Clothing the whiteness – by Isabella Wang
ISLAND | issue 168
For my mother and so many new migrants looking to make it in Australia, fashion was a tool for surviving, a means of asserting oneself in a society that systemically deemed them inferior. My mother would find race in every interaction. She’d find it when someone cut in front of her at the grocery store, when another driver would signal angrily at her before honking, and when she was short-shifted once more at work. Being young, I did not understand it. I’d feel the flushing heat of embarrassment thinking she’d overreacted, then beg her to stop. But she lived her life with nervousness and agitation, knowing she was constantly judged by her face and accent. You don’t have to speak the language to know how racism is coded. Clothing was my mother’s armoury. A composed, well-assembled arsenal of fitted jackets and delicate doily dresses, which matched her ever-present pearl necklace, gold hoops and evil-warding jade, so she wouldn’t look a step out of place.
On weekends, my mother would make occasions out of going to the factory outlet, where we’d rifle through piles of clothing and hunt for deals. She armed my wardrobe with an esoteric assortment of lace-detailed blouses and structured dresses with boning or intricate pleats. Even when we didn’t have the money, my mother would scrounge up frequent flyer points for gift cards or push through a double shift, justifying the purchases as being for a special occasion or an early birthday present. She shoved me into fitting rooms, insisting on buying me decadent yet discounted pieces, from fitted blouses to a Burberry trench coat.
‘In China, every ming xing (celebrity) wear this,’ she’d say. After trying on items, she’d repeat ‘Wahhh, ming xing, ming xing,’ with the sing-song melodies of Cantonese’s nine tones evoking the fervour of an eager child. I’d pretend that the clothes didn’t fit. Too tight, too itchy, I would say, despite the glimmer in my eye.
Between our shopping trips, I would open a wrong door or hastily charge into a room where my mother sat tearyeyed, anxiously scribbling out the cost of each utility bill and mortgage payment.
I know very little about my mother’s childhood and our family history, mostly due to its erasure by the Cultural Revolution. Ravaged by war, famine and revolution, my grandmother had no possessions nor any memories to pass on. The one tidbit that my mother held onto and repeated like a meditative mantra was that the streets used to be lined with shops owned by our family. Beautiful clothing stores selling rich silks, all before Mao took power, she would say.
My mother’s musing on a bygone era reflected her belief that, by birth, she was meant for greater things, to be surrounded by beauty and luxury. She was adamant that some sort of aristocratic artistic sensibility ran through our blood.
And so, when she shopped, she was projecting a belief that she could differentiate herself from others. Crassly put – that we weren’t like the other migrants. We were the better Asians.
That Burberry coat my mother didn’t buy ended up at Zara for us to discover months later. Same colour. Same design. Even the same epaulettes. Only now it was produced in bulk in a cheaper, flimsier polyester for less than a tenth of the price. My mother bought it for me immediately, her little ming xing.
In the simulation of luxury, fast fashion catered to her desire for fanciful myth-making. But it came at a cost. Workers in the developing world, particularly China and Vietnam, bear the burden of over-producing fast fashion empires. With stores going from design to retail in the span of five weeks, garment workers work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week in unsafe buildings teeming with toxic substances. Formaldehyde and chlorine pollute their drinking water. By-products of the industrial process, like nitrous oxide or fibre particles, make the air unbreathable. Our matching Zara trenchcoats were made of slave labour and vast environmental destruction.
But this didn’t matter to my mother. For her – who had severed so many relationships to move to Australia, who had missed so many milestones (including, later in life, not being with her own dying mother in a global pandemic), who faced an existence of never being truly recognised for her wit and acumen in her mother tongue – it had to be for this. Her sacrifice of a whole other life lost had to be for something.
She adorned me in her aspirations, dreaming the archetypal migrant dream: that I could do better than she did, and perhaps restore what my great-grandparents had lost.
Every so often, she’d help me get dressed for important events. ‘It don’t matter where your clothes come from, it’s about how people see you,’ she’d say. ‘You don’t need to speak, but they should be able to tell everything from what you wear.’
My mother wielded capitalism to compensate for racism. She saved every dollar to fabricate her sartorial arsenal of grandeur and elegance, while ignoring that her clothing was interwoven with the blood, sweat and oppression of communities she had abandoned to seek a better life.
That is how whiteness begins swallowing you.
Years later, it would come to light that fashion supply chains were propped up by state-sanctioned persecution occurring in China. An estimated fifth of the world’s cotton products come from internment camps in Xinjiang imprisoning the Uyghur and ethnic Kazakh minorities. These camps also involve forced sterilisation, re-education and assimilation to propagate the state’s larger ideology of racial homogeneity: that there is one Chinese race, the Han people.
