Alice Pung’s first Young Adult novel Laurinda maps the coming of age of Lucy, a sixteen-year-old girl from the fictional outer-west suburb of Stanley (a likely surrogate for Melbourne’s Sunshine), who unexpectedly receives an Equal Access scholarship to a prestigious girls’ school in the inner-east, Laurinda. At her new school, Lucy comes into conflict with The Cabinet, a group of girls expert at capitalising upon and abusing the power they inherit through their class, upper, and race, white. Pung’s depiction of this familiar incarnation of the usual mean girls group is magnified because their power is explored not just in terms of the social microcosm of the schoolyard, but also through the political: race and class privilege. These girls are violent, malicious and childish, their ‘pranks’ include falsely accusing their hot politics teacher Mr. Sinclair of sexual harassment, and pressuring frumpy history teacher Mrs. Vanderwerp to resign. They are enabled and sanctioned in these acts by a school administration that panders to the whims of the trio. This power stems from their matrilineage, the novel crucially reveals that these are the daughters of women who were The Cabinet at Laurinda several generations ago and who are now important patrons of the institution
Lucy’s story was uncomfortably familiar to me. Like Lucy, I was born to migrant parents who lived in the lower-to-working-class outer suburbs of Melbourne. Like Lucy, I sat entrance exams so I could go to school in the middle-to-upper class inner suburbs of Melbourne and faced similar expectations based on my race, from both teachers and students. I was aware that something was amiss but did not know how to articulate the experience of subtle racism, did not even know how to class it as racism because no one was beating me up or calling me ‘slant-eye.’ Instead they’d call Footscray market ‘tacky’ and its shoppers ‘stingy.’
More often than not, Lucy escapes The Cabinet’s attacks by submitting to their exoticising expectations of her: a docile, silent and virginal Asian girl-child. She takes on the role of bystander, silently observing The Cabinet’s abuses of power when inflicted upon others. When these encounters take on a racialised nature, Lucy feels implicated but is too afraid to intervene. When Chelsea asks Harshan, a Fijian-Sri Lankan boy from Laurinda’s brother school, what part of India he is from in attempt to ‘foster some cultural cohesion’, Harshan corrects her mistake kindly. However when she responds with ‘same diff’ and the rest of the Cabinet giggles the conversation sours:
‘Ignorant bitches,’ he [Harshan] muttered under his breath…Suddenly it seemed this was all Harshan’s fault—he was the brute…They were nice girls, and he was a condescending sexist pig…Harshan looked at them…then he did something completely unexpected, which made them squeal. He lowered his head and bowed from the waist—a long-drawn out bow that came to just above the hem of their skirts, his back straight as an ironing board. He slowly came up his hands in the prayer position. Bobbing his head from side to side he said, “Oh golly, gee, ma’am, I’m welly welly solly—please accept my most humble apologies.”’
This moment disturbed my pleasant sense of self-righteous impunity as a ‘victim’ of racism. Did Harshan become a perpetrator as well as a victim from the moment he called the cabinet ‘Ignorant bitches.’ Or was this another case of Western feminism’s insensitivity to Eastern culture. Did he become complicit when he parodied a colonial subaltern? Is it true that there is something of the victim in every perpetrator and something of the perpetrator in every victim even when it comes to racism?
Laurinda deals with this intersection between class and race with freshness, complexity and balance. It is not just the attitudes and behaviour of ‘The Cabinet’ that are interrogated; Lucy too is found guilty of classist snobbery which she wields as a sword and shield against the racism she experiences in not only Laurinda, but in her own suburb. In Stanley’s local shopping centre, Lucy tries to place her baby brother, the Lamb, on a Postman Pat Carousel on which ‘a little girl with a tutu and fairy wings over her pink tracksuit’ is already riding. The girl’s overweight mother tells Lucy:
‘Git lost—we was here first’ and aggressively asks, ‘Have you got a dollar?…Coz I’m not putting in a dollar in for you too.’
Lucy’s internal monologue at this moment is familiar to me, a revenge-fantasy melange of cruel assumptions and classist anger:
‘To her, people like us existed to supply people like her with the cheap and lurid-coloured Chinese takeaway food they loved so much, or the $2 T-shirts they bought from K-mart every few months. In fact, the Postman Pat carousel had probably been made by people who looked like me. Maybe that’s why the seats were so small—to seat pert little bums like the Lamb’s, not the wide load of her junk-food-fed-pup. And it was then that I understood my attachment to Laurinda. I was wearing my uniform, and this —who lived on welfare and fast food—would never be part of that world. She thought that people like us were going to steal her kid’s job in the future, just as she thought we were trying to steal a free ride now.’
Lucy’s tirade is familiar to me, first of all because it is sparked by an altercation in which racism is not verbalised. There is no point at which the mother alludes to or mentions Lucy’s race. And Lucy, like me, most of the time, is paralysed by anger, fear and contempt. She is unable to fight back except in her cruel classist fantasy.
Like Lucy, even as a full-grown adult, I hit a wall at that moment of not knowing how to respond to subtle racism and my response (when it was not silence or ‘playing dumb’) is usually fraught and inadequate. Pung acknowledges the difficulty of responding to racism and steers us away from the victim/victor scenario. I still don’t know whether I was right or wrong for trying to see into the unconscious parts of my so-called perpetrators’ minds as a teenager and as an adult. Is it fair that the racism I identify in strangers and friends is all too often so subtle that I’m never quite sure it’s happening? Was I over-sensitive when I sat in English class during VCE and a classmate said significantly, ‘Isn’t it funny that the people in our class that do better in English aren’t actually ‘English’?’ Or when a kid in the year below me asked me if I ‘could even read’ when our discussion about the final Harry Potter book became heated. These real life situations were never resolved as easily as they were in the books I buried myself in. Was my habit of imagining what these people would say the minute I left the room unfair and probably inaccurate? Were these thoughts nothing more than a form of self-conscious self-harm?
Alice Pung’s Laurinda is important to me because it re-energises exhausted racial narratives of goodies and baddies which inevitably victimise one race and demonise its ‘other.’ By contrast, through its balance and complexity Laurinda makes us so incapable of judging who is in the right that we are forced to put our own self-righteousness aside and instead exercise our ability to empathise.
Jessica Yu is founding editor of the interactive narrativity website,Betanarratives. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been published (or are forthcoming) in The Best Australian Poems 2014, The Lifted Brow (online), Kill Your Darlings, Seizure, Desktop and more. She is a monthly columnist for Right Now.
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