and now, a word on racism from a chinky gook from commie land

On Australia Day, I spent the day under a beautiful mango tree with some friends, eating barbecued meat and drinking beer. I wore my Big Day Out shirt from last year (which has a stylised Australian Coat of Arms on the front) and we listened to Triple J's Hottest 100.

Days before, I had an infuriating conversation with a patron at the pub. He demanded to know where I was from,and whether I "loved Australia."

I have this conversation every so often with some deluded old fart who is convinced that I am a dirty, slanty-eyed illegal immigrant who has just walked straight off the boat and taking the jobs of ordinary, hard working Aussie battlers, blah blah blah. To this day I'm unsure as to what they think they'll achieve by having this conversation.


Herro herro dis is Shitty Wok, you want some Shitty Chicken?

Despite the fact that I am an Australian citizen and can speak English just fine (except when inebriated), this old dude just did not get it. Our exchange ended with me mishearing what he said, his triumphant juvenile mockery of my alleged lack of English skills and myself promptly tipping his beer down the sink.

Now for the twist. You'd think this would be an entry whinging about how awful and oppressed I am, being an Asian female, in a land of thong-wearing white Aussie dudes.

Well, even though that exchange with old mate made my blood boil, I must say that racism is on the decrease. Conversations like that happen, but not very often out of the hundreds of people I talk to every week. And when they do, they're from people who couldn't be taken seriously by any intelligent life form. Like my obese, hairy, pokies-addicted friend I mentioned.

Sure, you meet the occasional person who can't get past the fact that you're not white, but I put that down to upbringing. Most people are merely curious and mean no harm, even though most of the time it comes across as offensive anyway. Other than that, 95% of my friends are white Aussies and none of them particularly care that I'm Asian.

Hell, Mr Chicken is a blue singlet-wearing, self-proclaimed "bogan" from Toowoomba whose idea of a rad time is wandering around in the bush, and he still reckons I'm allright.

One could argue that the loopy old bat I talked to was just a product of an old upbringing. Yet a lot of old people nowadays have lived through wars and the immigration boom. Many of the regulars at the pub are old men who are quite friendly to me and totally understand the whole "I'm Asian but I've grown up in Australia, mate" deal. In fact, most people in general understand, or even go the other way and are concerned about racist fuckwits giving me a hard time.

But what of events like the Cronulla Riots? I say that in the grand scheme of this country, it was a small group of people who were widely condemned by any Australian with a brain. Thank god for that. Imagine if the entire nation condoned racial violence.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that racism, in some form or another, is always going to be around. It's human nature to fear or hate something different. But the world - particularly Australia - is a lot better than it used to be, and it can only get better.

Not too long ago, it used to be perfectly okay to say "nigger" in everyday speech. Now the American president is black and an Aboriginal man is Australian of the Year.

It's a small start, but it's a good one.

Many people realise that racism, on a public level, comes from the truly ignorant or hateful. Racist comments, if they're not a joke already, are very rarely taken seriously. I try not to anyway. If I got upset every time an idiot said something insensitive, I wouldn't have time to go to the toilet.

Basically, if someone wrote a very serious letter to The Australian saying something like, "All Koreans are dog-eating communists who should be culled immediately", I hardly think a political leader would put down his morning coffee and call a meeting about it...

"Koreans are a serious problem in Australia."
"My god, you are right. They're everywhere, speaking in some crazy language I don't understand, cooking tasty food with lots of chilli, studying quietly in universities, drinking our beer and dating our sexy, sexy Australian men! Plus they're all Communists."
"Isn't that just the north?"
"Huh? Anyway, I suggest an overhaul of international relations. We must close all tasty Korean restaurants, blow up Kias and Daewoos, outlaw any eating of dogs of any kind..."

...and enact an Anti-Korean Bill of 2009.


All this talk about unnecessary racism reminds me of a certain ranga politician...

So all things considered, I don't mind being an Asian in Australia. Sure, some of our political leaders make my head hurt, the phrase "un-Australian" makes me want to slap somebody and the more nationalist bogan Aussies scare me.

But on the other hand, Australia has some good beer (well, not all of them), Triple J, crazy stoned Queenslanders (which is another blog entry altogether), a majority of fairly decent people and a prevailing sense of humour.

One of my favourite TV shows to ever come out of Australia is Fat Pizza. A thoroughly politically incorrect comedy, Fat Pizza exploits and exaggerates the stereotypes of wogs in gangs, bad Asian drivers (cheers Ahn Do), insane Italians and disgustingly racist white Aussies to make people laugh - ultimately to realise how silly it all is.




Hopefully one day, everybody will.

so, i know your sister through my primary school friend's brother's girlfriend

In my favourite book, "He Died with a Felafel in his Hand", John Birmingham said:

"The thing about Brisbane is that everyone knows you or knows about you. In small world theory, there's only six points of separation between any two individuals, but you can trim down the numbers in Brisbane. Everyone's stories intersect, crossing over and through each other like sticky strands of destiny and DNA."

As it's becoming easier and easier to find people on social networking sites like myspace and facebook, I'm starting to see how scarily accurate this quote is. The instances of 6 degrees of separation - or in this instance, two or three - are becoming ridiculously frequent.

