The figure of the Asian woman functions in the Australian imaginary as a signifier of the erotic and the exotic. This essay examines historical and contemporary fictional representations of Asian women and locates their ‘unheimlich’ counterparts in alternative portraits of, and by, Asian-Australian women writers. In their depictions of Asian women as vampires, mermaids, and pontianaks,1 these writers have transformed the contradictory images of the sinful and morally corrupt Asian femme fatale, and the passive and childlike oriental flower. I argue that the writers’ deployment of nightmarish female figures ultimately subvert and transform Australian images of the Asian woman. Asian-Australian women writers’ use of these mythical figures thus enables them to take control of, and change, the traditional misogynist and racist images that have defined both Asian women and Asia in the past.

Images of the Asian femme-fatale 2 and ‘oriental flower’ have a long and culturally complex genealogy. They begin to appear in Australian literary texts in the 1920s and 1930s during a period characterised by conservative attitudes towards sexuality. Despite rising Sinophilism, this period paradoxically produced split images of Asian women as passive and child-like, yet sinful and capable of deceit. The tension between these images of female innocence and slyness was often figured as a conflict between inherent Chinese depravity and an acquired Western sensibility. Ouyang Yu explains that representations of Chinese women at this time were often ‘Westernised’ by Australian writers; thus ‘a myth of the beautiful and mysterious Oriental woman [was] created not simply because these characters [were] Chinese women but because they ... accept[ed] Western values or emulate[d] the Western way of life’.3 A fascination with Asian women characters who are ‘distinguished by their high-class social background, Western education and refined manners’ 4 is particularly evident in Australian writing set in China from the 1930s onwards.

Narratives about female Asian ‘ministering angels’ who help white men were an ‘accepted formulation’ 5 but they were depicted as ‘mysterious enchantresses’: beautiful, charming and more importantly, ‘unfathomable’.6 Ostensibly benign images were juxtaposed with more threatening and exotic images of Asian women who willingly gave their bodies but remained emotionally and socially aloof.7 Dai Yin explains that this depiction of unknowable Chinese women embodied Australian ‘curiosity and fear of China as an alien spiritual strength’.8 This cultural fear of China exposes its Orientalist premise; Chinese women’s apparently dark and unknowable psyche was invariably perceived as being beyond Australian masculine control.

War narratives set in the Asia-Pacific region further contributed to images of an alien, unpredictable, dangerous and often feminised Asian enemy. These narratives were crystallised into stories depicting easy sex and bar girls who performed amazing feats with their vaginas. During the Second World War, narratives about highly sexualised prostitutes who contributed to the Allies’ war effort by satisfying virile Australian soldiers produced an imagined Asian temptress, at once uninhibited and more compliant than Australian women, and more importantly, capable of delivering sexual experiences not available at home.9 The juxtaposition of the virtuous Australian woman with the Asian prostitute was, as Lachlan Strahan points out, ‘two sides of the male construction of women’, now firmly located within a discourse about race.10 The oriental flower/femme fatale image persisted, particularly in the relatively conservative reportage style of well-known war correspondents such as Wilfred Burchett, who, observing local Burmese women at work in the fields, notes their ‘easy, almost insolent walk’ in trousers that ‘cling to their nether regions’.11 Burchett, like George Johnston,12 represents the Asian woman as a teasing femme fatale, but the allure of this figure is also accompanied by misogynist feelings of disgust as Asian women were often linked with filthy settings and sexually transmitted disease.

