Whenever I’m asked where I’m from, there’s the short answer and the long answer. In some parts of the world, the short answer I’m Australian is enough and the conversation can quickly move on to more interesting, less introductory small talk topics. In other parts of the world, the short answer is just the prologue to an explanatory story I’ve given countless times in three languages.

In Europe, there are two signals to start the story: either it’s but you don’t look Australian, or it’s but where are you really from? Both drive home yet again that whatever the international image of an Australian is (presumably blonde, suntanned, rather like a Hemsworth brother or Cate Blanchett), I definitely don’t match up, and at least five minutes of the introductory small talk I’ve fallen into is going to be explaining that over 12% of Australia’s population is of Asian descent, how my family and I became part of this 12+%, and by what it means to be an Asian-Australian. It’s an exhausting story to tell sometimes, particularly if I do it in French, but at least in Europe there was always plenty of good wine at hand to be fortified with.

The story comes from a different angle in mainland China. The opening line was always either someone wondering if I was Korean or Japanese which made me wince, or with the remark, Australian? But you are Chinese! which prompts a weird mix of pride and discomfort. Whatever the opening, it kicks off an attempt to explain that last century my ancestors fled southern China for Malaysia where they built a life my parents would eventually leave for Australia, and about the greater diaspora which is Chinese but not Chinese. It’s a more complicated story than the one I use in Europe, and far more difficult to tell given the limits of my Mandarin, and I never know how well I tell it. Thankfully we can always bond over Chinese food!

I don’t tell the story in Australia. In this country where I’ve grown up, whose passport I carry and where I call home, the short answer is enough, or should be, and most of the time it is. Yet in the past few years the short answer has become inadequate, too short, too simplistic, and in need expanded. Thankfully nowadays when I look around, there are plenty of other hyphenated Asians, from Australia and South East Asia to Canada, the U.S. and Europe, all writing and telling similar stories on their terms, giving my and others new mirrors to hold up to our experiences and imaginations. This is my space to record them.

JZT