For example, let's look at Dan, my boyfriend, as a case study. I met Dan fairly randomly - not through friends. He used to work with a fellow called Jay. Jay's best friend is Amy, a girl I've known since grade 9. Another person Dan has worked with, Sandra, knows my good friend Rob. One of Dan's friends is good mates with a fellow that I partied with back in high school.

How? Why?

And wait til you see the local music scene. It's completely incestuous. Let's look at my friend, Ash, who reviews metal bands for various publications. A few of the people who drink at the pub I work at are in local metal bands that Ash has reviewed. One band, Dead Letter Opener, is playing a gig with a band called Screaming Dawn, who I helped make a film documentary about for uni. Ash is friends with a fellow from a band called Phalanx, which plays with a band called Into the Ocean. My friend Callum, who lives in Toowoomba, is friends with a few members of the band.

I find that all metalheads know each other. The Brisbane metal scene is pretty small, I guess. If you haven't met someone at Phoenix, then you've seen them at the Step Inn. That's about it really.

In person? It's hard to walk into the city or uni without bumping into someone you know, or someone who you drunkenly talked to at the pub from a few years ago, or the sister of the girl you went to school with. And they show up in weird places too. A friend of mine from way back that I hadn't seen for years suddenly turned up on TV for diving in the Commonwealth Games. He's off to the Olympics soon. Gosh.

I don't know if this extended family thing is a good thing or a bad thing. It's nice that Brisbane is sort of a community where everybody knows each other. It could be a bad thing if everybody knows that you slept with that girl's ex-boyfriend or was mean to the friend of a friend or something. I'm waiting for the day when all my fuck-ups suddenly become public and I will be forced to skip town. I think that's why heaps of Brisbane people move to Melbourne.

According to facebook, Dan's ex-workmate Churv is friends with the older sister of a boy I dated four years ago. Total and utter coincedence. I told said ex-boyfriend about this bizarre connection, to which he simply replied, "That's Brisbane for you."


edit:
Oh oh it gets better!
Today I was at work and talking to some friends of Chris (my manager). Upon finding out that we went to private schools, we realised we knew the same people. BUT IT GETS EVEN BETTER. One of the fellows I talked to turned out to be, erm, the friend with benefits of a girl I used to be friends with. I'd even talked to him randomly on the phone once when he was on the piss!

Wow. Just wow.

Ladette to Lady

Last night was the finale of Ladette to Lady. I am ashamed to say that I watched a fair few episodes of this show. That's right, I have finally succumbed to reality TV. How tragic.
Anyway, in case you haven't watched it, Ladette to Lady is about a bunch of unladylike, binge-drinking, boob-flashing, blokey British girls going to an old-fashioned finishing school to learn how to become ladies. Their lessons include elocution, flower-arranging, cooking, sewing, and general etiquette.

The school is run by some formidable ladies who remind me of some of the teachers at my high school (which was an all-girls school). The sort who do not yell or scream, but rather scold misbehaviour in dignified rage - which is the far more terrifying - and cause even the most blokey ladette to hang her head in shame.


The teachers are the three women out the front. If curled lips could kill...

I found the show absolutely fascinating. Firstly, reality shows tend to ridicule one group. In this show, it was hard to tell who was ridiculing who. Was it the brash, crude ladettes who got completely wasted all the time and used bad grammar? Or was it the uptight teachers at the finishing school who would seem very upset over a bad flower arrangement and had a certain technique to fluffing pillows?

Upon looking up some information abou the show on the internet, I found a few blogs criticising the show. It was labelled as "sexist" and "old-fashioned." I personally don't think it's all bad. While I don't think that all females should be posh housewives who speak like the Queen, I don't think they should be drunken slags either. There's a delicate balance. Girls should be able to get a bit pissed and be silly, but not the extent that they end up vomiting all over the pub and flashing their boobs at everybody. At the same token, girls should be well-groomed for a special occasion, be polite to people and respect men like they'd want men to respect them.
Come to think of it, everybody should be like that, male or female. Maybe there should be a show called "Lad to Gentleman".
As blatantly cringe-worthy as some of the old fashioned values are in the show, there's a point; females shouldn't be like drunken boys.

As for me? I'm pretty sure that I'm a ladette. I dress for comfort, I drink too much when I go out and end up swearing loudly and I have burping competitions with Dan. But on the other hand, I can cook a mean marinated lamb, my calves look wicked in heels and my vase of fake gerbaras on the bedside table looks marvellous, thankyou very much.


Vicky, the winner of Ladette to Lady. She was my favourite - seemed like a nice person and had a fantastic Yorkshire accent.

