some of my earliest memories of australia were of western sydney. summer of 92/93. a democratic socialist party conference at the university of western sydney (i’ve noticed it’s now the wsu – western sydney uni). i had no idea who trotsky was, what was his beef with lenin, were they in different indie bands? so i spent three days reading lovecraft and crying into my journal (it had a picture of a sunset and a horse on it) in a darkened boarding house room (i closed all the curtains – it was blindingly bright outside), eating oranges i pilfered from the breakfast table (they were free, but it still felt like stealing).
i saw a wiji thukul performance during the arts night at the end of the conference, a performance art piece acted by himself, assisted by several young white activists, crawling in and out of oil drums with both ends cut out. considering the hearsay of how he was disappeared not more than five years later, these images still play as a chilling short horror flick in my head [ominous music playing].
we were co-living in a group house in dulwich hill along with several other leftist/ish indo activists, including the current director general of culture, hilmar farid, who still had his magnificent wavy glam metal mane then and seemed to be as popular with the ladies as tommy lee.
i escaped the daily seminar of reading 100 pages from lenin’s collected works by sneaking out to the summer hill pub to see local death metal bands. sadistik exekution played one day. the bouncer seemed unable to guess my age being an ageless azn boy so he just took the five buck note from me every time.
little did i know that this brief period in my life foreshadowed even more depressing years around a decade later of me as an inner westie.
sylvia nguyen, the anti-heroine of shirley le’s funny af funny ethnics (fr), is not an inner westie, she’s an out-and-out, proper, true blue?, westie from yagoona. i checked on google maps and the first aussie macca’s next to the hume highway mentioned as yagoona’s claim to fame in the novel is only an 18-minute drive from wsu/uws. i could’ve gotten a big mac and nuggies to go with my oranges.
the novel began with a dramatic soz, mea maxima culpa – sylvia confessing to her first-gen vietnamese immigrant mum me (with diacritic under the e) and dad ba that she was gonna drop law at uni (the already supposedly second-rate macquarie – “most students from slc [her selective school] ended up at the top unis like sydney uni or unsw”) to become a writer.
the scene straightaway brought my mind back to tracy lien’s all that’s left unsaid (okay, probably only because i’d just finished reading it before continuing my current contemporary aussie novels binge with funny ethnics), also a novel set in/about western sydney (lien’s set in cabramatta in the 90s) featuring a(n actual) heroine who also chooses a left-field profession for a “model minority” in australia (a journalist).
both main characters, sylvia in funny ethnics and ky in all that’s left unsaid, are even paired with the same type of contrasting, wilder, more slay bffls (sylvia is virginal and fears getting “dickmatised” and her best mate before the inevitable falling out/ghosting/getting canceled/blocked is fast-talking tammy, who studied fashion at TAFE while working part-time at bankstown’s professioNAIL (an artisanail!); ky is a model nerd and her bff is the heavily tattooed minnie who dropped out of highschool to join a cabra gang) – mean girls to their legally browns.
but in terms of the textacy you get from the prose and the complexity of each author’s positionality/pov – the different strategies le and lien took to weaponize their “own voice” storytelling – the two novels couldn’t be further apart from each other.
whereas all that’s left unsaid is written as a fast-paced plot-driven page-turner, in no-nonsense prose that borders on the hackneyed (the repeated metaphor of ky’s flashy rimless glasses suggesting she sees things that her community refuses to see is highkey cringe), undoubtedly with an eye for a possible future netflix adapt (this was my first impression early on, but i just checked and there’s an interview with lien on shondaland.com!), funny ethnics is rife with fantastic roflmao digressions (btw, afaik no one else has made the brilliant move to title all their novel chapters with internet acronyms? FML, SRSLY, IDC, GL, etc. – ROFL!) and seems to treat plot as more of an inconvenience than necessity. and i fucking love it.