The Asia-Pacific war narratives (including many dealing with Vietnam) resituated the resilient soldier of the heroic Australian legend to Asia, while contributing to the circulation of derogatory and eroticised representations of Asian women. One of the most recent appearances of the Australian legend in Asia is found in the characterisation of Mike Langford, the protagonist/hero of Christopher Koch’s 1997 Miles Franklin Award winning novel, Highways to a War.13 The relocation of Mike, a distinctly Australian prototype, to Asia suggests that the region is still perceived as a frontier to be imaginatively captured and scripted into narratives that celebrate Australian masculinity. Mike’s obsession with the comic strip, Terry and the Pirates, is focused on the figure of the ‘Dragon lady’, a ‘beautiful Eurasian villainess’ who is described as the object of his love, and yet was as alien to him as ‘a being from another planet’.14 Mike’s conflation of Asia with the villainess is characteristic of such narratives, which are typically set against the backdrop of war or a military coup d’état, and which position Australian men as antipodeans in an Asian playground.15 In this 1990s text, one might have expected an interesting parody or an ironic examination of older versions of Australian masculinity to emerge from Mike’s boyhood longings, but instead, as an adult, he finds the Asia he imagines in the ugly ‘reality’ of war-torn Cambodia, and subsequently disappears forever into its steamy, treacherous ‘jungle’. Mike’s heroic trek into the jungle to save his ‘dragon lady’ reiterates images of Australia as the heroic saviour in stark contrast to a morally degraded Asia — itself a motif revived in reports about the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square conflict.16 The similarities between representations of fictional and actual events in Asia emphasise the strong links between political and cultural spheres that simultaneously produce discourses of Australianness and Asianness for mass consumption, and which confine Asian women to stereotyped representations.

Contradictory images of the oriental flower and femme fatale still circulate in the image-making industry.17 James Dalrymple’s feature article on actor Gong Li equates her ‘knowing, mischievous and somehow mysterious’ face with China itself.18 Comparing her to screen icons such as Brigid Bardot and Marilyn Monroe, Dalrymple claims that with her face:

comes the promise of thrilling things that have been hidden and repressed for decades, even centuries. Sexuality, for sure, is there. There is also romance, perhaps violence and adventure, to replace the stodgy diet of political polemic the Chinese millions have suffered all their lives on the cinema screen and the printed page.19

Dalrymple’s rather orgasmic descriptions suggests that her qualities are perfect for Western commodification precisely because in the 1990s Western women ‘fail’ to provide ‘thrilling things’ for masculine audiences. Dalrymple selfconsciously denies his own sexual interest in Gong Li, stressing instead that unlike her Western counterparts, she is a ‘gifted actor of astonishing range and power’. However, his constantly favourable comparisons with the best that the West has to offer in female merchandising echo those earlier representations of Oriental beauties who ostensibly possessed qualities that could not be found at home.20

Ubiquitous alluring qualities, such as those described by Dalrymple and attributed to Asian women generally, have been the most difficult for writers to challenge and change. Beth Yahp comments that Australian portraits of Asian femininity are not only enduring but difficult to dislodge from Orientalist desire for the ‘other’ as ‘Orientalist images are what people first see: massage parlour queen or job-stealing migrant, swotting overseas student or gang member’s moll, or sex kitten and maid conveniently combined in the mail-order bride’.21 Using shadow imagery to describe the effect of the Orientalist gaze on Asian women, Yahp distances her own sense of self from dominant representations: ‘in Australia, the Other Asia drapes herself around me in a cloak of cobwebs and is far harder to brush aside. She patiently reweaves any strands I impatiently tear, ignoring my protests that, like the man at the beachside café or those who shout from street corners, some people see only her, not me’. Yahp explains that unlike ‘flesh and blood’ women in Asia, this ‘Other Asia’ is constantly attached to Asian women in Australia by the dominant culture.22

Factors that complicate the position of the Asian woman in Australia include the current changes in ethnic composition in the nation, its desire to have ‘intercourse’ with Asian economies and its enduring fear of ‘Asianisation’. Debates on these issues have been characterised by both anti-racist and racist rhetoric, which, in turn, has repolarised Australian perceptions of Asians. Ien Ang suggests that the kind of racial exclusivity that marked the era of the White Australia Policy has been replaced by ‘a curious inflection of liking or fondness for “Asia”’.23 The positioning of the Asian subject, therefore, involves a particular form of othering based on an internalisation ‘by a significant number of white Australians’ of an ‘Asian-mindedness so promoted by the government ... in the direction of a more enthusiastic excitement of sorts’ than earlier ‘suspicion and mistrust’.24 Ang explains that the ‘pigeonhole of “Asianness”’ has changed because in contemporary Australia, ‘“Asians” are no longer excluded (as they once were during the period of the White Australia Policy), nor are they merely reluctantly included despite their “difference”, but because of it!’ 25 Thus the inclusion of Asian women in Australian society is the result of certain kinds of ambivalence concerned with ethnic parameters and national. Although the Asian woman is still positioned as a ‘desired other’, this partly occurs through her own desire to be recognised for her difference from both her original/ethnic and Australian cultural identities.

