How Asian-Australian Creatives Are Killin’ It In Digital Spaces
By Sylvia Lee
For too long, the model minority myth has shaped the way we view Asian-Australians, who are pressured to become doctors, lawyers and accountants. But some of us are creatives carving out a different path, one that counters social and cultural expectations.
For women and non-binary people of colour in the creative industries, the internet promises a better alternative than the mainstream media: a digital safe space where we can freely self-represent rather than be underrepresented, build a following of kindred spirits who understand the feeling of belonging to no place, and mark our existence in this world.
These are the stories of 5 woman and non-binary Asian-Australian creatives who are killin’ it on digital spaces:
Digital Girl in a Material World: Tara Chandra
Before the day’s start, Tara Chandra always readies her dramatic winged eyeliner, the chain accessories already around her neck. It’s not uncommon to see the 21-year-old fashion influencer wearing oversized jackets painted with political statements like “feminism=equality”, a tracksuit with Chinese dragons scaling her legs, and her signature black platform boots.
With 42.2k followers on Instagram, she is considered an internet celebrity. But Tara cares more about the freedom the internet has given her to “create and express whatever the hell you want”. She is tired of the white-washed Australian media, which fails to represent “what Australia looks like today”. She is tired of experiencing internalised racism because she didn’t know any better when she went to privileged Upper North Shore schools, where ‘real’ girls had blonde hair and blue eyes and were not Indonesian or Chinese.
Why do I have to go to Chinese lessons when we live in Australia?
Why are you speaking Indonesian to me? We speak English here!
No, I don't want to eat that. It smells bad, it’s weird.
She's pretty… for an Asian.
There is nothing like the regret that comes with dismissing your own culture, race and language. It is a common thread that unites Asian-Australians and people of colour living in the West. When the inevitable epiphany hits us, we are appalled at our own ignorance and desperate to pick out the tight knots that have been woven into the fabric of our reality. We seek repentance, eventually learning to love our roots and realising the underrated joy of seeing the world in different colours.
“My culture is beautiful. I love celebrating Chinese New Year. I love my Chinese Buddhist practices. I love being a part of so many cultures all at once,” she tells me in our email interview as she types from her Upper North Shore home.
Tara now celebrates her Chinese-Indonesian culture through her style and online activism.
Fashion is indeed political, and Tara Chandra wears the Chinese clothes she inherited from her late grandfather with pride. It is her way of reclaiming her culture and learning to love herself again.
Ultimately, Tara seeks to educate her followers about intersectional feminism and racism in the West, and to carve out a safe space for people of colour who feel alienated because they never see familiar faces elsewhere. She is a reminder that Asian-Australian women can thrive as digital creatives, that we can be beautiful without being fetishised, that we are not meek, passive or submissive, and should not be underestimated.
Ballad for the Token Asian Friend: Joy Li
A scarlet paper lantern, rendered into existence by neon lights, welcomes visitors to the antiquated Li General Store.
Inside Li General Store, inexpensive Chinese curios are displayed on a counter lined with emerald and rose-coloured silk.
But a closer look reveals the items are more than meets the eye:
***
The entire establishment is fictitious, of course. Li General Store does not exist, except in the digital imaginary of Joy Li.
Joy is a 23-year-old graphic designer who tells me Li General Store was her Honours major work in 2017 for her Visual Communications degree at UTS. She explains on her website that the premise of Li General Store represents “a range of Chinese and immigrant identities… through the ownership, manipulation and display of a distorted Orient—an Orient tailored to the Western gaze.”
The project later became a finalist in the 2018 Adobe Design Achievement Awards. Despite this fact, Joy radiates with humility and makes no mention of it when we meet. Instead, she tells me about how her parents met through a community matchmaker in Fujian – the “real life Tinder of that time” – and how she had mistakenly believed her maternal grandfather, an English teacher, had picked out her name until recently. Rather, it was a “Joy Happy Forever” plastic stool her mother had serendipitously bought from a dollar store that had shaped her fate. This dynamic of cultural and familial dissonance underpins much of her design work.