When I found out about the camps I thought I’d stopped breathing. My airways seized up and my diaphragm quivered against the burden of moving. It was as if the world was stifling me – lurid imaginations of camps, people in indigo jumpsuits, the distinct faces I’d seen on the news, all spinning around me, reminding me of my culpability.
In the haze of a hypoxic episode, I dramatically demanded that, as acts of political protest, my mother and I should stop buying all clothing made in China and that we should never return to a country where human rights were being so flagrantly abused.
My mother’s face turned into a pallid moon. How could you say that about your heritage and culture? she yelled before embarking on a meandering and wailing soliloquy. You refuse to listen, you don’t know where you come from, you don’t respect where you come from, you make these choices not right for a young Chinese girl. I know best, no one else look out for you like your mother. How you ever going to have husband, have children if you do this?
Between muffled rageful tears, she delivered her last blow: You remember, all you are, you are Chinese. It reflected my mother’s experience of Australia; that at the very core, all she was to others was the foreign Chinese face. No one truly saw beyond her race.
Even in a country that denigrated it, my mother loved being Chinese. She reminisced about how far China had come in the last decades, lifting millions – including my own grandparents and uncles and aunties – out of abject poverty. It was the homeland she dreamed of returning to, of growing old in, of being buried in. A wistful reunion.
But her aspirations for social mobility had forced me into spaces where everyone and everything was white. She had hoped that I’d blend in and demanded I wear the mask of whiteness to succeed. And, because of it, I viewed China as an onlooker through the refracting lens of the media: China was the geopolitical threat, the totalitarian dictatorship, the human rights abuser we should condemn. China was a way for Australia to define everything it wasn’t.
What no one tells you about growing up as a second-generation migrant is the surreal disconnect you feel. It is
to feel completely alien from my heritage, but to know it’s imprinted all over my face. It is the experience of living in two worlds, always being half in, half out. I saw my life splaying out like feeble branches of a tree. I was desperately attempting to grow, to consume the auspicious sunlight and water of my upbringing. But I limped and drooped. Every attempt at growing pulled diametrically at my poorly sewn, shallow roots, which clung to the ground, needing connection for my survival.
Seeing a ‘made in China’ label would eventually make my cheeks blister with hot shame, and the taste of dread rise in my mouth. Part of it was the outrage regarding the persecution in the homeland my mother yearned for. I felt complicit, not only because I had been wearing garments that had propped up slavery, but also just by being Chinese – my face with its Han epicanthal fold, wide ovular shape and narrow nose – I was condoning tyranny. The other part of it was self-hatred; the dread that I, like the arsenal of fast fashion garments my mother armed me with, was cheap and Chinese.
The thing about self-hatred is that it festers. It’s a bottom-feeder, nibbling away in the darkness. Soon, it had consumed me so completely that looking in my closet filled me with nausea. The powder-puff tulle dresses my mother had searched for in earnest anticipation of my piano recitals, the hot-pink leggings that had been my first true crush, the scalloped-lace blouses and structured coats that my mother had seen on a ming xing. In an instant, they were all gone, sent off to the charity shop or to rot away on a rubbish tip. I craved blankness, a new start. It was a personal manifesto, that I was rejecting fast fashion and everything it stood for. A proclamation that I wanted to be someone new, anyone but me.
My pastime became travelling to affluent one-of-a-kind boutiques situated on the outskirts of town and trying on clothes I could never afford and had nowhere to wear. I relished just inhaling the smell of the material. I made it my mission to learn about homegrown Australian brands, ones that I believed embodied artistry and prestige. I studied sustainable materials and alternatives to the cotton that was most likely from Xinjiang. I became obsessed with curating a wardrobe so sartorially and ethically impressive that I could hide how unimpressive I was. Australian fashion label Ellery became one of these obsessions. There was something about the quiet elegance of luxurious materials, the exaggerated silhouettes and the architectural mastery of a pant leg. In my vagrant dreams, I imagined myself as an affluent artist in the streets of Paris as free as the flow of my billowing statement sleeve. It was the same aspirational myth-making of my mother, but peppered with the virtue-signalling that my clothes weren’t built on colonialism and forced labour.
What I stumbled upon a few years later, though, was an article in The Monthly, an expose of how Ellery withheld payments worth tens of thousands of dollars from garment workers. ‘We do the one thing stupid – we believe them … because we are not a very big factory.’ Reading the interview with the garment factory owner, Sally Wong, was like hearing my mother speak. Down to the exact cadences and syntax. And from her last name I could tell that she was probably from Hong Kong, just like my mother.
