Christina Lee

The Virtues of Unbelonging

Christina Lee

You speak Hokkien with an Australian accent says the friend with passable Mandarin and perfected Singlish my face turns a shade of embarrassment to overseas relatives, my English is like words spoken through a mouth full of potatoes

a man once told me your Aussie accent is so thick my lungs ballooned, diaphragm rhythm stuttered an involuntary, wordless response to the bloke from Queensland

in 1977 our family journeyed across the Indian Ocean carried on the metal wings of a silver phoenix moments after touchdown on the tarmac jet-black hair, high cheekbones and yellow skin would be touched by another sun

dressed in neat and tidy clothes the small children were well-behaved and quiet hard-working parents would sweep floors, clean grease from train motors and drive forklifts we’ll prove we deserve to belong here

we are no longer a yellow peril, they said for this new home, pieces of paper were exchanged renouncing golden lions and tigers for new totems an upright marsupial, a flightless bird but where are you really from? they would still ask us

hey Jackie Chan! hey China-man! do you know kung fu? call me Bruce, my father jokes but really, he would prefer Cliff or Elvis and a jukebox over a yellow jumpsuit

in an album with flimsy film and adhesive cardboard are black-and-white photographs the sort where everyone gazes into the distance a slight upturn in the corner of their mouths here, my father is Chinese Elvis Presley

hair meticulously sculpted with Brylcreem slicked into a quiff that is one part Teddy Boy, one part curry puff he sings about blue suede shoes and a hound dog ends with Majulah Singapura

The Seamless Tomb (Wearing An Iron Yoke That Has No Hole), 2017, inkjet print, ink, fire, Private Collection, Sydney, courtesy Annette Larkin Fine Art, Sydney. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

I once cosplayed a white woman the blonde one from Bananarama for a local lip sync contest a borrowed wig, the shape of roadkill, was abandoned the ruse would never have worked any way

years later I cosplay an Asian woman in a heavy, embroidered silk robe and satin headdress a regal pose, an unsmiling expression behold the Empress Dowager, or a Manchu noblewoman I try channelling ancestral spirits

but even in my mother’s homeland the photographer’s camera captures a foreigner in a costume that does not look quite right a Qing Dynasty knock-off as obvious as the Rolexes sold on dusty kerbsides

hey Charlie Chan! hey Mulan! do you know kung fu? do you eat cats and dogs?

in school lunchboxes, my mother packed whitebread sandwiches filled with pressed chicken and sliced peaches a staple lost in translation the children with rounded eyes saw exoticism we traded our novelty for their Vegemite sandwiches

your Chinese is so bad, my younger brother laughs yours is even worse! … but my French is getting better but I’ll take congee over cuisses de grenouilles any day we will ask our mother for recipes that taste like nothing found in chop-socky restaurants, and let her correct our pronunciation

hey Michelle Yeoh! hey Shang-Chi!

I put on a shirt that has now become threadbare a bandana-wearing panda proclaims, I KNOW KUNG FU! (and 15 other Chinese words) one part tongue-in-cheek, two parts truth.

Author’s note My poem, The Virtues of Unbelonging, was inspired by two artworks by Lindy Lee: The Seamless Tomb (Wearing an Iron Yoke That Has No Hole) (2017) and the video accompanying the exhibition (Lindy Lee 2020 documentary, duration 30min, Director: Jean-Pierre Chabrol, Produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia). The Seamless Tomb is a photographic work that shows Lee’s pregnant mother with family members, just before her husband steps on a boat bound for Australia when the ‘White Australia’ policy was in effect. I thought of my own family’s journey (my parents and their two young daughters) from Christmas Island, to Singapore, and then to Australia; and our immigrant experiences. Even after more than four decades of calling this country ‘home’, our place in Australian society continues to be questioned, our belonging supposedly elsewhere (‘but where are you really from?’). This speaks to assumptions of what constitutes Australian-ness, and the negotiative practices of diasporic communities to locate themselves in (between) places and cultures. In the second artwork (video), Lee refers to the sense of ‘unbelonging’ she felt as an Asian woman growing up in the West, but also how liminal spaces could be revelatory sites for self-exploration and growth. This idea was explored in The Virtues of Unbelonging, where moments of disjunction, discomfort and questioned legitimacy are transformed through acknowledgement, change and quiet empowerment; where the seamless tomb of unbelonging itself becomes expansive.

Christina Lee is a Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at Curtin University. Her areas of research include cultural memory, spaces of spectrality and imagination, fandom and popular culture. Christina’s latest book is a co-edited anthology called Living with Precariousness (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming).

Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, [left to right] Elixir and Boundless and Inexplicable, both 2020-2021, ink and rain on paper, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore; The Seamless Tomb (Wearing An Iron Yoke That Has No Hole), 2017, inkjet print, ink, fire, Private Collection, Sydney, courtesy Annette Larkin Fine Art, Sydney. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.