The daily telegraph =/= playboy

The Daily Telegraph website looked quite interesting today:

• Bum rush - Supermodel Gisele bares cheeky side in barely there shorts. See the pics (complete with a thumbnail photo of her bottom)
  

• Bikini babes on parade - Girls, check out these hot bikinis, guys, just enjoy the view. Pics

• Dita lesbian porn past revealed - BURLESQUE stripper Dita Von Teese has a secret lesbian hardcore porn past, revealed by explicit clips of the stripper in bizarre sex scenes that were leaked online. Gallery: See Dita's burlesque strip-teese

And the main story of the day is leaked photos of swimmer Stephanie Rice (who?) from her facebook. She's shown wearing 80's gear for a party. Apparently there were some "raunchy " shots of her and her boyfriend on there, as well as her dressed up as a sexy cop for a party. And of course, the Telegraph has posted up Stephanie's photos. Because it's not like these sort of photos are readily available on any young woman's social networking site.

Look, I'm not the sort of girl who's going to whine "that's sexist!" because girls who are prettier than me are in the media. But I do wonder what this sort of thing is doing on a newspaper site. It just reeks of blokey magazine. There's nothing wrong with blokey magazines - hey, sometimes I find their articles much more entertaining than the tripe in women's magazines - but I don't think that pictures of Gisele's arse belong next to a story about a grisly murder.

If I wanted to look at boobies and bums, I'd buy a copy of FHM, not the Telegraph.


(On a side note: How is Dita Von Teese starring in porn with ladies really so shocking? She's a burlesque star who's starred in Playboy, talks openly about her promiscuity and was married to Marilyn Manson for god's sakes. I think it would be a much more interesting news story if Dita Von Teese had a secret fondness for knitting socks for orphaned kittens, for example.)

Lies! Damn, dirty Lies!

I am an awful liar. If I lie to you, I’ll break down and tell you the truth eventually. The very most I do is exaggerate things for narrative effect, or cover up things to save my ass (Erm, no mum, I'm not hungover, just a bit tired. And i have a headache. And i'm throwing up vodka). But I could never look you in the eye and tell you something completely false. Don’t ever ask me to play a practical joke on someone.

So it was with great disaster that I told a huge porky to my boss today.
“I can’t work next Monday morning,” I said, “as I have a uni exam.”
“Oh, okay,” said my boss. Then she stopped and looked at me strangely. “Aren’t you on uni holidays then?”
Oh fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, said my brain, as I metaphorically soiled my pants.
“Erm,” I stumbled, “it’s, um, yeah, I have an exam that day for some reason.”
“It’s a bit odd,” she said pointedly, and left it at that.

I’m relatively sure she knows I’m lying. You see, I don’t have an exam next Monday at all. It is my best friend’s birthday party on Sunday night and I plan to get properly inebriated with her. The funny thing is that my boss is quite a nice lady and probably would be okay with me skipping work for my friend’s party. But there is then the discourse in truth. If I had said, “Sorry boss, can’t go to work next week because I plan to par-tay hard with my best friend on Sunday night”, she would probably wonder what kind of idiot would tell that to her boss.


Definitely not what I will be doing next Monday morning*

I felt sick for the next few hours as I tried to convince myself that if my boss found out I was lying, I wouldn’t get fired. Probably just a stern talking to. I hope.

In my ideal world, everyone would tell the truth. Lies and bullshit would be outlawed. It just causes unnecessary drama. Imagine, if you will, instead of this situation, which I have heard many times:

Boy: You are an amazing and truly beautiful human being. Do you want to go out with me?
Girl: Alas, I cannot be with you. I believe our romance would destroy the beautiful friendship we hold. My fragile heart is jaded from past relationships and I would only break yours.
Boy: Boo hoo, emo fit waaah.
Later, Boy bitches and psychoanalyses the girl’s mysterious comments to all his friends. Ad verbatim. Ad fucking verbatim.


We would have a far less convoluted explanation here:

Boy: I need someone of the opposite sex to validate my self-esteem. Do you want to be that person?
Girl: No, I’m not attracted to you in the slightest.
Boy: Damn.

In this world, we could tell girls they look fat in that dress and never see bums hanging out of hotpants ever again.
Employers would have to resign themselves to the fact that their employees have lives too and need time to live them, and thus have realistic expectations of the worker.
I truly believe people would respect politicians more if they told the truth, even if that truth is not what eveybody wants to hear (At least I would know who to vote for. I am so very conflicted at the moment that I plan to vote for the Shooters Party and the Fishing Party so I can shoot fish).
Infidelity wouldn’t exist. People would say, “I want to go shag this other person” and instead of being busted on ‘Cheaters’ and screaming like fat black women, the other person would realise that the one they love isn’t worth it, and such a relationship would end with both parties somewhat satisfied.


If everybody told the truth, there would be no need for fat people taking off their clothes on Jerry Springer**

Real friends would be easier to identify and again, people would have more realistic expectations
(It's not that I don't want to hang out with you, it's that I just want to some 'me' time, okay?)
In this world, truth would be universally accepted and everybody wouldn’t get so angry about things. Subsequently, people would put more thought into their actions rather than relying on lies to get out of trouble.
Life would be so much easier. I think that would be wonderful.



* As a side note: When I looked up "exam" on Google Images, all the photos on the front page were of testicular or vaginal exams. What.
** As another side note: When I looked up "cheaters" i got porn, and that is why I chose a Jerry Springer picture instead. And you should have seen what I got when I looked up "big black woman"