in that first scene for example. some reviews quoted the following passage as an example of le’s funny (perhaps it’s part of the press release?): “i had an important announcement to make. earlier, i had cleared away the bowl of kiwi fruit and the napkin dispenser, as well as the matching cork coasters. just in case things became physical.” but for me the best part came right after when le went on one of her magnificent digressions telling the story of an aunt from france who visited her home and had to listen to an archaelogical lesson from ba on the origin story of his prized marble table (where sylvia’s confession was about to take place): “he spent thirty minutes explaining to her that the table was forty thousand years old and watched as she traced her fingers over the little crustaceans that had curled up and died in the slabs of beige stone, ‘c’est magnifique,’ she murmured.” c’est LMAO, i gagged.
another one of my favourite passages was when sylvia, stuck at home after dropping out of law, went on an expedition to “explore the hidden gems of western sydney” – the first stop “an aqueduct in greystones that looked like the entrance to a lord of the rings castle.” behind a block of public toilets off cumberland road she encountered joe, a “drop-kick” who identified as a “flâneur” and enlisted her help to pick magic mushrooms in a “shrooms shrub” and split the results 50/50. in this passage le went from realism to electric surrealism in a heartbeat, from rambo: first blood to rimbaud: 1873. “wet soil squelched beneath my fingertips. i inhaled, expecting to smell rain. instead i smelled raw meat. i opened my eyes, looked down and near my finger was a quivering mass of flesh marbled with chunks of fat. i stopped breathing. my brain. my brain had fallen out of my head. i patted the top of my forehead. hair on a skull. i traced a finger along my scalp. checking for stitches. [paragraph break] i’d read mary shelley’s frankenstein in high school, the only book i’d finished in those years. i had been fascinated by the monster, described as having ‘yellow skin scarcely covering muscles and arteries’, its hair ‘lustrous black’, brought to life only to be shunned by society.”
cleverly putting in a reference to shelley, lowkey comparing the fate of asians (“yellow skin”, “hair lustruous black”) in white australia with the fate of the monster (“shunned by society”) after having just summoned benjamin’s flâneur and stuck him in the Great Australian Bush, at the same time exposing an archetype of modernist malaise as just “a fancy word for bludger” but also displaying a tenderness for him, this average, basic joe (the flâneur’s actual name!) for boulevarding off a highway – a perfect mix of sincerity and artsiness i haven’t seen since, full disclosure, SRSLY, fugazi.
talking about fugazi offers me the perfect segue to my own “own voice”. sylvia and her westie friends detest (white, inner west) indie kids: “listening to triple j was like listening to a foreign radio station. obscure references to people with names like leonard cohen”. IJBOL. i’m brown, and i’ve lived in jakarta, indonesia, for the last 18 years, but i still remember richard kingsmill. i’ve got multiple copies of beautiful losers and songs of love and hate. i spent my teenage years in canberra watching indie films at electric shadows (salo and almodovar’s entire oeuvre up to 1999 were highlights); seeing fugazi, mo tucker, weezer at the anu bar; reading eliot, austen, cohen. my english teacher in highschool (narrabundah college) was fucking geoff page (respect to the dude tho, he once endured reading to a room of students stoned out of their minds during a theory of knowledge camp on the south coast) – i can’t think of a more perfect coconut than me.
here in jakarta i still speak half english, half indonesian at home and with friends, and run a spoken word night (since 2017) where most of the crowd/readers codeswitch as a rule (earning their pejorative moniker “jaksel” which today seems to stand for anything that screams “privilege!” – from speaking english to wearing head-to-toe masshiros (whites only please). and yet i often feel frustration whenever my white aussie friends (who were my surrogate family when i lived there – and i still love them – and who now live all over the world, though some have also been happy enough to grow roots in tuggeranong) fail to understand the extent of my third-world (mostly financial) precarity. just because i can post about my top 10 gbv albums on instagram doesn’t mean that i can just fly off to sri lanka next year to join them on the australian cricket team’s tour to celebrate 30 years of our friendship. SMH. yes i’m so white australian i even watch the cricket. i did go to the unsw like a model minority azn but i was there to fail a phd thesis on “the bradman myth” (true story).