“Because we have such a strong connection to things that are tactile, I am fascinated by physical artefacts and how they have value beyond what they actually are, which can shape the way we think about ourselves and interact with others,” she explains. For Joy, there’s nothing more exciting than subverting such everyday objects to challenge cultural stereotypes. Her mission to “examine the intersection where design meets gender, race and cultural studies,” as she explains on her website, through IRL (‘in real life’) and digital design, has enhanced her appeal as an Adobe-partnered micro influencer on Instagram, where she has a modest following of 3.8K.
***
Like me, Joy is Chinese-Australian. Both of us have hard-working immigrant parents who “had to start from scratch and take shit from people who would say things to them and to conform, they’d laugh it off”. Like them, neither of us are strangers to ‘konnichiwa’ catcalls and under-the-breath murmurs drenched in acrid prejudice. But we are different. For us, the all-too-familiar ‘Did that really just happen? Did they really say that?’ moments strain against the overflowing jar of Things I Always Brush Off. Until the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon takes effect and we can no longer ignore it.
“You know when some people say they feel a strong pull to their country of origin? I don’t feel that. I go back to China and I feel foreign there. I go back to Australia and I also feel foreign. I don’t think I belong anywhere,” she tells me.
This existential placelessness is unique to those of us with hyphenated identities. It is the dreaded feeling of not being ‘Australian enough’ yet also not ‘Asian enough’ that weighs heavily against our chests. Perpetually paralysed in a cultural limbo, if you will.
***
In 2016, Joy published her three-part “Living as an Asian Girl” poster series online:
It wasn’t long before this project gained immense popularity on Tumblr due to its sprawling Asian-American network and a BuzzFeed journalist contacted Joy for a story that later went viral.
“That was my first foray into activism. There were things I wasn’t aware of because in America, the Asian-American community is stronger and has been there longer. Whereas here, even though we have good ties to Asia, Australia is pretty racist.” Joy is referring to the multi-layered legacy of Asian-Americans, her predominant audience. Unlike Asian-Australians, whose histories are closely tied to the limited lens of the Gold Rush and Hawke-era Chinese immigration, the Asian-American identity is heavily influenced by the multi-generational diaspora and the civil rights movement, which explains the relative ‘richness’ of Asian-American representation compared to Asian-Australian representation.
***
Today, Joy’s world has expanded beyond the bubble of her quiet Sydney life, fuelled by the rapid-fire of digital media. She recalls connecting with a third-generation, 50-year-old Japanese-American woman, who reached out to her because she, too, saw her struggles reflected in the “Living as an Asian Girl” series. She recalls another time when several Asian-Americans had thanked her for inspiring them to begin anew down the creator’s path. One could say she has battled the ferocious distance of the Atlantic Ocean and won, cultivating a supportive, intercontinental community on her social media, a second home to her creations.
A Site of Resistance: Sabella D’Souza
Once, Sabella D’Souza’s mum came home to them grabbing flour to paint themselves in whiteness. Because they were dressing up as Dorothy for a screening of The Wizard of Oz, and they naturally assumed they needed to be lighter skinned to step into those enchanted red slippers.
Sitting before me in the ABS café, Sabella D’Souza recalls the moments from their childhood that contributed to their identity crisis as a biracial child.
The 23-year-old is a non-binary Indian-Australian artist who completed their Honours at USYD this year. Sabella’s dad was born in Mumbai, India, but migrated to Morrinsville, New Zealand with his family at five years old. Decades later, he married Sabella’s mum, a white Kiwi woman. When Sabella was two weeks old, the family moved to Melbourne, where they grew up and left for Sydney only five years prior.
***
Growing up, Sabella couldn’t help but feel neither Indian nor Caucasian. The first and last time they returned to their motherland, they were fourteen. But in Mumbai, they were treated as a foreigner because they did not ‘pass’ for Indian. The Hindi language, too, was lost to their ears. They began to associate India with the same discomfort they associated with going to church. Because it was a formal obligation with customs they couldn’t navigate.
