Hin Chua's Magnetic North

Prior to boarding the Cathay Pacific flight at Heathrow, the customs official flipped through my papers and dryly remarked “now that’s a pretty well used passport!” I’d never paid heed to the fact before, but he was right. Beginning as a bumpkin who had remained within Australia’s borders for seven years and never visited Europe till 2004, I somehow managed to almost completely consume an entire passport in less than five years of travelling under my own steam.

As I meandered throughout the urban countryside bordering Beijing , I began reflecting on my experience as a foreigner photographing around the world and how it both reflected upon and affected my identity.

I never approached travel as a serious journalist would have; there was never a message or a concern other than the cause of Hin. I considered myself a wandering dork, a nerdy city boy exploring for no other reason than the self-indulgent sake of it while simultaneously trying to stay out of as much trouble as possible.

Within that context, my background became a disguise, a covert cloak of invisibility ready to deployed when summoned to by necessity. I found myself choosing when I would reveal myself as Australian. With “good” Australians, more often that not I ended up revelling in that specific Antipodean combination of openness, wit and sophistication that I so appreciated. With the “bad” Australians (such as the Wollongong rugby team discovering sangria for the first time), I’d keep my mouth shut and remain, at least for a few hours, a living and breathing manifestation of the famously inscrutable Oriental.

Of course, it was being Chinese which had the greatest impression; I was a novelty in many of the places that I visited.

Packs of excited Sicilian kids eagerly announced my presence, yelling “Cinese! Cinese!” on my approach. On one memorable occasion, they paused to practice their English on me:

Hello, what is your name?

My name is Hin.

Do you like ice cream?

Yes! My favourite flavour is chocolate.

Do you have sex with sister?

Um… no… 

(To this day, I’m not quite sure if they meant my sister or theirs, but I suppose that doesn’t really change my answer)

Indian teenagers in Tamil Nadu yelled out “Hey Jackie Chan!!” from across the road before performing their best impressions of a Wushu Lotus Kick, which would necessarily result in an acknowledging classic Crane Kick.

Wizened babushkas eyed me as warily as I emerged out of the Latvian woods, staring at me so intensely that I often wondered if I was the first son of Han to set ever foot in that particular patch of the Baltic. To my unqualified glee, I also later discovered that my Latvian hosts referred to me as “the Chinaman” when talking to their friends.

My experiences in the UK ranged from surprised pre-teens exclaiming “Chinese man!” to predictably unsophisticated racial abuse and everything in between. One particular episode remains fresh in the mind: 

I found myself resting near a housing estate in deepest, darkest Kent, when a car containing two middle aged women pulled up: the ladies wanted to know if I had any pirated DVDs in my camera bag for sale. When I sadly shook my head and proffered as an alternative a couple of rolls of Kodak Portra 120 film, they looked initially confused and then decidedly unamused and before vanishing into the late autumn gloom.

Even in East Asian countries, confusion abounded. In Malaysia, I was mistaken for being Korean. In Singapore, people were convinced I was either American or British-raised. In Taiwan, they thought I was Japanese. And in Japan, hell in Japan I’m sure it’d didn’t matter where I was from, I was still just a filthy uncivilised gaijin.

I ended up telling people half-seriously “honestly, I can be anyone you want me to be”. Whenever I needed to appear unthreatening or defuse a situation, I donned my best confused-yellow-tourist mask and hoped for the best. After a couple of years, I even stopped paying lip service to culture-specific linguistic sensitivities. Beyond learning how to say ‘hello’, ‘please’, ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’, I relied on the fact that most strangers would be impressed enough to discover that I spoke good English. In these situations, I was more than willing to accept the role of  the slightly eccentric, harmless oriental who was out of his depth.

The problem is that in the Motherland, China, that deception is completely exposed and my relationship with my ancestry is turned on its head. Not only do I have to figure out how to present myself here, but far more so than in other Chinese countries, my non-existent Mandarin is a severe handicap when interacting with locals. As I remarked to a friend, I find the balance of the foreign and the familiar in China perched at a delicately discomfiting level.

The fact is I’m considered a “banana”: someone who is yellow on the outside but white on the inside. In China, I can’t help but feel that I should be something more than what I am. Why don’t I know Mandarin? Because of this insecurity, I’m compelled to wonder what every peasant is thinking as they stare at me when I saunter past their front doors. What do they see me as? Who do they think I am? This is the only country in the world where I actually want to know the answer.

Of course, none of this existential discomfort should affect the final end result. Photographs are photographs and beyond my intuition, good luck and old-fashioned Asian industry, nothing much is going to change that.

And besides, I’m not a fish completely out of water. Once I warmed up my stiff right knee, I mastered the Chinese squat. I can perform the throat-clearing ‘hoick’ as well as the best of the locals. And in terms of xenophobia, I know exactly where I stand in the Grand Hierarchy of Yellowness. You don’t know about the Hierarchy? Well buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about it (but just one drink mind you, for the Asian Flush will quickly seize control).

Ultimately, I’m cool with being a banana. It’s good enough to recall my first experience of Hong Kong as an adult in 2009, when the sights, smells and cacophonous wave of Cantonese voices combined to precipitate a potent cocktail of institutionalised cultural memory. Here was a new place that clearly wasn’t, provoking an attendant sensation of contentment to match the balmiest of summer evenings. This boy hasn’t been totally bleached, not quite yet.