TRANSCRIPT
When Chinese-born Angie Cui got married to her Bangladeshi husband they had not one, not two, but three weddings.
She’s from China's icy Harbin region, and he from the humid and tropical monsoon weather of Bangladesh - the two met and fell in love as international students in Melbourne.
“Every time someone you know [is] about to get married, or some friends [are] about to get married they were like, 'Oh, I'm so nervous about my wedding. I'm so excited.' And I'm just like, I had three. I had three. I got married three times. (Laughs) And there's always someone who asks me, you got married three times? So, you married three different people? I was like, no, no, no. One person three times. And I'm tired of the wedding dress. (Laughs) I'm tired about reception. (Laughs)”
Their first wedding in Melbourne was an intimate ceremony in Australia surrounded by close friends.
“I think I invited maybe eight or nine people... It was really, really tiny and my dress wasn't that expensive. So total wedding cost was around less than $2,000.”
After she was granted permanent residency in Australia, Angie had a second wedding with her husband's family in Bangladesh - which she was told would also be small.
“So we went to Bangladesh first. The first thing we told us was that it would be a small wedding. But then on the wedding day, I actually noticed 600 people were there. And then, my dress was really heavy, the lahenga, it was huge. Really heavy. And the hairpiece, everything gold. It was good. I think it was around 400 to 600 people, I can't remember, in the wedding. And half of them, my husband told me he didn't even know who they are.”
By the time the third wedding rolled around in China, Angie was less enthused.
“The hairdresser was doing my hairpiece and she was asking me, 'Aren't you excited you're getting married today?' And, I was like, 'Yeah a third time.' (Laughs)... That was huge. So yes, three weddings. Three countries. Crazy.”
Angie says while she wouldn't repeat the experience again, sharing cultures with her Bangladeshi husband has been wonderful and eye-opening.
But not without its challenges.
Like Angie's, about a third of all registered marriages in Australia are intercultural. Experts - like Tish Prentice from the Scanlon Foundation - say they play a broader role in Australia's social cohesion.
“I guess intercultural marriage, in some ways is a reflection of acceptance. So when two people from different cultural groups, or different racial groups come together and join in that kind of intimate partnership, it certainly suggests a level of acceptance, and intimacy that's special and unique.”
“Love is love, honestly. And I think you will really miss out if I had actually closed my eyes to the fact that, 'Oh, he's of a different race', I would not be able to enjoy like eight amazing years of, you know, being with my soulmate.”
That's Stella Adlike, who moved from Kenya to Perth to study accounting in 2015.
Two months after the move, she met who would later become her husband.
“So we basically met at uni, he was [at] the same uni as me at Curtin. And we became friends, went for-- we started by going for breakfast, meeting in uni corridors. And then one day, he asked me out for dinner.”
What started as friendship, soon blossomed into love.
“I think we actually officially started dating that same year when my family came to visit me. And he was just so, so lovely. So he was when I was at work, he was taking my family out for lunch, for dinner, bringing groceries for them. So I thought, 'Oh, he's really invested.' If he likes my family, then yeah, there's something to it. So yeah, we started dating from there. Yeah.”
Stella says she is very comfortable in her own skin.
But says it's come as a surprise when people have questioned their relationship in the past.
“I once met a lady at the shopping mall who told me-- we were walking with my partner and she looks at me, she's like, 'Wow, you did well, congratulations.' And I'm like, 'Wait, excuse me?' So, she explained to me 'Oh, at least you choose a white partner, blah, blah, blah.' And I was like, you know, my jaw dropped; I was so, so shocked. But I think to my partner, because he's never experienced anything like that, to him it was funny. So he was laughing about it. But later on, I was like, 'No.' That's-- You know, I had to explain to him.”
Stella says her husband is supportive and empathetic.
But sometimes, she says, he's struggled to realise when she's being subject to racism, especially the more subtle microagressions that can occur.
“For people who are not affected by race, it's really hard for them to get it. So sometimes I really have to do a lot of education to my partner and say, 'You know, when you were queuing up at the supermarket, for instance, and someone looks back, like, 'Oh, how can I help?' And then she's like, 'Oh, are you together?' Sort of, you know, shocked that you two are together. So such things, he didn't understand that how that could be racist.”
