The Yellow Lady
In an article headlined ‘Government Blocks Migrant Spouse Scam’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 4 August 1992), a senior official of the Department of Immigration refers to ‘suggestions that some people were rorting the system’ through ‘a lucrative “sham marriage” racket involving Chinese students that is allowing a stream of Chinese to bypass the immigration queue to settle in Australia’. Marriages are brokered in Hong Kong, indicates the official, adding that ‘it is not difficult for mainland Chinese to get to Hong Kong via Shanghai’. Then Minister for Immigration, Gerry Hand, is cited as saying: ‘If chain migration was allowed to continue, the original 17,000 Chinese might increase to 300,000 by the turn of the century.’ It is the Government’s intention, the minister adds, to allow the sponsorship of dependents only ‘on the basis of a genuine and continuing relationship between the husband and wife’.
Let’s try to look at what’s going on here from a Chinese point of view. From 1986 the Australian government, as part of its policy to ‘export’ education services, made it possible for Chinese students to pay their tuition fees and be granted a visa to study in Australia for a few months. Participants in the scheme were actively sought, and Australian administrators were caught off guard by the numbers in a position to take advantage of the offer. For many Chinese it looked like a golden opportunity. Once they got to Australia their period of ‘study-sojourn’ (liuxue – the open-ended Chinese term for the process) might extend to some years of profitable personal and professional development, leading perhaps to permanent residency. Come 4 June 1989 and the Tiananmen Square massacre, China seemed more than ever a place to stay away from, and the Australian government, responding to extraordinary circumstances, made possible a four-year visa extension. Student fees no longer needed to be paid, but it was unclear what would happen at the end of the period of grace. Flailing around trying to reconcile the prime minister’s compassionate gesture with the government’s determination to keep immigration policy, like a sacred virgin, ‘intact’, the Immigration Department indicated one avenue: students could apply for refugee status. Some Chinese have strong cases for refugee status. Others took it as the chief administrative means offered to extend their stay. Cynical perhaps, but hardly a surprising product of a society where cynical manipulation of bureaucratic edicts is a way of life. (China, I mean.) The only real alternative is to establish a marriage-type relationship of convenience with an Australian. Naturally a lot of marriages took place – again hardly surprising in a society where the mores of the film Raise the Red Lantern are not far away, where people routinely marry for pragmatic motives, such as to get a permit to move to the city, or a house to live in.
Patterns of behaviour that may seem strange can be quite rational when explained in context. The report in the Herald subtly demonises these Chinese students, using misinformation, innuendo and racist cliché, to make their behaviour seem threatening and un-Australian. The ‘stream’ risks become a ‘flood’ or a ‘tide’, as they show contempt for that very British institution of the queue – an image of a long line of virtuous sheep waiting for their chance to go through the straight gate into heaven. It is not true that Chinese can get to Hong Kong more easily from Shanghai than from anywhere else, but the mention of Shanghai, teeming and sinful, adds an extra nuance. The hint that these ‘spouses’ are selling themselves is set off by the passing glance at the ‘genuine and continuing relationship between husband and wife’ – the norm in our society? And having sold themselves, there is no end of it, if the astonishing feat of turning 17,000 people into 300,000 in eight years is to be achieved. Only a Chinese-proof fence will stop them!
The SMH article is mild by today’s standards. The Immigration Department’s position is motivated less by racism than the determination to win an interdepartmental dog fight. It was the Department of Education, after all, seduced by dollar signs, that invited these Chinese here in the first place. Nevertheless, writer-diplomat Alison Broinowski must have enjoyed this press report, since it so nicely supports her claim that our old attitudinal problems with Asia are as ineradicable as feral fauna. Part of The Yellow Lady (1992), Broinowski’s book surveying Asian influences in and through the arts in Australia, touches on stereotypes perpetuated in the mass media, popular culture and everyday life. Cartoons are among her most fertile sources of racist caricature, playing on Australian fears of Asian takeover that go back well into the nineteenth century. She reproduces an astonishing example from the Weekend Australian in 1989, showing a cheerful, beer-drinking Australian worker mutating into a bent, bow-legged, laptop-toting coolie. The accompanying feature is entitled: ‘The Age of Asia … and how to survive it.’
