Funny Ethnics by Shirley Le
“I looked at the streets of Yagoona through eyes stinging with melted Maybelline liquid liner. Yagoona looked back at me, the wannabe hipster who dreamed of moving to a share house in the inner west and cackled.”
Funny Ethnics (2023) is the debut novel from Shirley Le. Le won the inaugural Sweatshop mentorship with publisher Affirm Press in 2018 and is also a Creative Producer for Sweatshop, a literacy movement based in Sydney that celebrates culturally and linguistically diverse communities through reading and writing.
Set in Western Sydney, we are introduced to second-generation Vietnamese-Australian Sylvia Nguyen as she navigates the transition from childhood to adolescence and young adulthood. The book opens with Sylvia setting the scene to inform her parents - Vietnamese refugees - she intends to drop her Law degree to pursue a career as a writer. The next night, her father suffers a nosebleed so severe he needs to go to the hospital.
A relative who is also a GP is called to assist, advising the heavy bleeding is likely due to stress and asking if anything has happened in the last twenty-four hours that might have contributed. Sylvia informs him about their discussion the previous night. He lays down a hard truth:
“I hated every single goddamn day of that med degree, but let me tell you something, Sylvia: when I became a GP, I realised it’s not about the money, it’s about the respect. You know how hard it is for us to get some respect ‘round here?”
This somewhat intense prologue sets us up well for the rest of Sylvia’s story. Catapulting backwards from that moment, Le dives into Sylvia’s early adolescent years and embarrassing (borderline traumatic) experiences as she grapples with discovering who she is versus who others want her to be.
From attending extra-curricular tutoring in an over-crowded, filthy back office to getting her first period while wearing white linen trousers, body image anxieties, first relationships and navigating the “bingeing and purging, waxing and waning” of early 2000s diet culture - Sylvia’s life is littered with the classic coming-of-age tropes that will no doubt feel familiar to many.
Except, hers is continuously filtered through the lens of her Vietnamese heritage and her parent's unyielding desire for her to be more - to achieve greatness in a country they have sacrificed so much to exist in.
But Sylvia simply can’t - or doesn’t want to - live up to these expectations. Despite a promising start getting into a coveted high school, she and her best friend Tammy find more important matters to be pre-occupied with than schoolwork, like boys and dieting:
“Un-der ave-rage, un-der ave-rage, un-der ave-rage, un-der ave-rage,” Ba’s first rapped on the kitchen table as he read through my report card. There were four columns against each subject: my mark, the ‘average’ mark achieved in the subject across the cohort, my rank in the grade, and a letter grade. E stood for Egghead, B for Boohoo Bitch, C for Cretinous, and F for Fuck Off. In Year 7, I had boohooed my way through school, and now in Year 10, I was ready to Fuck Off.”
Throughout school, we see Sylvia battle the internalised racism she’s grown up with. From realising that even her place in her coveted school ‘doesn’t count’ and that “a school with so many Asians just confirmed that Asians form ghettos and do not assimilate” to watching Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes, and consuming the belief that Asians are “forever losers who were only useful to Australian society as human calculators”. It’s easy to see why she veers from pursuing academic success to just wanting to make it through.
Sylvia's achievements, or lack of them, are never not held in comparison to others in the community. Her parents constantly jump from worrying that Sylvia is underachieving to worrying about what others will think. The impact on Syvia is isolating:
“Through a veil of tears, I saw my parents as 2D pixelated versions of themselves - black hair and orange T-shirts from the Kathmandu outlet in Auburn, huddled together like a pair of paper tigers. All they had was each other while their ogre daughter spewed, grovelled and disappointed.”
Sylvia is an unusual narrator in that we don’t get many glimpses inner life. Much of what she shares with us is a play-by-play of her experiences. She’s lost in a world where there seems to be only one part for her to play, and she already feels like she’s messed that up. She clings to Tammy, who similarly seems only to have one part to play but who is much more capable of embracing it and making it her own.
Le injects the story with numerous rich, visceral details and scenes designed to be humorous, but most of them centre around Sylvia being singled out or feeling humiliated in some way. Under Sylvia’s critical eye, everyone becomes a bulging cartoon-ish caricature with “bánh mì and cigarette-flavoured burps”; they’re too skinny or “three fridges wide” or with “red pubes” all over their chin.
No one is safe from these aesthetic criticisms. After a while, I found them less funny and wondered whether Le was trying to show us Sylvia living a ‘shields up’ existence - that her perpetual sense of loneliness is simply created by her inability to see anything positive about anyone because no one has seen anything promising in her - or were these simply just meant to be funny descriptions? If the latter, the humour quickly got lost on this reader.
Funny Ethnics is about the cultural divide between parents and their children raised in different lands. It’s about the complicated nuances of belonging, especially for migrants and second-generation individuals or anyone who feels pulled between worlds. It’s also about feeling seen by those we care about most, but also by ourselves - allowing ourselves to understand our needs and drives and permitting ourselves to go after them.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com