Rey Chow points to the continuance of a primarily masculine discourse in the conceptualisation of community in poststructuralist theories.26 Using the work of Frantz Fanon, she exposes the extent to which race discourses have been premised on the male subject, with gender, if it is considered at all, treated as marginal and disruptive:

If the woman of colour can be of value to her ethnic community only as gift or defenceless victim, then her assumption of agency would in effect invalidate her and deprive her of admittance. The ultimate danger posed by the Negress and the mulatto is hence not their sexual behaviour per se, but the fact that their sexual agency carries with it a powerful (re)conceptualisation of community — community based on difference, heterogeneity, creolisation: of community as the “illegitimate” mixings and crossings of colour, pigmentation, physiognomy — that threateningly vies with the male intellectual’s. 27

The implications of this conditional cultural admittance for Asian-Australian women are far-reaching; because their agency is provisional, their social positioning is complicated by intricate and, at times, contradictory sets of social expectations placed upon them by both their Asian and Australian communities. The competing claims for the Asian woman in Australia are clearly seen in such diverse examples as the vilification of journalist Julie Shi by the local Chinese Press (after she claimed Western men made better lovers than their Chinese brothers 28 ); the censure of Lucy Wang, fiancee of murdered MP John Newman, by both the local Chinese and Australian press (for her perceived sexual deviance and corrupt connections with the Asian triad underworld 29 ); and the angry condemnation of young Asian women who marry older Anglo-Australian husbands, featured in academic and poet Ouyang Yu’s significantly titled poem, ‘They Have Married White Men’.30 As Patricia Sakurai observes, ‘the competitive relationship between men ... is played out through the possession of the racially-defined female body’.31 In contrast, an Asian male’s possession of the white female body is a sign of his ‘having (socially) made it’ and the white woman’s desirability is assessed by ‘her ability to materially signify male “social success”’.32

The discursive use of heterosexual relationships to represent and negotiate race/ class identities is evident in representations of marriages between Asian women and Anglo-Australian men; these have often attracted media comment creating Orientalist images of passive yet sexually adventurous women who marry older Australians to gain entry to a (superior) Western society. Since Australian fears of ‘Asianisation’ have been largely based on fears of cultural (hence feminine), rather than physical invasion, the portrayal of relationships between Australian men and Asian women has been invariably seen as metaphor for cross-cultural tensions on a range of political, economic and national levels. Kathryn Robinson explains that the issue of cross-cultural marriages between Asian women and Australian men ‘has resounded with meanings derived from the contestations in contemporary Australian society about the nature of male-female relations, and the nature of marriage, which have intersected with debates about Australian relations with Asia.33 Thus the exaggerated frequency of ‘mail-order’ relationships reported in the popular press suggests that this phenomenon is ultimately a reassuring narrative of continued unequal power relations between Australia and Asia.

Because Australian constructions of Asian femininity have generally emerged from descriptions of Asian women in Asia, and these images are primarily concerned with the Australian psyche, Asian women writers in Australia have been necessarily engaged in a process of realignment which, to borrow Stuart Hall’s expression, has ‘release[d] strange demons from the deep’.34 One response to the difficult task of resituating their characters from one patriarchal cultural context to another, while at the same time rewriting overdetermined images of Asian women, has been the creation of proactive female characters through the use of feminine ‘monstrous’ creatures drawn from European and Asian mythologies. In these characterisations, exoticised, eroticised, Orientalist images of sexually available and childlike females coalesce with elements of the West’s own bad dream of the femme fatale into nightmarish images of mermaids, pontianaks, vampires and La Belle Dame sans Merci.35

