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 BENJAMIN LAW tells JODY MACGREGOR about GROWING UP ASIAN IN AUSTRALIA and writing for the anthology of the same name.
Alice Pung’s award-winning and best-selling Cambodian-Chinese-Australian memoir, Unpolished Gem, was very different to the standard immigrant story and so is the new anthology she’s edited. Talking over Skype at a reading at the Avid Reader bookshop, she explains how different it is, beginning with the baseline culture-reference for everything in the 21st century: The Simpsons. Specifically, the episode where Lisa loses a speechwriting competition to an Asian boy who talks about his family arriving on a boat four weeks ago and now owning ten laundromats. At this point in the reading the computer fritzes and things have to go on without her, but the point has been made – that’s not the kind of story she wrote or the kind you’ll read in Growing Up Asian In Australia.
Instead, you’ll read pieces like those presented by three of the contributors at the same reading. Benjamin Law’s piece, called Tourism, explains with a good deal of humour what it was like going to theme parks with his Chinese-Australian family before and after his parents’ divorce. Playing up their Australian accents they would refuse to pose for photos for fear of being mistaken for embarrassing foreign tourists while they were enjoying Dreamworld more than is legal. “I love camping, I love being at one with nature, but fuck, give me a good rollercoaster any day. I’m on it,” Law says. His other contribution to the anthology is about a very different but no less personal subject. “It’s about manhood and how I have very little of it and how I reconciled myself to that. My brother grew up listening to Nirvana and I grew up listening to Mariah Carey.”
Growing Up Asian In Australia frequently takes an irreverent approach to its subject matter, dealing with serious issues but lightening them with a touch of the drollery that seems to come naturally when Australians of any kind talk about weighty matters. “It’s hard to try to be funny,” says Law. “I’m not sure if I always pull it off either. If you go through crap it’s my way of dealing; I don’t want to get too emotional so it’s always better to have a laugh or do an interpretive dance about it. If I see something really horrible or tragic sometimes my first reaction is to laugh.”
Another reading, by Mei Yen Chua, who is compiling a cheap food guide to Brisbane, comes in the form of an Asian-Australian menu with surprising dishes while Michelle Law’s reading is a personal reminiscence about being singled out at school for her hairless arms and Asian features. Readers who are paying attention will have spotted that two of the readers have the same surname. Benjamin Law explains.
“All these people I really admire, Asian-Australians that I admire, are in the book so it’s a real thrill. Also, not only am I in the book, it’s this incredible thing that my youngest sister’s in it and she was only 17 years old when she submitted her piece. At her age in an anthology published by I think one of the most respected publishers in Australia,” he crows.
Among the other writers sharing sections of Growing Up Asian In Australia are Quan Yeomans from Regurgitator, Caroline Tran from JJJ, children’s writer and artist Shaun Tan, fashion designer Jenny Kee, chef Kylie Kwong, director Tony Ayres and TV doctor Cindy Pan. None of their stories is about arriving on a leaky boat or founding an empire of laundromats and convenience stores.
Law freely admits however, that he and his family do fit some of the typical images of Asian-Australians. “My driving is really bad and if you screamed out at me, ‘Bad Asian driver!’ I wouldn’t take that as an insult, I would take that as an observation,” he says. “See, there are some things where me and my family really conform to stereotypes. We went to theme parks, we did pretty well academically, my sister played the violin, we have slanty eyes. It’s sort of hard to avoid. And we can’t swim.”
Is not being able to swim really an Asian characteristic? I missed that memo. “If you go to any state school swimming carnival you’ll see the Asians at the end of the lanes getting disqualified and losing. We’re more built for acrobatics. But on the other hand, my family isn’t that great at maths.”
As well as not being mathematical geniuses, Law’s family doesn’t fit the stereotypes you see on A Current Affair or Today Tonight in plenty of other ways. Confronting those stereotypes isn’t his main goal he says, but merely a side effect of writing honestly about his experiences.
“It’s not like I’ve got some manifesto, ‘Let’s subvert stereotypes!’ I also think that growing up with a lot of the other Asian-Australian or Chinese-Australian families that were around us or that we associated with, my family was still pretty different anyway for a lot of reasons. One reason is that my parents divorced and that’s still pretty rare for my parent’s generation – to divorce. That was unconventional and we were a pretty big family and I didn’t know a lot of families as big as ours. So even in everyday life it seems that we were subverting commonly accepted norms just by walking around and going about daily life. There were a few things in my family that don’t sync up to broader notions of what Asian is anyway, so I think in that way if I’m writing about my family it just happens by default that some stereotypes are going to get knocked over the head.”
When the Law family visits Japan for their next holiday, he says they’ll be doing the theme parks just like they did when he was growing up, only this time instead of Dreamworld it’ll be Mount Fuji and Tokyo DisneySea. “I’m sure there’s beautiful natural parks we could walk around but for some reason we’re drawn to these massive motherfucking rollercoasters,” he says. “Still a theme-park family.”
 GROWING UP ASIAN IN AUSTRALIA is published by Black Inc. and available from better bookstores, including Avid Reader in West End.
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