Literally hundreds of Australian artists, thinkers and public figures zip past in the pages of The Yellow Lady as the author throws the widest possible net, covering all the art forms, all of Asia and the Pacific, all of Australian white history and some before, from stock images in the press to esoteric allusions in specialised practice, from The Mikado to Richard Meale’s Javanese gamelan-inspired compositions. Compressed from an evidently much longer manuscript, it provides an invaluable compilation of references, exhausting if not quite exhaustive. Subtitled Australian impressions of Asia, Broinowski’s survey is tilted towards how Australians have approached and construed Asia (as opposed to assessing actual Asian contributions to Australia, if a distinction can be made). Artists’ representations are taken to mirror the attitudes, fantasies and prejudices of the society as a whole. Broinowski investigates images, projections and caricatures, in an attempt to chart and account for what the author sees as Australia’s inadequately developed relationships with Asia. Stopping just short of an indictment of racism, Broinowski finds evidence of a blinkered Eurocentrism that has not only blinded Australians to Asia, but also to where our own advantage lies. Delving deeper into this self-defeating national defensiveness, Broinowski finds archetypes in the (white male) psyche that may explain the peculiar handling and mishandling of (yellow female) Asia.
The work of cultural materialists on postcolonialism and Orientalism help the reader get a handle on these slippery topics, but I suspect Broinowski is too much of an historian to want to fly off into realms of cultural theory. Her book is organised chronologically, charting the major phases and events that have shaped and reflected Australia’s involvement with the peoples and places to our north: the gold rush, turn-of-the-century japanisme, White Australia, the war with Japan, Chinese communism, the Vietnam war, the hippie trail, Zen, sex travel, refugees, real estate. The conclusion she draws is only partly of progress, maturation and sophistication. The dominant impression remains one of recurrent motifs, prejudices perpetuated, fantasies and bogeys reconstituted, wheels endlessly re-invented.
Broinowski reinforces the effect by overlaying on her mass of material a secondary pattern of organisation, where artists are grouped by attitude. So we have the Expatriate Shift, where an artist goes native and adopts the superior foreign viewpoint from which to judge the society back home. Or the Butterfly Phenomenon, where the Yellow Lady is exploited for erotic freedom-without-responsibility in a never-never zone of Illicit Space. Such generalisations tend to have a levelling effect on the more finely tuned engagements with one or other dimension of Asia in the work of pioneering individuals, such as artists Margaret Preston and Ian Fairweather.
Yet the mass of Broinowski’s examples shows that, if Australia has not managed its relationships with Asia as well as it might, nor understood the creative and other benefits Asia can offer in developing a distinctive Australian culture, it is certainly not for want of trying. There has been a succession of what the author calls ‘bridging people’. If there is to be a space for Asian cultural presence, it means working around the cultural and other barriers, and that depends on those who make the connections. In the case of China, they can be Chinese or non-Chinese, or a combination of both, and often they work in couplings, or even chains of several links. It may be less a matter of connecting with China, than of adapting what is available to meet the need for a sense of China. The cultural product that eventuates is inseparable from the contingencies of human links, networks of opportunity and mutual help, giving us a do-it-yourself China, constructed by, with and for people here, with a home-made actuality. It may not have much to do with China with a capital C.
The most stunning example of this process in recent times is Wild Swans, a miracle of composite composition, of bridging. It is not an Australian book, but it has been more successful here than anywhere else. Jung Chang took hours of her mother’s recollections, translated them into English, added the impetus of her own personal story, worked with her husband, historian Jon Halliday, to create an historical, moral and psychological framework that would give Western readers their bearings, and with the editor to produce an unputdownable read, a book that for millions of people has brought a new expression to the Chinese mask. China, once again, as woman.
The Yellow Lady ends with a recommendation: ‘It is clear that until Asia occupies a place equal to that of the West in Australian minds, the nation’s pursuit of its interests will remain distorted. If Australia’s identity and self-image are to change, they must therefore do so in a way that locates Australia in the Asia-Pacific hemisphere.’ Once again Asia is being constructed to serve domestic political ends. As past experience shows, this is dangerous territory. If it works, the result could be an epoch-making realignment of the society that exists on this land mass, making for survival, vigour and a new synthesis of cultures and environment. If it goes wrong, there will be a backlash, as Asia is consigned to the too-hard basket, leading to I-told-you-so indifference, or worse, resentment, hostility, and the re-inscription of non-negotiable cultural exclusiveness as a factor defining our nationalism. As Foreign Minister Gareth Evans noted in a recent address in Bangkok, ‘The product of generations of history … cannot be rapidly changed’. He added, nonetheless, that ‘a very rapid evolution in recent years’ seems to be occurring in attitudes towards Asian societies.
