Image: ‘Che Corona’, Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
In a surgical ward of Liverpool Hospital where Mum stayed post-knee replacement, the TV attached to the ceiling lit up like a siren. A white male newsreader spoke with a sombre expression: ‘The United States is on edge as police are still unable to rule out race as a motive for a shooting rampage that has killed eight people across three massage parlours in Atlanta. Six of the eight victims were of Asian descent.’
Photos of a young white man with the hairstyle of a rooster and a beard fashioned out of pubic strands flashed across the screen like a PowerPoint presentation. The reporter informed us that the gunman was a ‘highly religious and a regular Baptist church goer’ and ‘confessed to a sex addiction’. This was followed by a clip of the man playing guitar.
My chest felt tight, the pressure building with every word.
Mẹ clicked her tongue. ‘Nowhere is safe these days.’
She reached for the remote and switched off the TV. The images evaporated into a single pixel. She took off the bracelet on her left wrist. Her thumb flicked through beads of red agate. Paper eyelids pressing trembling eyelashes, she prayed ‘Nam mô A Di Đà Phật’. I wondered when she ever felt safe.
The reporter informed us that the gunman was ‘highly religious’ and ‘confessed to a sex addiction’. This was followed by a clip of the man playing guitar.
The steel door yawned. Head nurse Mariella entered. She glared at us through thick-rimmed glasses. Mum and I already had the ‘Which-Asian-do-you-think-she-is?’ discussion. Her skin was golden like ours. Her strong jaw and broad nose were exactly like my great Aunt Dì Tư’s, but Mariella spoke with an American accent and my mother found her ‘too assertive’ to be a Vietnamese woman.
‘Mama, you must take the painkillers we give you. Us Asians have a high pain threshold. We think we can take it, but then we suffer in silence.’
‘You are Filipino?’ Mẹ seized the opportunity to get to the bottom of things while conveniently ignoring Mariella’s advice.
‘Yes, and you are Vietnamese, right? I can tell. You like to do things your way.’ Amusement flashed in Mariella’s tamarind eyes. She placed a water bottle and a plastic cup with blue pills onto the food tray beside the hospital bed—thick arms folded across her puffer vest while she watched Mẹ swallow the meds with a sip of water. ‘It will sink into the bloodstream gradually. If we let the pain level get too high, Mama will suffer. It’s best to manage the pain as it comes.’
‘Oi cha…What is this, a jail?’ Mum muttered as Mariella strode off, using her hip to push past the stiff white curtain near the door. Feeling like my chest would split in two, I grabbed the remote attached to the hospital bed, switched the TV back on and changed the channel.
*
In 1998, when I was seven, the world rattled me in its grip. My mother returned from work one evening. Her small hands—so translucent that you could see a network of green veins crossing over and under the bones—shook as she unbuttoned the sides of her maroon Australia Post apron. That morning, the police had visited the mail-sorting facility in Clyde where she worked and questioned everyone there. A Chinese-Vietnamese girl vanished on her walk to school. Did anyone see her or the white van she may have been taken away in? She was twelve, five years older than me at the time. Her name was Quanne. I would have called her Chị: Older Sister.
Chị Quanne’s parents and relatives visited my mother’s workplace several times over the next few months. They walked the corridors of the mail-sorting facility, clutching a framed picture of their daughter’s school photo. Quanne’s mother approached mine while she sat at a desk sorting mail. She tapped Mum’s shoulder lightly, apologetic for disturbing her workday. Mẹ looked up. She saw the woman’s black curls fanned around her round face, her trembling mouth and her swollen eyes. Mum felt as if she was watching a version of herself and Dad living out their worst nightmare. Even in their shock and desperation, Quanne’s parents were polite. ‘If you know anything, please say something,’ they pleaded to my mother and her colleagues. ‘There’s footage of Quanne walking past the facility. Why aren’t there more cameras on that stretch of road?’
For Quanne, we each lit a joss stick. Musky smoke carried our prayers into the universe.
Each day, Mẹ came home and shared her worries about Chị Quanne with Dad and me. There was a Buddhist altar in our kitchen. On it rested a statue of Buddha and a porcelain bowl full of ash. For Chị Quanne, we each lit a joss stick. Three tall mustard yellow sticks with bright pink ends stood resilient in the grey dust. Musky smoke carried our prayers into the universe.
My mother and her colleagues, mostly Vietnamese refugees, could not stop discussing Chị Quanne’s disappearance. Her school photo was projected onto the evening news bulletin: We saw a little Asian girl smiling shyly, her black hair pulled back into a low ponytail. We saw clips of the police placing a mannequin dressed in a wig of straight black hair and a school uniform at Clyde station, with a photo of Chị Quanne pinned to the lapel. We saw her room, filled with soft toys, left untouched as her family waited for her to return home. Week by week, her story shifted lower and lower in the news bulletin until she disappeared, again.
I was never to walk anywhere alone. I was taught to not look anyone in the eye in the streets, to never speak to strangers, to walk quickly and with purpose. I became a little animal scuttling through life hoping to be unnoticed and unharmed. My father installed intercoms, security doors, bolts, locks, home alarm systems and shutters. He rostered my mother and me on a nightly routine to check that the house was ready. We checked the locks on every door. Make sure you hear the schlock of the metal bar sliding into place. We pulled down the shutters on the windows. Make sure they hit the window sill. Then, we punched in the code to set the alarm system. Make sure you hear the three beeps and the red light flashing beside the word ‘armed’.