These figures function on an important psychological level, confronting Australian audiences by returning to them that which has been repressed within the national imaginary. Unable to accept, or entirely forget, Orientalist images of the monstrous woman that are part of Australia’s past, audiences have repressed these images from consciousness; thus, it is at the level of the unconscious that recent familiar yet unsettling narratives by Asian-Australian women operate on the Australian psyche. Freud’s work is useful for examining the ways in which the once familiar set of meanings attached to Asian women in past Orientalist framings have been distorted and extended by Asian-Australian women writers through their use of familiar and alien ‘others’ to enunciate complex issues of self and identity. In his famous essay, ‘The Uncanny’, Freud analyses the role of the ‘other’ through the German terms, ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’.36 He explains that the word heimlich has two meanings: the ‘familiar’ and ‘agreeable’ and the ‘concealed’ and that which is ‘out of sight’. The opposite of heimlich, unheimlich, also has this second set of meanings, that which ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’.37 Thus ‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’.38 This unusual semantic structure occurs because ‘sometimes things which are known are repressed, hence, are both known, familiar and disavowed, becoming strange and spooky’.39 Such a structure rejects the self/other binary as counterparts of identity, suggesting instead that the ‘other’ lies within the self as both subject and object. In this structure, mermaids, pontianaks and vampires are not simply read as metaphors for an alien selfhood but are, instead, read as metonyms of the process of identity formation — as figures that not only signal mythic frameworks but that also refer to (ascribed) past identities. In such a reading, Ernst Van Alphen suggests, ‘identity is not “the underlying presence”, but the result of an ongoing process of reworking the self: an affect’.40

Simone Lazaroo’s use of a mermaid motif in The World Waiting to be Made demonstrates such ‘affect’. Her parodic representation of the north-west township of Broome exposes the way in which multicultural festivals can subvert the anti-racist sentiments they are meant to celebrate and instead become vehicles for the expression of racist and sexist ideologies. However, her use of the mermaid as a familiar signifier of uncontrolled female sexuality conjures up that which should remain hidden in this context — the mythology of female sirens who lure men to their destruction, and Orientalist anxieties about Asian femmes fatales. By associating mermaid imagery with ethnic diversity, Lazaroo invokes deeper fears of cross-species intercourse and nineteenth-century debates about miscegenation.

Lazaroo’s emphasis on the highly sexualised aspects of female participation in such community festivals is clear in her depiction of the parade. The narrator observes that the young women assembled on the float in their fish-tails were obviously chosen to represent different ethnic groups.41 She is also aware that her presence on the mermaid float leaves her open to ‘misinterpretations’ (by white men) of sexual availability, and she suspects that both she and her sister ‘probably were merely screens for some men on which to project their fanciful notions of the Orient’.42 In fact all the ‘mermaids’ understand the conditional nature of their inclusion in the parade and rebel by refusing to wear ‘strapless tubes’ to replace their tee shirts. This ‘revolutionary’ moment is humorously depicted as an instance of ‘racial’ conflict by Lazaroo’s use of stereotypes to portray the silent Asian woman, the Aboriginal activist and the suntanned ‘Aussie sheila’. Her deployment of the mermaid motif unites the rebellious narrator with other marginalised women on the float who reject the apparently privileged social positioning enjoyed by Jane as representative of the ‘white’ segment of Broome society. The narrator’s disavowal of an already constituted Australian identity, embodied in both Jane and the racially indeterminate Gloria,43 is further augmented by mermaid mythologies that recall stories of stranded female creatures, condemned to isolation from their own kind, through their possession by male human keepers.

For many Asian-Australian women writers, social realignment has not necessarily involved taking up an already constituted Australian identity but has, instead, produced new positions outside the parameters of existing social structures. To reflect these difficult interstitial positionings, some writers portray their protagonists as being closely aligned with the spiritual world. The portrayal of figures who reside both inside and outside social structures stress the collocation of heimlich and unheimlich, of estrangement and ‘home’, thus enabling complex critiques that explore cross-cultural issues of displacement, alienation and discrimination.

