“So where are you from?” is usually the first thing strangers ask when they meet me. “Malvern” I would reply with a deliberate smirk. “No, I mean where are you really from?” they would insist, staring fixedly at my black hair and dark inscrutable eyes. At this point I would ask them to guess my place of birth and a merry game would follow. Thailand? Singapore? Japan? Indonesia? Laos? Over the years I’ve had every South Eastern Asian country named as my motherland. You see, because we have all black hair, we all apparently look the same and hence the confusion. This “State of Origins” game is almost as fun as asking strangers to work out how my first name is pronounced. The phonetic variations that could be twisted from a four-letter word is astonishing. Although many a time I wished I’d changed it by deed poll to something acceptably bland, I have resisted for fear of seeming ungrateful. It is after all, my name, a title my parents bestowed upon me and to wear another would be a churlish and ill-fitting gesture. Anyhow, as the conversation continues, my interviewer would invariably say with a dab of admiration mingled with a dash of condescension, “Hey your English is pretty good you know”. I have been in Australia for twenty one years now so fluent language skills are hardly a remarkable achievement. Yet even though I’m beginning to develop freckles across the bridge of my nose I am still asked whether I eat anything besides rice. This particular question had come from a charming, well-meaning couple who was borne with silver spoons in their mouths and so expected wooden chopsticks in mine. As I hastily reassured them of the breadth of my appetites they’d regarded me with gentle wonder, as though I were an exotic flower managing to grow in foreign soil. Perhaps I should have told them that my roots were planted not in Vietnam but in Australia, that it was the culture and people of this country that had nurtured me. Perhaps I should have told them of my partiality to burnt chops, fried onions and tomato sauce.

Unless I look in the mirror and unless I am reminded of it by loaded questions, it is easy to forget about my racial background. Arriving in Australia as a five-year-old, However the smell of fish sauce, the taste of a steaming bowl of pho, the media mentions of Pauline Hanson and of heroin deals in depressed suburbs all jerk me back to my past and remind me of who I am. Family members provide a surer confirmation of identity. A while ago, I visited the high rise commission flats in Richmond to see my uncle and aunt and their young daughter, Amy. On the way up in the elevator, I met a man leaning against a sagging mattress. “So what was it like when you moved here?” he asked expectantly and I cringed at his assumption that I belonged in this environment. The other two Asian girls in the tiny enclosure stared resolutely ahead. Having been fed suspicion along with breast milk, they ignored him and left silently on the tenth floor, moving with the briskness of wildebeests detecting movement in the foliage.

As the man looked over in my direction, I told him I didn’t live here and  he congratulated me on my luck. But I did live here once upon a time. Well, not here but why did it matter, these places were exactly the same. The pools of urine and alcohol, the scrawled obscenities on baby blue walls (the colour chosen perhaps, to lift morale), the shattered glass, the communal laundry, the pot plants that never got quite enough sunlight, the suicidal leaps into the cracks below.

This amiable mattress man was obviously a newcomer, evident not only from his possessions that filled up two-thirds of the elevator, but from his behaviour. He’d broken an unwritten rule and spoken out; tried to make eye contact. 

It just wasn’t done. Didn’t he know that the tenants here have shame in their eyes and avoided any unnecessary interaction with strangers? They didn’t want to live here. They had no choice. Without money and knowledge of the host language these  black heads have to wander about in the narrow parameters of society. 

the memories of war-bloodied Vietnam and of the journey over here are mere kaleidoscopic flashes. My parents have suffered from acute homesickness, but I have assimilated so well I feel like a banana  – yellow on the outside but white on the inside. 

Their only means of comfort would be to luxuriate in the familiar syllables of their neighbours’ tongue and to cluster about in ghettoised grocery shops and cheap vermicelli restaurants. To stave  off the crippling sense of loneliness and dislocation the Nguyens, Huynhs and Trans would have to seek camaraderie from those who had also made the journey over on leaky prawn trawlers.  And at night in their restless sleep they would dream of those they’d left behind. 

From the whirl of their sewing machines, they would dream of brick houses in suburbia; from the hunched over backs of their studying children, they would dream of future doctors,  lawyers and engineers.

My cousin Amy was conceived in Australia. Now, at only four years of age, she is already bilingual. As she plays and mumbles in a mixture of child talk and halfwords, I know she will straddle two cultures effortlessly. She will experience the shame of being the child of boat refugees, she will have to prove herself to those who begrudge her very existence, she will have to work triply hard to elude racist prejudices but she will succeed because she is a black head. And on the white face of society we are nothing if not stubborn.

Thuy On is a freelance writer and reviewer.