i am surprised though, looking back on the very beginning of my writing “career” as a poet, to realise that the very first poem i’ve ever written properly, and by properly i meant once i found out about the real weight of (mainly white, english-speaking) poetic traditions bearing down on me, was a robert lowell pastiche set at badde manors, the famous vegetarian café on glebe point road, inner west ground zero, but one that was – this was my oblique confessional in the poem – questioning my place as a brown boy meddling in english poetry. i’ll quote (just some lines, the whole thing makes me gag, not in a good way):
Lowell would give her a name, grand and old,
like De Witt Clinton, Hoes, or Vanderpoel
Of strange origins and split-second force
hung heavy on history’s family tree.
The sound of morning, meaning still far-fetched,
begins here. The date on the wall, Roman,
smiles and nods its dark head: Lowell is dead.
“her” was the barista, also white. what am i doing surrounded by all this whiteness? SMH.
i sent off the poem to a “sydney urban poetry” contest organised by the new south wales writers’ centre (now writing nsw?), and was invited to a reading for being one of the top 5 poets. the reading was at the glebe library, my local, and i was the only brown poet there. when i walked off the stage i could hear an elderly (yes, white) lady telling her friend, under her breath but still loud enough for me to hear, “well, that was a bit dry, wasn’t it?”
the thing is, she was right. ROFLMAOZEDONG.
why didn’t write my poem in the ouyang yu tradition instead of lowell? because i didn’t know then there was already an azn-australian man writing angry poems about white australia that weaponized that whitest of literary trope – the irony – against itself. “that is an indonesian struggling with right diction”, says “The White Australian”, “a nameless guy in Asia”, “a literary editor” in white australia in yu’s The White Australian (Kunapipi, 20(2), 1998). 1998! i wrote the stupid lowell poem (real revised title) in 2000! FML.
but is my “own voice” the voice of someone like yu? lulz. in that poem, there’s a “chinese pretending to write in bad english”, maybe that’s yu being shady about himself, but hey, i really do struggle with my diction! i’m constantly dictmatised. i want to be funny like le, a perfect cross between lorrie moore’s punny drollness and intan febriani’s savage take-downs (now that’s someone with a strong own voice, pity she doesn’t write anymore).
on my recent morning walks around menteng, past the old home of suharto, the former dictator who was in the last throes of his rule when i was living down under, past many ugly mcmansions (suharto’s isn’t one, his was in the ’70s civil servant humblebrag style, no doubt deliberately chosen to enhance his farmer-boy-made-good father-of-development image), inhaling the sweetish, old sugar factory smell of polluted air – on which an aussie friend now traveling across continental europe (last stop: “fulfilled a lifelong dream to visit notre dame du haut by le corbusier in ronchamp, france. well-described by x as ‘y’s make-a-wish trip to disneyland.’” to be fair, another white aussie friend, one of those who chose to grow roots in canberra suburbia, cut the tall poppy down pronto: “a lecorbusier church – like worshipping at the old belco bus shelter.” WKWKWK) commented when i posted a photo of my morning walk on instagram: “love that weird Asian mega city pollution twilight”). ah sarcasm, the refuge of the hyper-educated!
during those walks i’ve also been listening to a lot of podcasts on contemporary asian-australian books and authors – nina wan, the aforementioned tracy lien (they were interviewed together in one), a live broadcast from the sydney writers fest featuring the spec-fic novelist grace chan, le’s stablemate at affirm press (btw, chan’s bio is “australian writer and psychiatrist”, a model minority for me if ever there was one!), a feature on the helen demidenko affair (remember her, née darville, now dale? now that’s someone who struggled with their own name let alone their “own voice”!), and so far two interviews with le herself that i’ve found. the second one was actually tacked on to the end of the abc book show’s “fakes and frauds” episode on the helen demidenko affair – was it in any way deliberate, why? – featuring an interviewer who i thought was more than a bit irritating, slyly suggesting that perhaps the readers would like to hear more about sylvia’s parents’ boat people stories when the whole point of funny ethnics was telling the story of the second generation of vietnamese refugees in australia (sylvia’s/le’s), not the first (ba’s and me’s with diacritic)! note the clever way le uses the mum’s name, me with the diacritic and the object pronoun me for sylvia – sometimes you have to do a double take, did she mean me or me with the diacritic?, to suggest, almost primally, the deep emotional connection and compassion between the two despite the generational gap. the abc interviewer’s question is like if an old bule expat asked me, after reading my novel set in the jaksel club scene – the vixxxens, the mr foxes, the duck downs – ”no, please, tell me more about zanzibar and tanamur.” SMDH.