Back in Melbourne, they still didn’t feel ‘brown enough’ to be Indian, so they moved around in white circles that further reinforced their difference. They endured being called “fucking Indian” by strangers; the occasional “What’s up my (N-word)” by young people who thought appropriating the slur made them look cool. (It so doesn’t.)
The only safe spaces existed online, in educational, social justice Tumblr accounts and autonomous women of colour Facebook groups, which offered them some respite. They began to dive into books written by bell hooks and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, African-American women scholars who theorised intersectional feminism and critical race theory. Sabella didn’t stop reading until they committed to memory the painful legacies of European imperialism and colonialism, which have left behind interwoven institutional inequalities that oppress the most marginalised in society.
***
In 2016, Sabella dressed in a traditional Indian lahenga, choli and dupatta that they had screen-printed with the words, “MY MOTHERLAND IS A MOUTHFUL”.
This was one of their first performance art pieces, and they were the main attraction.
They began livestreaming themselves on Periscope with the front camera on, attracting an online audience of three hundred voyeurs. They said nothing, simply fretting over their appearance as if they were taking a continuous selfie, their features enhanced with a red bindi and an elaborate gold nose chain.
“ur gorgeous”
“Show your ass”
“indian?”
“is osama at your party”
Those were some of the comments from Sabella’s voyeurs in the live chat. It was a confronting moment for the artist, but they weren’t surprised about those remarks because they had been on the internet since they were five. They try not to acknowledge their voyeurs’ presence in the ‘non-space’ they occupy. Sabella calls it the ‘non-space’, an attempt to occupy space online as a way to occupy space in the real world, where no one believes their cultural identity exists.
“It came from this idea that I couldn’t speak Hindi, that people would assume I could if I told them I’m Indian, that no one believed I was Indian, not even in India. For me, it was this idea of motherland seeming unattainable and impossible to describe. It’s a mouthful… It’s caught in your mouth. You can’t say it and you can’t explain it, but you know what the feeling is.”
***
For Sabella, the ‘Asian-Australian’ label is complicated because it encompasses a pool of diverse ethnicities that are frequently ignored in favour of the monolithic East Asian identity.
“When I say I’m South Asian, people tell me, ‘No, you don’t look Asian.’ When we say Asian, usually we mean East Asian and that can be really difficult for different narratives and stories coming in. There is a tendency to erase Filipinx, black and other Asian identities that exist in Australia.”
And then there is the existential frustration that bubbles right under the surface when they are overwhelmed by hegemonic white narratives that fail to tell their story. “But it’s also the only way that I’ve ever existed. The only way that everyone’s ever existed,” they tell me.
***
For women and non-binary people of colour who feel oppressed by the patriarchal norms permeating both their cultures, the internet allows them to find digital communities who share their identity struggles and frustrations.
“A lot of people go on online spaces because they have more autonomy over what they produce and how they represent themselves, but also in re-presenting themselves to the public,” Sabella tells me.
With zealous conviction, they reference bell hooks’ again, explaining how the internet is a “virtual homeplace, a site of resistance for [women of colour] finding solace and support, and gaining the power to step out of the public eye into a private space.”
Feeling alienated by the real world, many of us search for a homeplace in the digital realm, where autonomous safe spaces are aplenty.
“This is where you can recuperate and find validation and build a community, and a new idea of politics. These groups are greatly affecting politics and identity for young people of colour.
“But even though we’re finding spaces for ourselves, we still have to carve them out. They still don’t necessarily want us there and that is the same feeling for Asian-Australian representation. It’s frustrating and disheartening, but we haven’t known anything else.”
Common Music Folk: Nancy Phung
These are Nancy Phung’s favourite moments in life: the bittersweet quiet of writing song lyrics in an empty room, the hum of dozens of electric pedals snaking across the floor, the bone-shattering release of noise rock against her skull, the euphoria of performing alongside Shiv, Zac, Marco, Jesse. Her shoulders relaxing a little as she lets muscle memory take over strumming cryptic rhythms on her electric guitar. To her, it is like filling in a crossword puzzle: filling in musical rifts through the guitars, the tonality, the volume, the stage presence that seizes the crowd. Leaning over the rusty microphone stand and letting her voice sink softly into the chaotic soundscape of Whirl:
Take the coins from my ashtray/'cause that is all I’ve got…
Let the people break I,/the common folk
'Cause it’s all just politics and assets
And we're all just plebs to them anyway
And they said, "Fuck up the middle class!”
