not speaking or knowing a word of English. She did all her grocery shopping in Chinatown, socialized with Chinese-speaking friends, watched Chinese language-drama on TV, and got around town on the train by memorizing the color of each station's platform. One afternoon, my grandmother flipped through my yearbook and tried to name all of my friends by their faces. She had a recollection of all Asian faces, but failed to recognize any of my white Australian friends. I reminded her that many of these white Australian friends actually came around to the house frequently, to which she replied, “but I cannot tell them apart, their faces are the same, and their voices sound the same to me!”
