The Plaid Bag Connection

Tag Archives: Chinese Australian


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Ethnoburban development in Melbourne

From the 2011 Glen Waverley Chinese New Year and Lantern Festival. Photo: Alpha (Flickr/Creative Commons).

The Age ran an article this week about the Melbourne suburb of Glen Waverley, which is quickly becoming an enclave for affluent, well-educated Chinese migrants. Currently, Mainland China is the country that sends the most migrants to Australia. Many arrive in the country as international students and decide to settle (although “settling” in the era of transnational capital flows may still involve plenty of back-and-forth travel and living arrangements, as detailed in Aiwha Ong‘s Flexible Citizenship).

But why are so many choosing Glen Waverley? The answer is that it provides the crucial building blocks to begin a life in a new country: good public school education, transport, a safe environment and – an important factor – other new migrants.

This demographic shift makes Glen Waverley analogous to other affluent “ethnoburban” communities in Western settler societies: Arcadia and Rowland Heights near Los Angeles, for example, or Markham near Toronto.

Interestingly, in the accompanying photo gallery the editors decided to focus on school performance in Glen Waverley:

Last year Glen Waverley’s school was the highest performing non-selective state school in the VCE, and 80% of its enrolment have Asian backgrounds.

Which came first, the Asian students or the high performance?


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Is diversity enough? Tim Soutphommasane on multiculturalism and cultural learning


In this talk for TEDx Sydney, Australian political philosopher and public intellectual Tim Soutphommasane asks whether Australian society truly values cultural diversity. He argues that cosmopolitan cultural consumption is not enough, and that Australians and other people from Western societies must engage in real “cultural learning.” For Soutphommasane, valuing diversity means going beyond just adding bits and pieces to our cultural repertoire and truly changing the way we engage with the world and with our fellow citizens.

Watch the video, or download the audio file (MP3, 11.18 Mb).

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你看得懂嗎？Revisiting the “white people can’t read this” shirt

The Aussie China Stories Twitter feed reminded me of a t-shirt I saw for sale on the internet years ago. On it are 5 simple Chinese characters: 白人看不懂, or “white people can’t read this.”

Well, it just so happens that plenty of 白人 can read it, and add to that every other color of the skin color rainbow, too. The Western world’s growing fascination with China means that more and more people of non-Chinese heritage are learning the language.

On the other hand, heritage language loss among Chinese and other Asian groups in Western countries is advancing so rapidly that many Chinese Americans, Chinese Australians, or what have you can barely speak the language, let alone read or write it.

Perhaps we should change the shirt around and have it say something like “黃人看不懂.” (Yellow people can’t read it.)

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