Picture with my parents in 1974, Syntagma Square Athens
I remember the first time invitations were given out at school. They were for a boy’s birthday party who was called Jeremy. I was 5 years-old, and I could sense that I wasn’t going to get one.
I sat there cross-legged on the floor like all the other kids while the teacher read out each recipient’s name. In the end my prediction was correct, I was the only one whose name wasn’t read out. I was still learning how to speak English, and although I could understand it well my language skills were a barrier for my ability to blend in.
While it would have been nice to get an invitation part of me was relieved, as I was very self-conscious each time I had to get out of my ethnic bubble.
Even at five I felt safe within its confines, for I knew what was expected of me. I would most probably have felt embarrassed at the thought of my father or mother, with their European ways, having to drop me of at an Australian family’s house. Anything that they would have done would have seemed wrong to me, but I had no idea what was correct either. In those days when it came to my classmates, I was on the outside looking in.
Korean-American actor Steven Yeun, who starred in the independent hit film Minari, talked about ‘gap people’ in the interview he gave to The Washington Post earlier this year. As a child the only time he felt safe, in the United States, was when he was in his Korean church. There he knew who his friends were, and that he could be himself.
He refers to the children of immigrants as a community of gap people, a place where you are caught between two worlds, two different countries, and the inherent loneliness of the migration experience.
The gap is a place that I have been living in all my life. I have never spoken of it as a gap before, but I knew exactly what it was when I read about it in Yuen’s interview. Since then, I have often ruminated on what does the gap mean for different ethnicities.
As an Australian-born Greek woman in my fifties I have never been able to identify as fully Australian, nor can I say that I am fully Greek. The truth is I belong somewhere in the middle, the chasm, the collision, the gap.
I’m not true-blue, dinky-di, and up until recently I could not bring myself to sing the national anthem. Advance Australia Fair was offensive with its ‘for we are young and free’, as it ignored the fact that the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders existed in this land for tens of thousands of years before European Settlement. The change to ‘for we are one and free’ has meant that I will sing it, even though I do not think that we are all free. I do, however, accept that the change is a step towards embracing our diversity.
In the mid-fifties my mother was once told by a woman in the tram to stop speaking Greek and to speak English. My mother’s response, in her broken English, was ‘if you tell me to speak Aboriginal I will, but your language is not Australian.’ Perhaps my mother’s response was a bit of an inconvenient truth that was quickly swept under the carpet by whoever heard it that day. Perhaps it left those who heard it speechless, Australia was a different country at that time. My mother’s sentiment is something that has shaped how I feel. When you are different you judge a society by the way it treats its own.
We like to think that we are embracing ethnic diversity as a nation, but are we really? Undoubtedly the migration experience was a lot easier for Europeans than it was for Asians. My colleague Joseph (not his real name) is a successful Australian businessman, whose great-grandfather first came to Australia in the gold rush. I wanted to find out whether he saw himself as an Australian or as Chinese, or something in between. I sent him an email explaining what gap people were, and asked him if he related as one.
Rather than answer the email he decided to call me so we could talk. I found out that apart from living in China for a couple of years as a child, he was born in Melbourne and has lived most of his life in Australia. As far as his identity is concerned, he feels that his default location is the gap. His non-Caucasian appearance has him firmly placed there, both from a sense of his own identity, and from where white-Australians, of which he further identified as white Anglo-Saxon, have him placed.
Joseph’s school years were not easy, looking back at that time he said: ‘I was one of the boys behind the school gate, but not out of it, I was never invited to birthday parties.’ When I asked him whether Australia has moved from a place of assimilation to one of diversity, his response was ‘look at how the Indigenous Australians have been treated and continue to be treated.’ We spoke about a lot of things, mainly our experiences at school.
Whilst things are a lot better now than in the 1950s when he was growing up, and it was in 1973 when the Whitlam Government renounced The White Australia Policy, Pauline Hanson’s 1996 election win is not that long ago. We both agreed that in some areas Australia has a long way to go as a nation.
When I travelled to Greece as an adult for the first time, it felt like coming home. I guess that’s due to mum speaking Greek at home growing up.
After speaking with Joseph, I sent my friend Anna a message on WhatsApp, asking her about her identity, and whether she related to Yuen’s gap. Anna was born in Melbourne and is of Greek and Croatian extraction. She suffers from a wanderlust that is genuinely Australian and lives with partner Peter and their three cats. She grew up in a household where the dominant language was English. ‘Neither of my parents spoke English fluently, but they didn’t speak each others’ native tongue either, so an English of sorts was used by both of them.’ She added a ‘LOL’ after English in her response.
Anna doesn’t feel like there is a gap that defines her, she feels Australian, but in her words ‘not in an Aussie true-blue way’. Her last message answered my question regarding the influence her parents had on her identity:
‘When I travelled to Greece as an adult for the first time, it felt like coming home. I guess that’s due to mum speaking Greek at home growing up.’
Our ethnicity is part of our identity, but our lived experiences and to some extent the experiences of our parents make us who we are.
Even though I have had a good life, at times I still feel like that five-year-old girl who didn’t get invited to Jeremy’s party. I don’t think Jeremy would even remember coming up to me after school that day to tell me that he would bring my invitation tomorrow, regardless of that I never received one. Even though he was only a little kid like me, he sensed that something had to be said to show that it didn’t go unnoticed. Perhaps his parents said no to inviting that little Greek girl, perhaps he forgot about me when he crossed the school gate, but at that moment he chose not to ignore me when he could have done just that.
Although I don’t feel like I’m on the outside looking in anymore, I still feel like I reside in the gap, because it’s from there that I can make sense of my world.
Ari Talantis 