In 1998, Australians were more likely to know about JonBenét Ramsey, a little American girl with blonde curls and round blue eyes who was murdered two years prior, than Chị Quanne, a little girl with black hair and monolid eyes. Former Detective Inspector Bradley Cox, who worked on the investigation, has since observed that perhaps Quanne was not the ‘perfect victim’ that would receive a lot of attention from the wider Australian public. While Cox did not elaborate on the reasons why Chị Quanne was not perceived to be a perfect victim, people like me clearly understand why.
The detective who worked on the investigation observed that perhaps she was not the ‘perfect victim’. While he did not elaborate, people like me clearly understand why.
Two years prior to Quanne’s disappearance, Pauline Hanson had stood up in the House of Representatives. Speaking in a high-pitched, nasal voice quavering with newfound political power, Hanson declared:
I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.
Hanson’s hair sat on top of her head like an open flame ready to annihilate our existence. Her blue eyes glowered like freshly polished bullets as she continued: ‘Do we want or need any of these people here?’
Weeks after Hanson’s speech was broadcast on the news, an elderly white woman spat on my mother as we waited for a bus to Bankstown Square. I watched Mum shake with rage as she looked for tissues to wipe away the spit. On the bus ride I felt her shame—her palm hot and sweaty against mine. As the bus trundled down the Hume Highway, I replayed the incident again and again. I imagined myself stronger and taller, slapping the racist’s face so hard that white powder foundation flew off her shrivelled cheek.
That evening, when Dad came home, I told him what had happened. He sighed and placed a hand on my shoulder, reminding me that our family had gone through worse: when my parents moved into the neighbourhood (before I was born), rocks and coils of dog shit were pelted at the glass windows of our home.
‘Don’t worry my child, most Australians are not like that,’ he said, smiling as he sat down at the dinner table. ‘There are always a few bad people in a community. We’re not perfect either.’
He was referring to Cabramatta, a suburb near us with a large Vietnamese population that had been branded the ‘Smack Express’ during the earlier half of the 90s. News cameras showed Vietnamese youth in drug-dealing gangs and the junkies who lay dying on the streets. This was the socio-political context surrounding Chị Quanne’s disappearance. To my mother and her colleagues, to us—Asian Australians in Western Sydney—Chị Quanne was not a cold case or a story tucked away in the back pages of a newspaper. How could a little girl just vanish like that? And why did nobody else outside of our communities seem to care?
How could a little girl just vanish like that? And why did nobody else outside of our communities seem to care?
More than twenty years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, communities in Western Sydney are still searching for basic human compassion. I am writing from Bankstown, in the middle of a lockdown and moments after the NSW Premier’s announcement that more than a hundred extra police officers will be deployed here to ‘ensure compliance’ with health orders. Why wasn’t sunny Bondi served with a major police operation and a side of harsh political language when new cases appeared there a fortnight ago? When certain communities are targeted and perceived as a problem and a threat, it becomes clear why we cannot be the ‘perfect’ victims. Helicopters hack the air above our heads. Under mainstream Australia’s gaze, the injustices we face become justifiable.
*
In the hospital room, I tried finding other topics to talk about but my mother refused to budge.
‘I heard about a camera that you can install to your front door. It will record whoever walks past and alert you by email.’
A familiar weariness settled into my body. A cycle repeated. Locks, bolts, alarms and glass eyes were my mother’s pain medication. I assured her that I would look into an extra surveillance system for my unit. Deep down, however, I knew this wouldn’t make much of a difference. No amount of locks, alarms or glass eyes would have prevented the little boy in the Westfield from pulling up the neckline of his shirt to cover his mouth and nose as he passed me on the escalator, nor would they have stopped the man who stalked me down a Woolworths aisle, whispering broken bits of Chinese.
To live in a non-white body is to be bound in fear and anger. After Chị Quanne’s disappearance, I had nightmares about going missing and I would wake up sobbing. Twenty years later, I have run out of tears. Instead, my teeth clench after Pauline Hanson denied that she is a racist, after the FBI Director denied that the Atlanta Spa shootings were racially motivated and after the NSW Police denied targeting our communities in this latest lockdown. A study conducted by the Australian National University found that more than 8 in 10 Asian Australians have experienced discrimination during the pandemic. According to the Asian Australian Alliance, there have been almost 380 reports of COVID-19 related racism in Australia against Asians/Asian Australians in the two-month period since April. Approximately 65% of respondents identified as being female. We know our pain and yet we are still denied recognition of it.
Whenever I hear of another act of anti-Asian violence, I remember Quanne. I am reminded that those deemed less than ‘perfect’ endure a second death.
Since Chị Quanne’s disappearance, I have witnessed the reporting of many Asian women’s brutal deaths. I have watched as our stories flare and fade in the public eye. Whenever I hear of another act of anti-Asian violence, I remember Chị Quanne. I am reminded that those deemed less than ‘perfect’ endure a second death.
I placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder, just like my father had placed his hand on my shoulder after she was spat on at the bus stop some years ago. I felt her goosebumps under the flimsy hospital gown.
‘Mum, do you remember Chị Quanne?’ I asked.
‘Of course I do,’ she replied. ‘I never forget her or any of us who have to leave this earth in such devastating ways. But what can we do? We can pray for their loved ones and the rest of us who are left behind.’