in several of these podcasts, le spoke of a “coming to voice” – aka, in her case, finally finding her “own voice” in the company of other sydney westie poc writers at sweatshop, “a literacy movement based in western sydney which is devoted to empowering culturally and linguistically diverse communities through reading, writing and citical thinking”, whose founding director michael mohammed ahmad wrote the lebs, the first of these sydney westie novels i read (sometime before pando) which kicked off my slow binge.
i wish sweatshop had existed when i was still living in sydney in mid-2000s – when i wrote that first poem whose voice was colonized by lowell, the whitest, born with the silverest of a silver spoon among the confessional poets. SMH. if there was something like sweatshop back then, perhaps i would not have felt so alone or confused, disconnected. i knew even in that très coconut poem that i was questioning my place not only in white australia but also in the western english-speaking poetry traditions – but the question manifested itself only vaguely through the subconscious and the alchemic magic of poetry, suddenly it was there at the end of the poem, but i didn’t know how it got there, or what exactly it (i) was asking or demanding. i felt there was something wrong with me, or the situation i was finding myself in – not realising that it was a sign instead of being wrong that i was actually on the right track to find my own voice even if i was still in the very beginning of the journey.
on le’s instagram there’s a poster of a session she appeared in at the latest brisbane writers fest, captioned “coming of rage”. IMHO though funny not quite the perfect made-up genre for funny ethnics. i’ve been tearing my hair out trying to find a working pun of my own for it, but so far no go. le’s novel is more of a comic, parodic, anti-, bildungsroman. if sylvia and tammy were dudes, i’d have my pun and call it a bildungsbromance. on the evidence of this debut novel, le is already a masterful comic author, and in that regard (only) she shares more with evelyn waugh or lorrie moore than with, say, michael mohammed ahmad. the combo of comedy and bildungsroman is well established. comedy can be savage on the genre’s anxiety about the social, professional, and romantic standing of its heroes/heroines, and le somehow manages to combine savagery with empathic irony in funny ethnics, presenting like a lovechild of bianca del rio and jinx monsoon. for example, when she went on full-on parodic mode to tear the “native speaker english tutor” stereotype to pieces by creating the jabba the fat bastard-like character of “Sir” – “The stench engulfed us and so did the humidity. The small room was crammed with at least fifty Viet children… In the middle… sat a white man with yellow-white hair slicked back and fluffy white hairs trailing down his jowls, sticking out of his ears and visible from under his vulture-beaked nose. He was the source of the smell.” – she then did an almost complete u-turn, lowkey praising him for teaching the kids prosody via poe’s poetry and his roasting of teacher’s pet/”vocaburglar” joey pham: “… MY BOY. BIG WORDS DON’T EQUAL BIG MEANINGS. BEING CLEAR AND HAVING INTERESTING IDEA IS WHAT MATTERS.” le never guns for “white tears and white laughs“, but she doesn’t go for easy brown(ie) points either. funny ethnics is morally complex, like all good comedies are.
so when le said in the helen demidenko podcast that “the spectrum of humour and laughter is just so wide, and i’ve tried to explore that in funny ethnics where we get all types of laughter, from a snicker to a deep, rich laughter straight from the belly”, for once she wasn’t joking. SRSLY.
so yeah, if only sweatshop – perhaps i could’ve completed my coming to voice years ago instead of still struggling in my middle age with a slow af crawling to voice. FML.
Divagyrations 