Associate Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: In “White People Parenting,” the observing speaker slowly realizes she is also being observed. First, she notices Korean employees at Suki Sushi greeting a white customer in Japanese, beginning a conversation about the shifts and slippages that occur where ethnicities, nationalities, and languages meet, are performed, are perceived. How much of whiteness is a skin color, a way of speaking, consuming, seeing? I’m struck by how Frances An’s images mirror this complex conversation about identity categories—the wasabi and soy sauce mixing “into a green-brown blob” and the leftover bento box that mistakenly ends up in the recycling bin.
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White People Parenting
The employees at Suki Sushi yabber to one another in Korean until an Anglo-Australian woman approaches the store. They pipe up a “konnichiwa” as she ogles rows of sushi rolls lined up at the glass window. I glance at the empty bento box on my table, soy sauce gathering in the plastic lattice mold at the base. A pair of disposable chopsticks rests across the box, their tips stained in wasabi and soy sauce, which mix into a green-brown blob.
“WAAA!” A baby yowls in a pram that appears at the top of the escalator. The baby’s arms flail at the mountain of stuffed Pikachus and My Little Pony dolls tumbling back down onto its face. An Anglo-Australian man pushes the pram over the bump at the top of the escalator, his arms and neck covered in tattoos of naked women and cherubs. As the baby wails louder, he shakes the pram. “Little fucker—Mummy’s coming, okay?” I glance at the old Asian woman sitting diagonal to me. She shovels Singaporean noodles into her mouth, followed by a clump of alfalfa. She continues eating her meal in alternating mouthfuls: noodles, alfalfa, noodles, alfalfa.
An Asian woman with platinum hair hurries up the escalator to join her partner. Her fake tan and contouring look like mud slathered all over her body. An imitation Gucci handbag hangs off one hand while she holds a packet of Huggies nappies in the other. She speaks with an exaggerated Aussie accent, “Hun, I left my shopping list in the car.”
“Can’t you just fuckin’ remember?!” The man grabs the woman’s nappy-holding hand. Is it just me or do Asian-woman/white-man couples conjure up images either of star-crossed lovers fleeing a (Vietnam) war zone or drunken old dudes who beat their mail-order wives?
“Seriously?!” She tries to yank her hand away. I shouldn’t stereotype any couple-types, I guess: some are happy; some not so much. A mother wearing a Hello Kitty–themed bucket hat walks by, patting her children’s heads to draw them away from the bickering couple, “Đừng nhìn người ta.” Meanwhile, the baby stares at me—no, it’s staring at Noodles-Alfalfa woman, who is in turn watching me watch them. The pram swerves as the man drives it back down the escalator, his face purple as he glares at his partner.
Noodles-Alfalfa turns around just as both parents have their backs to us. She shuts the noodle box. “Aus-sie parents . . .” She speaks with a Mandarin accent.
“Um . . . sorry?” I lean closer: wasn’t one of them Asian?
She points after the pram. “White people.” She shakes her head. “We Chinese never do like that, ha?” “À . . .” It doesn’t matter that I’m Vietnamese-Chinese. Noodles-Alfalfa gives me an oily smile. I pile the plastic sushi wrapping, chopsticks, and leftover wasabi into the empty bento box and take it all to a rubbish bin. After I push the bento box down one of the chutes, Noodles-Alfalfa raises an eyebrow at me. That was the recycling bin.
Frances An is a Perth-based writer interested in literatures of Communism and Nhạc Vàng (‘Yellow/Gold Music’). She is completing a PhD in psychology at the University of Western Australia on corporate misconduct. Frances has recently published short stories and essays in Pulch Magazine, Journal, Sydney Review Of Books, Star 82, Seizure Online, and Peril. She has performed/published her work for the Sydney Writers Festival, Writing And Society Centre at Western Sydney University and Lost In Books.
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