It took me the most part of my childhood to understand how my mum could be Cambodian, but born in Vietnam, at the same time. She was born in Cambodia then moved to Vietnam. During the Vietnam War she worked as a telephone operator for the American government. Needless to say when the Communists won, they didn’t like my mum very much. They put my family in one of the re-education camps.

My mum resolved to escape Vietnam - they had to go to Thailand and leave the continent from there. They pretended to be visiting relatives in Thailand, and once there found people who would help them flee. When asked if they wanted to go to Australia, America, or Canada, they heard that Australia was the lucky country and decided to take their chances there.

When they arrived in Australia, and the Immigration Department was going through their papers, my mum found out that someone in Thailand made a mistake. They said she was born in Vietnam rather than Cambodia. My mum was upset. The guy at Immigration didn’t know what to do.

{quotes}He came up with a solution. “If you tell me you were born in Vietnam,” he says, “we’ll let you in the country straight away. If you tell us you were born in Cambodia, you’ll have to wait a few years for your papers to be processed. I’ll give you half an hour to think about it.”{/quotes} My mum went away, fought with her husband, then returned.

“Okay,” she told the guy at Immigration, “I was born in Vietnam.”

If the same thing were to happen these days, I think my mum would have been accused of being a terrorist for having false papers. I could have been born in a detention centre rather than the Queen Victoria Hospital.

My mum came to Australia in 1980, in the midst of a national debate about whether so many postwar immigrants should be let into the country. “They’ll take our jobs,” was a common cry. They’ll bring the “corruption and drug culture of wartime Saigon,” insinuates historian and social commentator Geoffrey Blainey. They can’t speak English, they look different, they believe in different gods. Guess what they say about the refugees currently seeking entry into Australia?

The concept of ethnicity and nationality are tricky issues. It implies loyalty to a homeland rather than the ‘host’ country you are in. Many migrants seeking entry into Australia to escape their domestic conflicts do not intend to return, because they have nothing left for them. They still want to retain a part of their culture yet are willing to learn the customs of their new home. They have a shared history with the people still in the homeland, yet their future is in the new country. It is their children who test the boundaries of nationality.

{quotes}I was born in Australia. On many occasions, working in retail or just being at a train station, a stranger will ask me, “Where are you from?” I tell them I was born in Australia. This response never suffices {/quotes}and the stranger will ask me, “Where are your parents from?” I am fused between two cultures yet people still like to pigeonhole, they like to decipher which nation I am more akin with. Even then, their knowledge of Vietnam is limited.

While having coffee the other day someone asked me where I was from. “I was born in Australia,” I tell him, “but my parents are from Vietnam.” His next question startled me. “So do you carry a knife?” Having seen my bemused expression, he continued, “No offense, it’s just that Vietnamese people are renowned for stabbing people.” I have never stabbed anyone, or known anyone who has. The only knives I own stay in the kitchen.

It’s difficult to approach a culture you know nothing about. You want to learn more about them but you don’t want to accidentally offend them. Sometimes it’s easier to accept the generalisations that have been made a thousand times over, without finding out their validity. Sometimes it’s easier to keep them in a detention centre, use phrases like ‘asylum seekers’, ‘illegal entry’ and ‘jumping the queue’ rather than find out who they are, the horrors they have experienced, their heartfelt yearning for a better life.

The threat of the ‘other’ is a recurring issue. It is a technique used to create a shared feeling of identity, by emphasising the differences in the other. Describing them in derogatory terms or using extreme examples of behaviour allows us to dehumanise the other, creating a focus for anger and hatred. It helps us feel morally superior because we are protecting our people from the dangers of the other. We become united in our cause for justice.

But what does justice mean? The freedom and prosperity that we pride ourselves on is meaningless if it is denied to the people who need it the most. Once we break down the barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ we realise that we aren’t too different after all. My mum speaks English haltingly and likes to dress in traditional Vietnamese costume for special occasions. By the same token she is addicted to The Bold and the Beautiful, barracks for Essendon and cooks lasagna. It’s so easy to separate yourself from a person with an ethnic background, surrendering to faceless generalisations about their culture, reeling off crime statistics and interpreting their pleas of help as emotional manipulation.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if I were born in a detention centre. Would I have been separated from my parents? Would I have sewn my lips together as an act of voiceless desperation? Would I have seen the Australian sky without being surrounded by barbed wire? Thankfully my childhood is only tainted with confusion about my mother’s nationality rather than imprisonment for it. Yet the thoughts still scare me.