The meaning of the words lies in what cannot be heard. She remembers the thrill of working on Whirl with Shiv soon after they had formed their shoegaze band Holy Forrest. It almost seems eons ago. Her brows furrow as she summons an unwelcome muse. And there is a moment when the swaying audience disappears, the blinding stage lights dissolve, the breath she’s been holding catches in her throat–
The moment of clarity when there is nothing except her heartbeat and the music she’s fought so hard for.
***
“This song was stripping me down to bare bone. Take everything I have; I don’t have anything…”
Nancy pauses to take a swig of water from a swing-top bottle she had decorated with a red sticker from obscure German record label Time as a Color. The 23-year-old sports an untamed Mohawk and a fraction of her gramophone chest tattoo emerges from her black HUF tee.
We are seated at the grey countertop in the kitchen of her two-storey home in Condell Park. English ivy creeps along the sides of white cabinets, the deep green starkly contrasting against the bare white walls. Mismatched ornaments, too: a camel model ship with semicircular sails, a custom-printed mug with her mother’s smiling face on it, a bowl of Vietnamese-style mock meat waiting to be eaten.
“It wasn’t about a government that loves their people,” she continued. “It was about this greed and this one-percenter idea that I hated, so I wrote Whirl in an empty room all by myself.”
She recalls the claustrophobic feeling of never quite having enough and being viewed as lesser because she comes from a “working class” home, an insecurity that has touched much of her adolescence. All her life, Nancy has sought after “a place where I can look at people and see some resemblance to myself”.
Eventually, it was in the thriving, rebellious suburb of Newtown – “a blissful place” – that she understood where she always wanted to be at 16 years old. In particular, she found solace in the indie rock scene, even if it meant trying to fit in with “lots of hip, white people” as a queer woman of Vietnamese and Chinese heritage.
“I loved the grungy, angsty noise because it reflects what I feel and music is this means for self-expression and that’s what drew me to it because we listen to what we can relate to.
“I’ve always been a child who was confused, not really understanding myself or others. It was this constant state of being confused and angry about it, between states. I’ve always been melancholic, so I feel closer to that music.”
***
Coming out: It is a drawn-out process that takes patience, self-compassion and acceptance.
But for LGBTQ+ Asian-Australians, coming out is further burdened by culturally-ingrained homophobia, traditional familial duties expected of ‘good sons and daughters’, and the heightened chances of experiencing intersectional discrimination due to belonging to more than one minority group.
For Nancy, the process was complicated by the times. In 2010, the world wasn’t as welcoming of the LGBTQ+ community as it is now. Fairvale High School was no exception.
She felt like a “foreign Martian” in her year group because “they’d never met a gay person before” and “there weren’t that many people in the media back then”. Girls were hesitant when she stepped foot in the locker rooms, whispering amongst themselves, “Oh my God. What if she looks at us?” Overhearing those insidious words as a child, she was lost for words.
But it is the betrayal that hurts more than the schoolyard teasing and loneliness, propagating and taking root in her anger and confusion, until the feeling of being robbed of the one thing that mattered the most can never be forgotten.
Her private truth had been bursting at the seams, until it was so unbearable she did the one thing she thought would help it be heard. In Year 8, she posted her coming out story on YouTube. But an uncle had stumbled upon it and outted her to everyone in her extended family.
“My mum was the last to know and that hurt her for so many years. ‘Why didn’t this come from you? Why am I the last to hear about this?’” Nancy’s voice wavers as she struggles against the torrent of buried feeling.
“At that time, a lot of people found it easier to criticise my mum. ‘She’s gay because you let her have a phone.’ ‘She’s gay because of you.’
“It happened in a matter of days. I never ever even got the chance to process it or plan how to tell them at a family dinner or after my NAPLAN.
“I watched my mother become so upset that she stopped putting effort into herself. She was crying every other day. I couldn’t blame myself for it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I did this to her. That’s what tore us apart.”