Stella says while some people can be ignorant, most are accepting.
“It's quite beautiful because at least I get to enjoy visiting two countries. You know, going to Kenya and going to Russia any time, which is really really nice. As well as sometimes we have his family over and they make all their different cuisines. Same thing when my family comes in, you know, it's, it's different. And sometimes you meet people who give you such beautiful compliments as well. So I'll say for the most part of it, it's really, really good. I wouldn't say-- We're quite fortunate to be in Australia. As much as some people can be ignorant, most of the times, it's good.”
Trish Prentice from the Scanlon Foundation says these unions represent a breaking down of barriers at both a personal and individual level.
“The fact that we're seeing more of these kinds of relationships in Australia, is perhaps an indication of the integration in the intermixing of different people from different cultural and racial and ethnic backgrounds, which I think is positive for Australia, and certainly speaks of the cohesion that we have or the cohesiveness that we have as a society.”
Interracial marriage was once frowned upon and restricted by the state.
This, coupled with an added social pressure, sought to discourage people from engaging in intercultural relationships.
Australian Catholic University research fellow Dr Rachel Stevens says up until the mid 20th century, Indigenous women in Australia required permission from the state to marry a non-Indigenous man.
“So we see, especially Indigenous women, female sexuality, being very restricted, being very much regulated by the state, as a way to, in a de facto sense restrict the amount of interracial marriage that happened throughout the Australian colonies.”
Dr Stevens says this also extended to relationships between Chinese men and Anglo women.
“Especially during the Gold Rush is where there's evidence of around 2000 such marriages between white women and Chinese men in the southern colonies during the Gold Rush. But within a couple of decades, this number had reduced to just a couple of 100 such marriages. Because there was so much social pressure to restrict the marriage between Chinese and Chinese men and white women... And if they did, you know, it was credit to them because they risked, you know, being disinherited from their family or social ostracization. You know, there was a lot of risk involved in engaging in intercultural relationships.”
Dr Stevens says this extended to the segregation of African American troops when they arrived in Australian during the second World War.
And up until 1962, if a Catholic wanted to marry a Protestant they would have been excommunicated.
“It's all very well to get into a relationship and date someone who's from a different ethnic group or different religion. But it's when people get married, and the question of children, you know, bringing children into the world and how they're going to be raised, this is where the fault lines often emerge. And this can be some tension about what faith that your child will be raised in. And so very simple things like that become quite problematic, you know, so it's often with children, when children are born into the well, that's where the issues can, can appear.”
Carolyn is the daughter of an interracial marriage.
Born to a Chinese-Malaysian mother and white Australian father, she says having two cultural identities allows her to have the best of both worlds.
“My father was in the military. So I grew up with a lot of mixed race friends, I guess. My mum had a lot of Chinese friends, a lot of Asian friends in general; their kids generally were mixed race. So it was kind of a bit of a norm for me.”
But she's often felt like she had to choose between the two.
She says the way she has identified culturally has shifted throughout her life.
But that also began to change as she got older.
“Growing up going through school, I guess, with there being a lot of, I guess, like racism, and, you know, being bullied because of what I would bring for lunch, then I kind of tried to hide that side of my identity.”
Carolyn says because she was mixed race, it was easier to conceal certain parts of her Asian heritage.
“The older that I got, the more I realised that I was missing out on one side of my identity. And I guess I kind of worked through a lot of internalised racism. And now, yeah, I guess it's really nice to find people who I can share my culture with who have a similar understanding.”
The Scanlon Foundation's Trish Prentice says this is a common experience among mixed race children.
She says cultural identity is a complex journey that each individual navigates differently.
“I think that's a journey that many of many of the children from intercultural marriages, or intercultural relationships they take on; there's kind of an added complexity to their identity as they grow up... And in fact, that may even change as a person grows up and through different life phases as well. So I think it's interesting. And I think it shows a complexity that those of a particular race or ethnicity don't have to navigate. If you kind of know that you've been brought up by Chinese parents, and your identity is Chinese, there's no complexity there. But if you've got a couple of cultures or a couple of religions, then, you know, you've got to kind of work through how you see yourself and how you self identify.”
