Chinese-Australian history predates the first fleet – and my family helped me find out how

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Growing up in Queensland as ABCs (Australian-born Chinese), my siblings and I would get our backs up whenever strangers complimented us on our English – which was often. “Why wouldn’t I be fluent?” I’d think, fuming. “I was born in Nambour.” It didn’t matter: white Australians around us seemed as impressed by our English, as much as our Hong Kong relatives pitied our butchered Cantonese.To get more chinese news in english, you can visit shine news official website.

Yet I have an admission. Whenever I saw or encountered other Chinese-Australians speaking fluent English myself, my jaw would hang in disbelief. Seeing Chinese-Australians – or any Asian-Australians, really – on TV was rare in the 1980s and 1990s. But when people like Annette Shun Wah presented on SBS, Elizabeth Chong showed Bert Newton how to stuff a chicken with spring onions, or Dr Cindy Pan discussed prophylactics on Sex/Life – and with Australian accents, like mine! – my brain couldn’t process it. Weren’t my family the only ones?

Perhaps. As MP Tim Watts writes in his forthcoming book on Chinese-Australian relations The Golden Country, the late 1980s – a decade after the formal abolition of the White Australia policy – saw less than 3% of the Australian population claiming Asian heritage. What compounded being outnumbered for me was growing up in a particularly monocultural part of Australia. I could count the number of other non-white students in my year level on a single hand. I had no idea how there could be other Chinese-Australians out there, let alone how some families – like Shun Wah’s and Chong’s – could trace their lineage in Australia back several generations.

Most of that confusion stemmed from how ignorant I was of the history of the Chinese in Australia. In high school history classes, teachers might have mentioned the Chinese presence during the Gold Rush and touched on the Tiananmen Square massacre. Nothing else even began to explain how Mandarin become Australia’s most spoken language after English, and Cantonese our third-most. Or how “Chinatowns” came to exist in most capital cities, and Chinese restaurants featured in the main street of almost every regional town. Or how we got to where we are now: a nation that has roughly 1.2 million Australians with Chinese heritage, and – more broadly – one in 10 Australians with Asian ancestry. That’s roughly proportionate to the percentage of African-Americans in the United States.

In my family, we had our own mysteries. No one can ever fully comprehend the lives and struggles of their ancestors, but when you’re the child of migrants, your forebears may as well have come from the moon. My goong goong (maternal grandfather) was the son of a concubine to a merchant, survived the Sino-Japanese war and escaped civil war and poverty to arrive in Malaysia. My ma ma (paternal grandmother) lived through the same wars, lost siblings during escapes and never learned to speak English in the years she lived Australia. It’s not straightforward interviewing my grandmother to collect those stories. It’s not as though I can just hop onto Ancestry.com and easily trace my roots.

So earlier this year, a small crew – led by documentary writer and director Alex Barry – collaborated with my family to remedy this. We shot a major two-part documentary for the ABC that fills in the blanks of my family story. At the same time, we also discovered how Chinese-Australian history isn’t adjacent – or a sidenote – to Australian history, but been at its core for centuries, well before white arrival. It took me – a tertiary-educated Chinese-Australian – travelling between remote Eastern Arnhem land to the Chinese megalopolises of Shanghai and Guangzhou, to fully comprehend this.