Uyen Loewald, Lau Siew Mei and Beth Yahp use the extraordinary qualities of the ghostly figure of the pontianak to interrogate the oppressive gendered and cultural restrictions faced by Asian women in both their original and Australian societies.44 As part of the shape-shifting fairy mythologies that are shared by many cultures, pontianaks are always breathtakingly beautiful and can transform from young maidens into hideous demons at will. They are often presented at their most disruptive when they appear at ceremonies that celebrate the family — the foundation of society. In Lau Siew Mei’s short story, ‘Until the Wake’, a mysterious, young and beautiful pontianak mourner appears uninvited at the funeral of an elderly man and her presence is a reminder to the women mourners, in particular, that men often had lovers and children hidden from their ‘legitimate’ families.

The tenuous connections made by various Asian-Australian women writers between gendered and culturally defined societies and an-other world located beyond racist and sexist restrictions are, perhaps surprisingly, strengthened by the inclusion of Orientalist portrayals of Asian women modelled after stereotypes in Australian literature, and European and Asian mythologies. Contemporary narratives that borrow from older narratives about female shape-shifters invariably explore mythologies about a prolonged life or immortality. 45 In both ‘The Red Pearl’ and The Crocodile Fury, Beth Yahp uses imagery drawn from pontianak legends in her highly developed characterisations of transgressive Asian women. Also in keeping with the mermaid mythology, the lover/pontianak in The Crocodile Fury is described as having distinctive ‘fish eyes’, ‘cold, pale skin’ and ‘sharp teeth’ and constantly pines for an elsewhere across the sea to a place where she properly belongs.46 Hence this strange and spooky character is not only the ‘other’ of the West’s Orientalising dreams; she is the unheimlich embodiment of alienated women paradoxically positioned within familiar social settings.

Yahp’s exposure of the unheimlich location of the self/other in ‘The Red Pearl’ is more explicit. A beautiful stripper and dancer at the ‘Shanghai Bar’ is portrayed in vampiric terms, as the ethereal lover of a charming ‘ladies’ man’, a sailor from the West.47 According to Jewelle Gomez, the Chinese ‘kiang-si or (chiang-shih) was a vampire like figure who slept during daylight hours and could only be driven from its victim by fire’.48 Yahp recasts elements of this figure in her depiction of Red Pearl. In particular, the interdependence of the vamp(ish) stripper dancer and the ethereal sailor reveals the uncertain boundaries that separate self/other and persecutor/oppressed. Yahp describes the sailor’s fascination for Red Pearl as a ‘dark thing he feels for her: only when it’s dark can he see her clearly. The night is her element, it flows through the window in lazy spirals, it creaks through the crevices in the floor and walls and weeps through the ceiling to fold like some majestic beast at her feet’.49 This evocation of darkness combined with reptilian references recalls Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s portrait of the lamia (snake-woman) in his poem, ‘Christabel’, and is reinforced by the description of the sailor as a ‘bloodless doll’.50 The relationship between stripper and sailor thus resembles other vampire stories in which the vampire keeps a human donor as a ‘pet’, killing its prey only when it loses control of its appetite.51

Representations of bloodsucking, diseased Asian women and helpless Western men have been used as powerful cautionary images for Anglo-Australian men. These continue to circulate in contemporary discourses that situate Asia itself as an Oriental beauty with a shady past, a predatory neighbour waiting for Australia to become weak through its desire for Asian markets or Asian women. While Yahp’s depiction of the marriage between the rich man and the lover he sexually uses (but whom he cannot fully possess) provides a disturbing analogy of the position of Asian women in Australia, more importantly, her evocation of vampire imagery fundamentally troubles those very ethnic and gendered categories that construct Asian women as projections of Western male fantasies and desire.