Carolyn says navigating this has been a challenge.
“The biggest struggle for me was trying to identify with one group or another, based on my own experiences, and based on, I guess, people wanting me to identify with one group or people excluding me from one group. And it wasn't until I think it was, I don't know, maybe five years ago that I started looking into it more, and realising that there is this thing called mixed race identity crisis, that I hadn't really heard of that term before. And I think knowing that, you know, there are other people who can relate.”
While intercultural relationships have become increasingly commonplace, not everyone's experience with them are positive.
Helen Nguyen had been urged by her Vietnamese mother not to date outside of her race.
And as the only Asian person in her friend group at a predominantly white school, Helen says she did everything in her power to defy any stereotypes being thrust upon her.
“I felt a very strong pressure from everyone around me that I was expected to only date another Asian man or be friends with only Asian people, and, I guess represent the whole, or every stereotype of an Asian person.”
She says she wanted to show that she was more than just a two-dimensional stereotype.
“And that manifested in a lot of different ways it manifested in hiding my intelligence. Like, I've always been a bit of an academic overachiever in high school, and I was paying it down and acting dumb and trying to show that I was less smart than my non Asian friends and trying to show that I had-- I was only around white people all the time, I would only date white boys. I tried to be fit and active and show that I wasn't like a stereotypical awkward Asian girl. So yeah, so the rebellion manifested in a lot of different aspects in my dating choices was one part of that.”
But those rebellious dating choices weren't always embraced by her parents.
“My mum always said the same thing. She had a very much like us against the world mentality. And she'd always repeat like, 'White people won't treat us the same. They'll never see us as equal. They don't care about us the way Asian people would or the Asian community would.' She lived in her fear complex pretty deeply. And in the environment we had grown up in my parents were pretty isolated. And that was the environment that they were familiar with. And they would try and echoed that onto me. And I know they were they meant well and wanted to protect me. But that only in turn deepened my internalised racism, and then like my angsty teenage need to rebel from that further and show them like, 'No, like, people around me do care about me, like I am worthy of being cared about more than just people that only saw me as a race'.”
Helen says in some of her relationships the surface level approval she experienced left her feeling disrespected.
“I think there is a big expectation in society, or at least an expectation that I felt as a young Asian woman to satisfy this submissive, docile stereotype; being very agreeable, quiet, willing to do everything, but on the other hand, also to be hyper sexual beings. And yeah, it's a stereotype that I felt like hit me really hard when I was dating quite a lot of different white people. And, yeah, so I've had like a few like experiences intimately where I felt like I was shoved into this box.”
She says it wasn't at all what she expected.
“I thought it meant like I was like I've finally proven myself as Australia and as belonging in Australia, if I had white approval, if I had this community around me white friends and a white boyfriend to validate my existence, basically that that I didn't even need to speak up then because I had the approval to show it. But yeah, it made me realise that it wasn't all that I thought it was meant to be. And that there's a lot of, yeah, there's inherent power imbalances in in these kinds of dynamics.”
Helen says she's since worked through a lot of internalised racism.
“I had always had this very toxic mentality that I really wanted a half white child. I always thought that they were so beautiful. And that if I had mixed race kids, white Asian mixed race kids that they would be more accepted in society and they wouldn't have to face the same kind of marginalisation or yeah, that cultural gender imbalances that I faced as a fully Asian woman.”
She says she soon began to realise that some of these thoughts were inherently problematic.
And is now on a journey of self-acceptance.
“It was a friend actually, that brought this to my attention, she was like, 'They would still be half of you. And if you reject yourself, your kids are likely going to reject you too'. Which made me think about how I would-- what role I would play in raising a child, that if I was raising the child with that mentality... And all of these questions came up, and I was so afraid of like, being potentially hated by my child by still giving them this half me that I realised, yeah, how problematic my whole thinking was. And if I didn't accept myself, then there was no way like, I can expect my child to either accept me or accept themselves. And yeah, it's been it's been a long work in progress, coming to terms with my ethnic identity and the parts of it I used to be so ashamed of and I am now learning to love.”