It is difficult to talk about racial and ethnic attitudes in Australia objectively. The violence and degradation inflicted on the Aboriginal peoples cast a shadow over subsequent attempts at demographic diversity, including migration programs that have, through good luck or good management, worked out well by most accounts. ‘All Australians are boat people’, as Broinowski puts it. But the history of Australian settlement reminds us at every turn how racism and good intentions can go hand in hand. The new public construction of Asia is a positive one, but what is it based on?
‘Let’s avoid using the words “Asia” and “Asians” wherever possible,’ suggests Professor Jamie Mackie of the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, as a first step towards clearing our heads about the countries in the region. He is right, of course. No person recognises themselves primarily as Asian. The first time they have come across the concept, usually, is in encountering the world as divided up by bureaucrats. In Chinese, for instance, a seldom-used character is taken over, in a non-natural way, to translate the Western geographical label. It has the same sort of relevance as ‘Oceania’ does when applied to Australia. Only the Chinese would edit official anthologies of Oceanian Literature, mixing Peter Goldsworthy with Francis Tekonnang from Kiribati. It is a convenient categorisation, like Asia, based on lines drawn across a map, and that’s about all. In the same way, it is hard to imagine any policy or approach this side of fantasy that could apply with equal sense to any two Asian countries. South Korea and Bangladesh don’t have much in common, save that both are east of Suez. A favour done to Cambodia becomes laughable if offered to Japan.
It was a notion of aiding overseas development that helped sell ‘export’ of education to Chinese students. The assumption was that, like the Colombo plan students a quarter of a century ago, the takers would go patriotically home at the end of their courses. It was also a spirit of fairness that originally did not exclude China from the markets for Australia’s export education industry. Such fairness, designed to maintain a globally non-discriminatory immigration policy, rested on the tacit assumption that very few people from China would be able to lay their hands on sufficient funds to cover study abroad, and that Chinese students therefore would not present a serious ‘visa overstay’ problem. The emergence of so many Chinese applicants able to comply with Australia’s financial and other requirements came as a surprise. More accurate information about the economic circumstances, attitudes and aspirations of the relevant strata of Chinese society at the time might have been sought to balance the prejudice that, for economic and political reasons, China simply did not count as a market for export of Australian educational services – which proved to be a product Chinese bought for their own reasons. Another kind of humanitarian impulse took over in the offer of sanctuary post-Tiananmen. Extending entry permits to family members showed a further impulse to do the decent thing. The problem is that such selective humanitarianism breeds resentment in others who are not accorded the same treatment – for example, asylum seekers from Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Lebanon. Clear-eyed pragmatism is a better way, where we know what we’re doing. The Immigration Department has hired hundreds of extra staff for the elaborate process of trying to separate the sheep from the goats among Chinese applications. The Chinese students should be permitted to stay in Australia because they are here as a consequence of an exceptional series of Australian policy bungles and it is too expensive to do anything else with them.
I emphasise the issue of the Chinese students because the advent of a significant cadre of mostly educated, enterprising young mainland Chinese established in Australia is a real social change that has come about inadvertently, through good intentions and good will run amok. It will be interesting to watch how, as individuals, they contribute to Australia’s involvement with Asia.
Australia’s preoccupation with the monolithic diplomatic entity known as the People’s Republic of China has for too long hindered appreciation of the complexities concealed within the term China. Peking, Shanghai, Canton, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, the Indo-Chinese, Cabramatta – all, in different ways, are and are not China. It no longer makes sense to speak, for example, of artistic exchanges with China without specifying who you are talking about. Once every Chinese was expected to be a Mao-suited comrade working for the motherland. Now no one is. They’re each on their individual long marches and with luck they’ll get where they want to go in their own way. Part of the ‘Asian thrust’ involves making Asia more accessible. At best this is a matter of finding points of affinity and contact that make interaction work. At worst, accessibility, like misconstrued relevance, encourages simplification and superficiality.
Alison Broinowski has introduced us to the Yellow Lady. We know now that she prefers to drink green tea, with neither milk nor sugar. Next time we should be ready to meet some more particular human beings … Acehnese, native-born Taiwanese, Hong Kong Indian, Dayak, Khmer Rouge and Karen. But they won’t all fit in one book.
1993