In the opening chapter of Shirley Le’s debut novel, Funny Ethnics, main character Sylvia Nguyen is praying with her family in western Sydney’s Phước Huệ Temple, asking Buddha to help her pass the selective school test she’s taking that year. “Soz for the stupid question,” she mumbles. “I know you’re not Santa.”
That child-Sylvia believes that Santa could grant this request, while Buddha could not, reflects the push-pull of heritage and home that characterises the lives of so many second-generation migrant children. As the only child of Vietnamese refugees who never discuss the traumas of leaving their homeland by boat, Sylvia’s story is one of both longing and belonging. But what she is actually longing for – pleasing her parents, kowtowing to community expectations, fitting in or standing out – is often so unclear, both to herself and the reader, that at times I found her to be frustratingly passive.
But then I read about the brick thrown through the window of the family home by her white neighbours – wrapped in an article on Pauline Hanson’s infamous speech about Australia being “in danger of being swamped by Asians” – and I came to understand Sylvia a little more. Her passivity is a learned behaviour, acquired as a result of her marginalisation.
Coming of age in Sydney’s Yagoona (a suburb she says peaked in 1971, when Australia’s first McDonald’s was opened there), Sylvia sees herself as “bird-brained” failure in a community of achievers and bootstrap-pullers. She makes it into the selective school, but doesn’t maintain her grades; her goals are sidelined by a lack of emotional security and a toxic relationship with food.
She fails to get the grades to study law and must endure the shame of enrolling in an arts degree for a year before transferring; when she finally does get into law she almost wilfully underperforms, not turning up to class or doing her readings, too conscious of her white classmates who lack self-awareness. She’s a hanger-on too: clinging to her high school BFF Tammy, a vivacious Viet who is able to make new friends while also simultaneously embracing and moving on from her western Sydney roots.
Sylvia does not embrace or move on. She passes from childhood to adulthood, making and losing friends; attempting romantic relationships in the age of apps while trying to avoid being “dickmatised” (“when you put a guy on a pedestal and let him have the upper hand”); furtively negotiating gynaecological health scares and fumbling through her career ambitions. Her failure to toe the line, set not only by her parents but mainstream Australia, is a recurring event; though when the situation calls for it, she uses her “Model Minority Voice”, ending every sentence “with a shy smile and enthusiastic nod”.
Funny Ethnics is not your typical coming of age novel, though it clearly possesses qualities of one. There’s no clear three-act structure that concludes with a resolution; no big aha moment at the end where Sylvia comes to terms with her place in the world. Instead there are many complications, though Le makes room for both hilarity (Sylvia meets a Viet “junkie” who identifies as a flaneur) and heartbreak (the closest she comes to self-acceptance is via a university assessment, which her tutor threatens to fail her on because it’s not objective enough).
Although I found myself wanting more of her parents’ story, I also appreciated that Le held back – in doing so, she renders the ethnic story as unequivocally Australian, with the focus on Sylvia’s here and now. This is not a “poor me” narrative, nor is it riddled with trauma porn for white Australian readers. (On that front, Le’s mother tongue is neither translated nor italicised for the white gaze, and no meaning is lost.) Instead, Funny Ethnics is an erudite depiction of intersectional identity; subtle but powerful in its portrayal of communities on the fringe.
Le was a recipient of the inaugural Sweatshop mentorship with publisher Affirm Press, and her talent is apparent throughout her debut. Funny Ethnics is so rich in similes that at times I lamented the parts where the physical sensorial details (the shape of a man’s head; the shape of another’s lips) held greater weight than Sylvia’s interior life.
But this approach also makes the book canny and engaging: the reader must work for the story, and it is in their contemplation of meaning that the book is better appreciated.
Wry and matter-of-fact, Funny Ethnics is the story of a young woman who sees herself as “a nit on a blonde scalp”, who also doesn’t see much point in doing anything about it. And neither Santa nor Buddha can save her.
Funny Ethnics by Shirley Le is published by Affirm Press ($29.99)