Discovering this was to feel the same burning shame, the clenching loss of breath, the same repulsion I had felt at so any points of my life. In my obsession with donning these garments as aspirational emblems of grandeur, whiteness had recruited me too. Worse, it had swallowed me so completely and drowned me in delusion that I had tried to play the misguided white saviour. I too was complicit in exploitation and neo-colonialism, but at home.
Just as the global garment industry is predicated upon exploitation in primarily Asian countries, Australia’s industry too is upheld primarily by Asian migrants, who are subjected to unfair wages and conditions. As the Secretary of the Textile Clothing and Footwear Union Jenny Kruschel put it, ‘Whether you’re in Australia, or whether you’re overseas, if you’re a garment worker, you’re more likely to be exploited and not be paid properly, have a casual job, and to be hidden.’
Garment work is born out of necessity for migrants. Shut out of the labour market by language barriers, migrant workers are left to find work in the only remaining safe space – their own home. Enclosed within their homes, workers hunch over their sewing machines, recalling the craft they learnt back home. At immeasurable speed, the needles rumble and hammer through the fabric, throwing up clouds of dust. These are the conditions they bear for hours on end, with rates as low as 80 cents per piece, all in the self-sacrificing hope that their children may attain a better life.
In a way, outwork is where society wants migrants most. Unseen, unheard and isolated. Not taking the well-paying white jobs, but still contributing to national productivity and the economy. To be silent sufferers who rationalise that we’re not oppressed enough to need to speak out. To be happy to just be here.
While the union movement has attempted to empower migrant outworkers, they have an image problem. When we think unions, we think of burly men, bright fluorescent vests, and public protests. Unions seem to be characterised by a brash and staunch outspokenness which is not only hard for migrants to conceive, but feels terrifyingly dangerous. It stokes fears of getting investigated, charged and – worse – deported.
No matter how long we live here, we know what it’s like to always feel on the precipice of getting booted out.
It’s not surprising that more than half of all migrant workers in Australia feel unsafe at work, experiencing discrimination, bullying and verbal abuse, with 58% experiencing wage theft, according to a 2023 Migrant Worker’s Centre report, Insecure by Design: Australia’s migration system and migrant workers’ job market experience. My own mother, who has been a citizen and an essential frontline worker for decades, stayed silent amidst workplace strife. When we were struggling financially and she was unable to get shifts at work, she could never get her wages paid on time and faced workplace bullying. Rather than joining a union and fighting for her rights, she took a second job.
In a society that has systematically deprived us of opportunity, we are taught to be so upstanding, so deferential that we are not heard. We disappear from the collective consciousness and are subsumed by white power. So much so that we begin seeing ourselves through the colonial lens. We’re the assiduous workers who have sacrificed our lives, drilled away until our dreams are nothing, and still we feel unworthy. We’re pitted against each other, goaded into perceiving each other as threats in a society that teases and beguiles us with illusory flashes of success. It’s why my mother fortified her defences with the facade of glamour and wealth, and I too with a contrived aesthetic and ethical sensibility. We were on the wrong side.
At the earliest opportunity, when I was 18, I moved to a town just hours from Paris where I had once dreamed of being the liberated artist. I knew no one and could barely utter a few sentences in French before a waiter or passerby would roll their eyes at my garbled syllables and gaudy Anglicised accent. In this small coastal town, the streets were blanketed with frost, and it was so windy that rain, hail and snow would attack horizontally. It was a landscape so foreign for the born-and- bred Aussie, child of sun and sandy beaches.
Shut in by the eternal winter and my homesickness, I barely left the house. I’d sit by the heater and wrap myself in the maroon alpaca-wool jumper that my grandmother had knitted for my mother, who had then of course given it to me. It was prickly and a little stifling but warm, the warmest I would ever feel in France. It was something familiar. Family.
I wore it whenever I was dragged out of the safe confines of my apartment, and every night when I went to bed I would be lulled to sleep by its fibres.
By the end of my time in France, the jumper had pilled so much it was unravelling at the seams. With a utilitarian rationalisation that it was virtually unwearable and would not fit in my luggage, I threw it away. It was just a raggedy jumper, I thought.
To this day, it is a ghost in my closet, one of a confused melange of clothes that mean nothing to me, reminding me of how I turned love into self-loathing.
I fear the day when my future child grows into consciousness and, like my mother and me, understands the power of their sartorial choices. What will I tell them? That I never cared for anything enough, loved anything enough, loved myself enough to pass anything on? That I was and am still too paralysed by confusion and grief to know how to dress them or myself? ▼
Image: Maria Ianova - Unsplash
This essay appeared in Island 168 in 2023. Order a print issue here.
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