Dear John

When I was an international student in Bathurst, New South Wales twenty years ago my Intercultural lecturer Mr Eric Loo assigned us to ask an Australian ten things they knew about another culture.

My chosen candidate, X, worked in the media and had a Chinese friend whom he’d known since school. When I asked X to list ten things associated with his friend’s culture, he couldn’t think of one.

“What about chopsticks?” I asked.

“That goes without saying,” he replied.

“But you didn’t say it.”

X said he hadn’t thought of chopsticks because his friend was more ‘Aussie’ than Chinese. His friend had changed his name to ‘John’; drank beer; ate meat pies; watched footy, spoke English, and he used a knife and fork not chopsticks.

When people talk in favour of assimilation in Australia, they want everyone who arrives from 200-plus countries to disappear into the dominant Anglo culture. Strangely this is not a urge that Anglo-people apparently feel in reverse.

When the English arrived in Botany Bay in the 1700s, they didn’t bother blending in with the 300-plus Aboriginal cultures in Australia at the time. Didn’t learn the ways of the Goorawal and Gweagal people; make a meal of witchetty grubs or walk around in climate-appropriate clothing.

No they clung to their crinolines, brought rabbits, foxes and horses for leisure and transport; and tried to grow corn on an ancient Aboriginal initiation site without learning about existing traditions. In fact they did their best to nullify existing cultures in ways that are detailed in insightful documentaries like the ‘First Australians’ shown on SBS a couple of years ago.

While the English cling to all things familiar that remind them of their home in a strange environment (beer, meat pies, rugby and the language of English-which goes without saying), apparently they lack the generosity of spirit to allow others to enjoy the same comfort. Why that is, I’ve no idea.

I do know that when I lived in the UAE, Jumeirah in Dubai was known as a British expatriate enclave where you couldn’t wander in without an invitation to visit (security wanted to know who you were going to see). The rest of us congregated in areas where we could afford the rent.

Of course, it’s understandable that when you go to a strange country, you’d like to surround yourself with people who can buffer you a bit from extreme culture shock. And nowadays, most of us don't travel for adventure, we’re do so for a greater sense of security; with that comes the need for familiarity. But sticking to your own kind to the point of being ignorant of everyone else is boring, limiting and sometimes offensive.

In another intercultural assignment, I spoke about a lack of diversity in the Australian media, why teaching Australian school children to speak French, German and Italian instead of Japanese, Indonesian and Mandarin/Cantonese was keeping this country a perpetual Euro-zone (in the media at least); why we rarely saw people from non-English speaking-backgrounds featured in the news or even giving the news.

One of my classmates replied that it was difficult communicating with people who didn’t speak English. When I asked the speaker if he didn’t bother because he thought non-English speakers wouldn't have an opinion worth sharing, he didn’t reply.

Even more telling was when a trainer from a major Australian newspaper gave a talk on what he saw as essential requirements for new cadets. He focused on grammar and spelling but couldn’t understand why it would be offensive to describe a person with jaundice as ‘looking Chinese’. (That description was in print).

When I migrated to Australia ten years ago, one of my first jobs was in a call centre that had a list of employees who spoke a language other than English as well as access to an Interpreter service. Yet often it only took a little patience to bridge language barriers. My job involved taking car registration numbers (aka licence plate numbers) over the phone. Once I got a call from an Arabic-speaking customer and we had a great time figuring out that ‘P’ wasn’t ‘B’. When I repeated his rego number back to him as ‘A’ for ‘Ahmed’, he wanted to know if I was Egyptian. He made my day. Another time, an Anglo-Australian thanked me for opening a door, by saying ‘iss-thu-thi’ which means ‘thank you’ in Sinhalese (my language), he made my day too.

If media organisations employ people who speak only English and who lack the understanding or inclination to understand anyone else – well, that would explain why we see mostly Europeans on television (except for SBS and occasionally ABC) and hear a limited world view.

On a train ride home one night, several of my fellow commuters got very offended by an Anglo-Australian man asking for signatures on a petition, all except for an African man who said ‘if you don’t want to sign, don’t sign but don’t stop him from doing what he thinks is right’.  I closed my library book wanting to hear more from that man, but he stopped speaking when faced with a phalanx of sour expressions.

Perhaps it would help to understand multiculturalism by comparing it to opinions. We are people with different opinions. Any country that calls itself a democracy should encourage diversity in thinking, speaking, dressing and living, along with the maturity to express these differences in non-combative ways.

I don’t want to be you. And I don’t want you to be me. After all imitation maybe the most sincere form of flattery to the person being imitated, not the person doing the imitating. That person just comes across as a spineless twit without an original thought, and why should anyone be expected to waste a perfectly good brain that way?