I Didn’t Know How To Exist In Australia As A Mixed-Race Chinese Woman, Let Alone Write About It
"This is what happens when you follow the advice to write what you know."
When I first moved to Melbourne from Los Angeles, I was relieved to finally have an easy answer to the tired question that seemed to follow me wherever I went: where are you from?
“I’m from the States,” I could now reply.
But I was in no way prepared for the comments that would follow. In the US, enquiring minds probed deep enough to find out that my mother was Chinese and my father was white and left it at that. In Australia, the responses to questions often took an insidious turn.
“Then how come you look so exotic?”
“But you’re Oriental?”
“You don’t look American. You look Hawaiian.”
“Let me guess. [Insert racial slur here]?”
Or simply a, ‘If you’re American, then how come your face?’. This one often came with an accompanying circular gesture to highlight the point of their confusion.
In Melbourne, it was strange to live in a place where so many people questioned my existence, even my closest friends.
How come my face? My mother is a second-generation Chinese-American, and my father is a white American. Or perhaps, more accurately, I have my father’s oversized smile and squinty eyes, and my mother’s broad nose and ears that stick out at the sides.
In Melbourne, it was strange to live in a place where so many people questioned my existence, even my closest friends. Once at a dinner, a few of my white friends were sitting around discussing the problem of race in Australia. We were drinking natural wine and eating overpriced pizza topped with cheeses like taleggio, smoked scamorza, and fior di latte. One friend began, “We as white people need to…”.
“I’m not white,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” she replied.
Here, I was and I wasn’t. I was allowed to share a table and heirloom tomato salad with my friends, but I wasn’t allowed to share my perspective on what it was like to live in a racialised body.
Sometime after moving to Australia, I decided I would have to write myself into existence. But how? The age-old adage ‘write what you know’ comes to mind but doesn’t account for the fact that what we know is based on what has already been known, what is visible, what is seen. I knew my experiences, but I had never seen them translated to the page in a way that mirrored those experiences accurately. Or, more simply: how could I write what I knew when I wasn’t even known — not even to those closest to me?
Perhaps the lack of explicitness means that the story can accidentally be read as white. But the opposite is also true…
The answer: write as intimately as possible. I would have to find a way to draw people into my world as a mixed-race Chinese woman and make it tangible, hyperreal.
The first story I wrote using this approach, Dead Summer, is about a woman who self-destructs after her mother passes away from a long illness. The narrator is a bewildered young woman who sees death in everything, including her boyfriend, who reminds her of a corpse. The narrator is also a mixed-race Chinese woman. While this is never specifically written into the text, it was clear to me from the conception of this story that it was an account of my own experiences with grief and racialised experiences. Perhaps the lack of explicitness means that the story can accidentally be read as white. But the opposite is also true — the lack of explicitness means that the story of a mixed-race Chinese woman can be read as universal.
Throughout She Is Haunted, there are many unnamed and unraced women narrators — they are all mixed-race Chinese women. There are named and raced Chinese women narrators too. This is not a convenient decision that I made after writing. This is what happens when you follow the advice to ‘write what you know’. In the book, any narrator that is not Chinese is identified as such, and, in their stories, their whiteness plays a considerable role in how they move through the world and interact with the East Asian characters they encounter.
Unlike the way my friend overlooked my existence that night over upmarket pizza, I do not want my stories to be overlooked as white merely because it is convenient to read them as such. Where do these stories come from? I’ve already answered that question. They come from the same place that I come from.
Paige Clark’s She Is Haunted (Allen & Unwin) is out now.
Paige Clark is a Chinese/American/Australian writer, born and raised in Los Angeles. She is currently a graduate researcher at the University of Melbourne exploring the relationship between race, craft, and the teaching of creative writing.
(Imagery: Marcelle Bradbeer)