This is the root of her half-buried confusion and anger, which secretly drives her song-writing and the bone-deep splinter she feels when she’s singing under the lights and strumming her electric guitar, the ugly truth metamorphosed into art, or something someone would want to listen to at four in the morning.
***
Like many indie bands, Holy Forrest owes some of its success to their use of Facebook and Instagram, which reveal the upbeat, goofy dynamic of the 5-piece band while simultaneously capturing the melancholic beauty of the noise rock sound.
Nancy runs the magic on Holy Forrest’s online feeds. Bringing to life dreamy moments of the band losing themselves in their music as sunlight streams through windows, tongue-in-cheek internet humour, audio teasers of kaleidoscopic melodies, and the odd promotional post about upcoming shows.
“Everyone’s story should be heard. If we were to remove social media, bands would only ever be on a bill in the pub and who would know about that?
“We’ve met a lot of encouraging and likeminded people online. I hate this ‘fan base’ thing because it’s not, we’re friends. It’s a way to meet other bands and other creatives who want to play a gig together. People we would’ve never met if it weren’t for our online presence.”
***
Even amongst the throng of indie rockers in the communal bars that have become popular haunts for the shoegaze scene, it’s impossible to overlook Nancy’s charismatic presence. In a genre and industry saturated by white male musicians, she stands out as the sole woman on the bill, let alone the only queer woman of colour. As frontwoman, she is hopeful that Holy Forrest continues to fight the good fight against the status quo.
Perhaps cynics would say she’s only a dreamer who spins an idealistic web. But for Nancy Phung, she’s simply an old soul dreaming of a better world.
New Voices from Asian-Australia: Candice Chung
When Candice Chung responds to my email, she writes from her inner-city home, where she does most of her work as a freelancer for The Sun Herald and SBS. It is a Sunday morning, a regular workday for the former editor of The Daily Life since her deadlines tend to fall on Mondays. But she hears the lively sounds of people going about their business on the street and she always feels a pull to join that world.
The 37-year-old’s family is from Hong Kong and throughout the years, she, too, has endured the “quiet damage from not seeing yourself reflected in the mainstream”.
“It means you are internalising the message that worthy, complex stories are white; while your own cultural identity is something that holds you back, boxes you in,” she tells me.
And then there was that mind-numbing realisation that her voracious consumption of Western pop culture had separated her from her parents, “turning into a foreign language that stands between us”.
“It hit me that as a child of immigrant, you’re constantly forced to choose your cultural allegiance — even when you don’t quite realise it.”
Eventually, she learnt to “dust off those messages and wear her cultural identity cosily”. Today, her Asian-Australianness informs much of her work. She started SBS’s Emerging Writer’s Project, an ongoing series giving a platform to new Asian-Australian voices. She writes extensively about her family and upbringing in personal essays delving into the minefield of identity and belonging.
She is grateful for the work of her fellow Asian-Australian artists and creators defying convention by shaping what it means to be Asian-Australian today, giving her courage to continue hers.
“People like Ben and Michelle Law, novelist Julie Koh, editor and writer Adolfo Aranjuez, essayist and journalist Neha Kale, writer and photographer Leah Jing – to name but a few.”
I ask about her thoughts on the emancipatory potential of digital spaces for Asian-Australian creatives. I imagine her pondering this carefully before she types her response:
“To me, the internet has done two main things for marginalised voices. First, it lowers the barrier of entry to be heard. Second, it lets us rally behind a movement at a breathtaking speed,” she writes.
“As non-white creatives, it means having an opportunity to find our own audience. That’s empowering because it means not having to wait around for a ‘patron’ who sees the value of your work. On the flip side, it also means being exposed to potential abuse, and wasting precious energy interacting with detractors online.”
Though she is sceptical about the utopic nature of digital spaces for people of colour creatives, she shares the tentative optimism that many of us cling onto for mere survival, remaining hopeful about the future of Asian-Australian representation.
“What’s clear is that there’s a growing hunger to hear from non-white creators, and a pride from the audience to identify with their Asian identity.”