My international students and I usually spend the last fortnight of our course together looking at Orientalism, making a consideration of its discursive (rather than, say, institutional) function. One thing we discuss is essentialist images of Asia that circulate today. This is what we have been doing this new year.

An obvious example at the moment is the Malaysia: Truly Asia campaign, whose television advertisements, as screened in this country at least, show a country apparently devoid of any actual Asian people, at the same time as promoting the country as part of an experience of geographical authenticity. Everyone featured in the advertisements appears to be either a white tourist or a white-looking local. I find this particularly discomfiting, as do my students.

One of my students who is from Malaysia has one Chinese and one European parent but looks like the latter, which he describes as part of the random draw when one has such heritage (an assertion supported by other acquaintances of mine whose children are similarly made). In the course of the class discussion he commented* that he had been approached, while on holiday in KL, by the agency that produced the television ads screening here. Although he declined the approach, he then had the curious experience of being seated with those who had been successfully recruited on his flight home to Kuching. These strangers on the flight assumed he was part of their group of youthful, fashionable, white-looking Malaysians about to make the ad.

I'm attracted to such stories of ethnic confusion, not least because they seem to me to speak to many facets of identity in this country. Maori-Pakeha blending is perhaps the most politicised at the moment, because of the way in which one identifies with these parts of one's heritage has implications for one's participation in the nation-state. But even to be Pakeha is to be blended as well, and to have assumptions made by others about what that blending means.

My parents' separate drift into Anglicanism out of to their Southland Presby-Methodism revealed a line which to me was ethnically-drawn: in terms of the way my father's family thought about its heritage, we may as well have been wearing t-shirts which said "not Scots and not Christian". And yet, that hardcore Presbyheritage was itself a synthesis of imagined Highland traditions in which the mostly-lowland Scots migrants to Otago/Southland had very little stake at home.

A friend of mine expresses it differently: the land which her Kotahitanga ancestors worked so hard to wrest from the hands of its appropriators had been appropriated by her Irish ancestors. Within her hapu, this historical contradiction does not go unnoticed today.

Or, to return to my student's account of himself, people meeting him for the first time in his home town assume he's foreign, and even the fact that he's a native speaker of Mandarin isn't enough to offset the ethnic confusion, until they get to know him, which sometimes they don't bother to do.

Other friends identify not with their ancestors at all but with the tag New Zealander and the nation-state which has historically generated that tag, bespeaking a desire not to play the politics of ethnicity. To me this might be a luxury generated by looking a certain way: if you don't fit people's preconceptions of what a group of people look like, you become problematic. This, to my mind, is the thing that Orientalising discourses, or discourses of ethnic-belonging more generally, can do: sweep others into closeness to the elusive authentic, which is of course an illusion, and hold others at arms' length. Who gets the moniker of authentic, or even "normal", depends on who's doing the sweeping. In my student's case, it was the agency scouts by whom he was approached.

* and gave me permission to share the story elsewhere, for which I thank him.

Originally published at Harvest Bird.

Tags: commentatrix, in aotearoa, teaching & learning