Cirrus@Austlit

'There is a peculiar practice in immigrant Sydney that I know well thanks to being born to a pair of Lebanese settlers. It is when a set of beliefs that parents hold true about other ethnicities (usually groups of people who migrated earlier than they did) are told to their children as a kind of forewarning. For example, as my father drove along Burwood Road to drop me off at Christian Brothers College, he would point at the cluster of Asian shops and say, ‘In business, Chinese are the most cunning.’ This probably would have made a lot more sense to me had my father ever engaged in ‘business’ but he hadn’t which meant he had inherited that saying from some other Lebanese man in a TAB somewhere who had probably heard the same from another Lebanese man and I suppose it could probably be traced to some misadventure of business between two eager men from different parts of the world. When my father said these things, I would nod. As would my sisters and cousins and any other third culture kids splattered around Sydney when their elders spoke these varyingly racist beliefs. We would nod. Not because we agreed, but because very early on as Australian-born children, we knew we would never speak the same language as our parents, that we were somehow more accepting than them if not purely by default of grazing our knees on the diverse playgrounds of Sydney’s schools.' (Introduction)