I sat at the marble dining table, steam from the bowl of pho in front of me fogging my glasses. The smell of chicken stock made me want to throw up.
Mum stood by the kitchen sink, furiously scrubbing chopsticks while wearing green rubber gloves.
“Is he white or Viet?” She dropped the chopsticks into the sink with a rattle.
Mum had just found a box of unopened pregnancy tests on my bookshelf, hidden behind Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
“He is white,” I declared smugly. Was that really what was important to her? His ethnicity?
After a recent incident in bed, I suspected I might be pregnant. For weeks, I’d felt panicked and sick, and struggled to digest food. I was 21 and not ready to be a mother. I barely communicated with my own mother: cultural differences kept us distant.
Like a good Vietnamese woman, my mother had waited until marriage to have children and spent most of her time working tirelessly as a travel agent, a role common for Vietnamese migrants. Like a classic second-gen Asian, I was studying to be a lawyer, but on Centrelink. I worked three jobs on top of university because I was desperate to move out of home and become independent. By my fifth year of university, I’d already had several boyfriends. I was proud to have rebelled against my conservative parents, who’d held my childhood tight in their fists. Sleeping with guys – white guys – felt like a way of reclaiming my lost youth.
My mother clucked her tongue. “White people are not like us,” she said. “They will not treat us the same.”
I hated when she spoke in terms of “us.” I was not like her; I was more open.
“You’re a traditionalist,” I snapped. “That stuff doesn’t matter anymore.” My mother expected me to date only Asian boys.
“It does matter,” Mum insisted. “Our line is to be Vietnamese. I don’t want all I have given you to be lost.”
Did I care about losing touch with my Vietnamese roots? For years, I’d been trying to erase them
Her words hovered in the air. I felt guilty but was unsure why. Did I care about losing touch with my Vietnamese roots? For years, I’d been trying to erase them. At my predominantly white, private girls’ school, I felt lesser because I was fully Asian. Once, in geography class when the teacher had stepped out of the room, a girl quipped, “Turns out, I’m only, like, 3 per cent Asian. Thank god I missed out on that!” Everyone around me sniggered. I laughed along, but my cheeks burned. Since then, I have never dated someone who shares my ancestry. I do not even have any Vietnamese friends.
In her Vogue article “”, journalist Sylvia Hong equated her “white saviour syndrome” with her desire to fit into white spaces. “Society has taught us, especially first-generation immigrants, that validation comes with being invited to sit next to white people – even though none of us will ever actually make it to the table.”
For years, I had been deliberately socialising with white people, mimicking them, dating them. Sex, to me, has always been political – a way to stay in close proximity to white people. When it came to having children, I wanted to have mixed-race offspring so they could have the power I’d never had.
But hearing my mother’s words about “our line” made me wonder how I would raise a half-white child. Would I enrol my child in Vietnamese school? Drag them to Quanh Minh temple, like my parents had every Sunday, hissing at me to sit upright while I played Angry Birds on my iPhone? Would my child ask me about Vietnam, and all I’d be able to offer them would be my Uber Eats order from Saigon Street Food?
When it came to having children, I wanted to have mixed-race offspring so they could have the power I’d never had
Writer and illustrator Carla Gee has written about . After having a mixed-race Chinese and Anglo-Australian child, Gee started to value her racial identity. She wanted to be better for her children, to be a source of cultural knowledge and comfort to them – to give substance to her children’s Asian identity, beyond merely “Chinese New Year and chopsticks”.
I realised my dating choices would not erase my Vietnamese genes. Any children I had would still share my Asian identity. Would they hate me for it? Or would they hate me for not sharing enough of my Asian heritage and genes? I was afraid of disorientating them in the same way growing up in Australia had disorientated me.
“I’m just scared,” I blubbered, standing up to approach my mum.
I lied and told her I’d only bought the pregnancy tests to be safe. That I was abstinent. That I would break up with Dylan*. Internally, I tried to reassure myself. If I was really pregnant, Mum would have my back – right?
Mum slid a bowl of bright jackfruit towards me. “We are the same, no matter what,” she sighed. “Just study and eat your jackfruit.”
That evening, as Mum prayed before our shrine, I shut myself in the bathroom. Footscray was oddly silent, nothing but the slow crawl of kinh prayers twirling up the stairs. I was terrified, but less so knowing I had bridged a divide with my mum. Holding the pregnancy test between my legs, I urinated. Everything was quiet, as if the universe was listening in.
I was terrified, but less so knowing I had bridged a divide with my mum
A pink sunset burst across the white square, bleeding into a single, slim horizontal line. I exhaled, clutching the test to my chest, eyes filling with tears. When Mum yelled at me to come downstairs to pray, I abruptly wiped my face and threw the test into the bin.
After my pregnancy scare, something inside me shifted. I can better understand the politics of interracial dating, why people do it and the power imbalances it perpetuates for Asian women. For that reason, I no longer look to white men for validation or self-congratulatory thrills.
When I have children, I want it to be with someone I love. I don’t want my children to be forced into this world by my insecurity.
Maybe, what my mother gave me was never lost.
*Name has been changed.
Helen Nguyen is a writer and final year law student, currently interning at the United Nations.
