["A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people ... okay -- the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night." Andrew Marr, BBC.
Not so much angry, as angsty. And thankfully not in my mother's basement. But ok, I'll cop to late night drunken ranting...]
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about being comfortable in my own skin. A kind of side-effect of the various upheavals of a fairly critical theory heavy undergraduate degree was the tendency to problematise everything, even, and especially, my own sense of self. But I am coming to realise that at some point, if only for my own mental health, the deconstructing has to give way to something positive. The process of questioning every aspect of my life must be followed by a process of reclaiming those aspects that are redeemable.
Listening to Gary Foley, Nazeem Hussain and Hoa Pham talking on the Token Effnik panel at TiNA about ethnic representations on television, I was struck by how often they referred to their own ‘community’. In their cases, the communities to which they belonged first were the Indigenous, Islamic and Vietnamese communities, respectively. That sense of an ethnic identity is something I’ve not been comfortable with ever since I become aware of myself as ethnically different from my friends. Ever since dropping out of Viet school after less than a year during which I failed to make any Vietnamese friends, I’ve consciously shunned specifically Vietnamese or Asian social circles. Instead my circle of friends has always been overwhelmingly white. Indeed, the things I tend to be interested in – literature, sound art, critical theory – have tended to be dominated by whites. Somewhere along the way I began enjoying my point of difference, neither white nor yellow, but somewhere in the excluded middle – variously described as the ‘hip’, ‘cool’ or just ‘whitey’ Asian guy.
But that point of difference also leaves me isolated in ways that I didn’t think those panelists would feel. For the first time, I began to see a way around a kind of self-imposed ethnic segregation – which was always how I saw the ‘Asian group’ at school – to a healthy sense of ethnic identity which is not only something to be proud of in and of itself, but which opens up an artistically fruitful heritage I’d been reticent to glean up til now.
That was probably reflected in my attitude to ‘ethnic literature’, and my not-so-ironic deprecation of Asian-Australian authorship. But the truth is, seeing and reading people like Benjamin Law, Alice Pung and Nam Le offers me a model of being ethnic, of being Asian, in what I had always instinctively felt was a white middle class environment.
A rather different problem presented itself when I began to think about ‘reclaiming’ – or more accurately, being comfortable with – my masculinity. And in the interests of being frank, let’s be clear that it is a middle-class, every-opportunity-in-life-has-been-presented-to-me kind of masculinity. How do you speak from a position of privilege? What’s becoming clear is that silence is not a solution – neither ethically nor for my own mental health. But weighing in on topics such as feminism or Indigenous rights as an inner city, middle-class male can seem, at worst, like nothing more than a sort of intellectual imperialism – I’m effectively gagging those I purportedly speak for. And whilst I know that positioning myself as an ally to oppressed and marginalised groups is important and useful it can be very difficult to shake off the nagging question, why me? Why my middle-class male voice amongst a sea of other, identical voices?
Maybe it comes back to that idea of community – who am I writing for anyway? Sometimes a particular story will be pitched at a male audience, or a middle-class audience, and maybe that’s ok. These are, for better or for worse, tags that will always follow me around – and lately, they’d begun to feel suffocating. I started second guessing every sentence, every sentiment – writing and perhaps even living in a kind of bland zone of exclusion, shying away from my Vietnamese-ness, my masculinity, my middle-class roots, but unable to fully appropriate or embrace whiteness or femininity or the working class. Not that I want to move towards some kind of reductionist ‘revival’ or originalism – but hopefully by recognising and accepting that those tags are in some valid way descriptive of me, but not definitive, then I can start to open up that zone of exclusion and play around a bit. Somewhere in there, between yellowness and whiteness, between masculine and feminine, between my middle-class intellectualism and my honest appreciation of certain working class values – is a space from which I can begin to write again.
