Cultural Purgatory
Why I Don’t Get Along with Other Asian Australians
By Clinton Chan
8 minute read
I’m going to be blunt because I don’t know how else to speak about this - I don’t really get along that well with other Asian Australians.
This probably sounds ludicrous as somebody who writes largely about the experiences of Asian Australians. It also reeks of internalised racism - I get it.
What I mean is that for much of my life living in Australia I have felt weirdly disconnected from international students and other 2nd or 3rd-generation Asian Australians. Naturally, I also don’t feel entirely at home amongst white Australians either.
I was having dinner with my parents several weeks back and I revealed the same sentiment to them, only for them to stare at me confused and ask “so what do you think you are then?”. I shrugged and just said bluntly, “Well I’m just me”.
It does sometimes sound lonely to be honest, to be stuck in this culture purgatory where there isn’t a particular identity or set of status values you can ascribe to. You can’t beat your chest in an almost nationalistic way and say “I am X identity because I do XYZ” or “I belong to this tribe”.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been out on my own. I wanted to share my experiences in the hope that maybe there are other people like me.
Growing up it often felt like my life was an oddity, like the Truman Show, but I was the only one watching it. Source: Unsplash
How this came to be - I struggle to stay friends with other Asians
I realised this for the first time in my life when I entered university and actually met lots of other Asian Australians - almost too many others. I went to the University of New South Wales (a very “Asian” university) and although I didn’t study Commerce/Business (surprise surprise!) I volunteered with lots of organisations which led me to befriend lots of Asian Australians.
For the first year or so it was almost a honeymoon period. For some of us we just clicked. Growing up I’d never really known any other Asian Australians. I grew up in a Cantonese neighbourhood but went to a fairly white/European primary school before going to a fancy private school that had less than 10% Asian representation, a good chunk of whom were international students who kept to themselves. I was used to being the minority and I was also used to code-switching to avoid sticking out for my perceived “Asianness”.
So when I found a community of other Asian Australians, it was a dream for a time. I didn’t have to explain why the lunch I brought to uni smelt funky, or why on certain days of the year I couldn’t hang out with my friends after 5pm. We also bonded over similar familial experiences and the pressures of parents wanting us to be high-achieving.
It is cringey, but hey it was fun while it lasted. For a time it was the highlight of university. Photo provided by author.
However, it wasn’t long before I felt something was amiss. Outside of growing up in somewhat similar circumstances, we didn’t actually have the same interests. As I grew older and developed my own personality and explored multi-faceted interests, I often diverged with them.
Though it may sound reductive, I was never really into things like karaoke, K-pop, or bubble tea, or hardstyle raves like many others were. But outside of these superficial interests I also felt that I approached life differently - I didn’t have much of a sense of filial piety at all and I had a different risk tolerance to most other Asian Australians, and was gawked at when I mentioned that I had white friends who I was close to.
Centralising identities
Of course all humans have different interests, and it would be extremely harmful to paint all Asian Australians the same way. But, what I was seeing was a performative centralisation and reaffirmation of what it meant to be Asian Australian. It’s not uncommon for migrant diaspora communities to not just intermingle, but to seek out a unique and discernible identity that might be different to the majority population around them.
For my Asian Australian uni friends this meant creating a near-homogenous group identity, and most importantly having close friends who were mostly Asian with similar cultural values. This performative group identity is obviously not absolute, but there is certainly a “locus” of behaviours or values that are explicitly or implicitly collated for the purposes of constructing this identity. The community itself then embodies and reinforces this central identity through self-actualisation and performing this identity by aligning their behaviours and sense of self with the group identity. For you social psychology nerds, this is called self-stereotyping and accentuation in “self-categorization theory”. Ultimately what that meant was that, if I was in the “ingroup” with other Asian Australians I was expected to hold most of the same interests and nigh-Confucian values - otherwise, I’d implicitly or explicitly be rendered in the outgroup.
It sure isn’t the only Asian Australian identity, but the one I speak about is so prominent even the New York Times wrote a piece on it.
Young Asian-Australians at the Sanctuary Hotel, a gathering place in Sydney for members of the “little boy” and “little girl” scene. Credit: David Maurice Smith for The New York Times
As with all group identities, where this is a locus, there is also an outer realm, an opposite identity. As I got older and quickly lost interest in going to Korean BBQ or hearing about careers in the “Big 4”, I realised that I was on the outside and was slowly set adrift. This coincided with the time that I came back from studying/working in China for almost 1.5 years, where I discovered that I also wasn’t very Chinese.
So there I was, an outsider to both my heritage and the diaspora community.
What if there is no “Asian Australian”?
These days, I try to have a diverse mix of friends. There are still plenty of Asian Australians I see on the reg, but I also try to keep fairly diverse company - after all Australia is diverse so why shouldn’t my friends reflect that?
I do still try and make an effort to interact with other Asian Australians and recently joined an Asian Australian community built around discussions of our unique experiences with mental health. Interestingly, during these interactions I certainly do connect with some members but not all, and often quickly find myself alienated again as I only share a small handful of the experiences or values of others. I don’t think I’m “above” anybody else at all, and I’m certainly trying to make a strong effort to stay connected to this community.
But what if my notion of “Asian Australian” is just a single subculture amongst the vastness of Asian Australians across all generations? What does it mean to be Asian after all? My guess is that I may have taken a fairly reductive view of the Asian Australian identity or worse still - conflated a misalignment of cultural values with a difference in socio-economic status, and my privileges as a straight Asian man. After all, my risk-taking behaviour and preferences for exploring other cultures and communities likely comes from the comfort and abundance in my upbringing.
All that I can say is, it’s likely all of the above. I have little doubt that most people’s identities are an intersectional smorgasbord much like my own. So it’s less a cultural purgatory and more a multiverse (how 2022) of different Asian diasporic sub identities, with each person taking up their own universe.
I am after all just my wear wacky self, and that’s ok too.
