Picture with my parents in 1974, Syntagma Square Athens
I remember the first time invitations were handed out at school. They were for a boy’s birthday party. His name was Jeremy. I was five years old, and I could sense that I wasn’t going to get one.
I sat cross-legged on the floor like all the other children 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 called. I was still learning how to speak English, and although I could understand it well, my language skills were a barrier to my ability to blend in.
While it would have been nice to receive an invitation, part of me was relieved. I was very self-conscious each time I had to step outside my ethnic bubble.
Even at five, I felt safe within its confines, because I knew what was expected of me. I would probably have felt embarrassed at the thought of my mother or father, with their European ways, dropping me off at an Australian family’s house. Anything they might have done would have seemed wrong to me, yet 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 film Minari, spoke about “gap people” in an interview he gave to The Washington Post earlier this year. As a child in the United States, the only time he felt safe was when he was in his Korean church. There, he knew who his friends were, and he could be himself.
He described the children of immigrants as a community of gap people, caught between two worlds, two countries, and the inherent loneliness of the migration experience.
The gap is a place I have lived in all my life. I had never named it that way before, but I recognised it immediately when I read Yeun’s words. Since then, I’ve often found myself wondering what the gap means 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 that I belong somewhere in between. The middle. The collision. The gap.
I’m not true blue or dinky di, and until recently I couldn’t bring myself to sing the national anthem. Advance Australia Fair felt offensive with its line “for we are young and free,” ignoring the fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples existed on 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 now sing it, even though I don’t believe we are all free. Still, I accept that the change is a step towards acknowledging our diversity.
In the mid-fifties, my mother was once told by a woman on a tram to stop speaking Greek and 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 her words were an inconvenient truth that was quickly swept aside by those who heard it. Perhaps they were left speechless. Australia was a different country then. My mother’s sentiment has shaped how I see the world. When you are different, you judge a society by how it treats its own.
We like to think that we embrace ethnic diversity as a nation, but do we really? Undoubtedly, the migration experience was easier for Europeans than it was for Asians.
A colleague of mine, Joseph (not his real name), is a successful Australian businessman whose great-grandfather came to Australia during the gold rush. I wanted to know whether he saw himself as Australian, Chinese, or something in between. I emailed him, explained the idea of gap people, and asked whether he related to it.
Rather than reply by email, he called me.
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 identity is concerned, he told me his default location is the gap. His non-Caucasian appearance places him there, both in his own sense of self and in the way white Australians, whom he identified as white Anglo-Saxons, perceive him.
Joseph’s school years were not easy. Looking back, 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 whether Australia has shifted from assimilation to genuine diversity, his response was simple. “Look at how Indigenous Australians have been treated, and continue to be treated.”
We talked mostly about school. While things are far better now than in the 1950s when he was growing up, and although the White Australia Policy was formally renounced in 1973, Pauline Hanson’s 1996 election win wasn’t that long ago. We both agreed that in some areas, Australia still has a long way to go.
When I travelled to Greece as an adult for the first time, it felt like coming home. I suspect that had something to do with my mother speaking Greek at home when I was growing up.
After speaking with Joseph, I messaged my friend Anna on WhatsApp and asked her about her identity, and whether she related to Yeun’s idea of the gap. Anna was born in Melbourne and is of Greek and Croatian background. She has a wanderlust that feels distinctly Australian and lives with her partner Peter and their three cats. She grew up in a household where English was the dominant language.
“Neither of my parents spoke English fluently,” she wrote, “but they didn’t speak each other’s native tongue either, so an English of sorts was used by both of them,” followed by a laughing emoji.
Anna doesn’t feel defined by a gap. She feels Australian, though, as she put it, “not in a true blue Aussie way.” When I asked about her parents’ influence on her identity, she replied:
“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 forms part of who we are, but our lived experiences, and to some extent those of our parents, shape us just as much.
Even though I’ve had a good life, at times I still feel like that five-year-old girl who wasn’t invited to Jeremy’s party. I doubt Jeremy remembers approaching me after school to say he would bring my invitation the next day. I never received one. Even so, he sensed that something needed to be said, that my absence shouldn’t go unnoticed. Perhaps his parents said no. Perhaps he simply forgot me once he crossed the school gate. But in that moment, he chose not to ignore me when he easily could have.
Although I no longer feel like I’m on the outside looking in, I still live in the gap. It’s from there that I make sense of my world.
Ari Talantis 