Since the 1970s, Western vampire novels have been recognised as an expression of ‘cultural attitudes towards the outsider, the alien other’.52 Yahp’s deployment of the vampirish pontianak is certainly a rehearsal of larger issues about cultural incommensurability. In her discussion of race, Donna Haraway elaborates on the role of the vampire in constructions of human unity and racial difference, and explains that the vampire is ultimately the figure of ‘the diseased prostitute, or the gender pervert, or the aliens and travellers of all sorts who cast doubt on the certainties of the self-identical and well-rooted ones who have natural rights and stable homes’ (my emphasis). In the twentieth century, Haraway continues, ‘vampires are the immigrants, the dislocated ones accused of sucking the blood of the rightful possessors of the land and raping the virgin who must embody the purity of race and culture’.53 In this respect, the fears invoked by increased Asian immigration and perceived rampant female sexuality are irresistibly encapsulated in the figure of the vampire ‘as the cosmopolitan, the one who speaks too many languages and cannot remember the native tongue’.54 Yahp’s deployment of vampire imagery thus refigures those inherently transgressive qualities that mark distinctions between good and evil, us and them. The traditional masculine, sometimes androgynous, figure of the vampire is recast as a female ‘rebellious outsider’ and member of a ‘persecuted minority’.55 By combining aspects of Chinese mythology with vampire/mermaid imagery and the figure of La Belle Dame sans Merci, Yahp creates pontianaks who are ideally placed to interrogate Western attitudes towards Asian women. Idealised as feminine yet transgressive, they challenge male social dominance (since female vampiric figures are the ultimate predators) and their mere presence in the world reveals the limitations of constructed social order and indeed, reality itself. The symbiotic relationship between the stripper and the sailor, the East and the West and the vampire and the human, calls into question those very categories that have historically defined and described cultural identities. As Veronica Hollinger points out, the vampire ‘is itself an inherently deconstructive figure: it is the monster that used to be human; it is the undead that used to be alive; it is the monster that looks like us’. Thus, she concludes, ‘we look in the mirror [that this figure provides] ... and see nothing but ourselves’.56 Yahp’s recuperation of sinister figures from misogynist mythologies reveals the ‘categorical ambiguity and troubling mobility’ such figures ultimately represent. As Donna Haraway puts it: ‘Vampires do not rest easy (or easily) in the boxes labelled good and bad. Always transported and shifting, the vampire’s native soil is more nutritious and more unheimlich than that’.57

If a shared set of meanings between heimlich and unheimlich exemplifies and describes the interdependence of apparent opposites, Asian-Australian women writers demonstrate that older, somewhat cliched Orientalist images are also, in carefully constructed contexts, capable of suggesting their opposite. If, therefore, the female cultural outsider is portrayed using aspects of traditionally voiceless monstrous-feminine creatures such as vampires, pontianaks and mermaids, the misogynist attitudes that created them are not only exposed in these narratives, but are also enlisted in a deliberate return of nightmarish Orientalist images designed to unsettle existing social formations. Hence the transformation of those derogatory images (of oppressed passive flowers and raunchy femmes fatales) that once characterised Asian women is achieved by a carefully controlled narrative strategy that demands the reader remember those demeaning racist and sexist figures which have emerged from Australia’s literary and cultural narratives in the past. By emphasising those very familiar images that once defined Asian women, Asian-Australian women writers have explicitly taken over the production of their meanings, rewriting the repressed nightmares and Orientalist narratives that their audiences would rather forget. In so doing, they have inexorably changed the images and the way we read the figure of the Asian woman in Australia.

Notes

1 Pontianaks are mythical female death spirits in South East Asia.
2 See Anne E McLaren, The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period, Wild Peony, Sydney, 1994, for the history and use of this figure in Chinese literature.
3 Ouyang Yu, ‘The other half of the “other”: the image of Chinese women in Australian fiction’, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, no 2, 1994, p 76.
4 ibid., p 78.
5 Dai Yin, ‘Representations of the Chinese in Australian literature’, PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 1994, p 414.
6 ibid., p 383.
7 See, for example, Ion Idriess’s characterisation of Yellow Lily in The Yellow Joss and Other Tales, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1934, and Helen Heney’s portrait of Camellia in The Chinese Camellia, Collins, London, 1950.
8 Dai Yin, op. cit., pp 420-1.
9 Lachlan Strahan, Australia’s China: Changing Perceptions from the 1930s to the 1990s, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p 64.
10 ibid.
11 Wilfred Burchett, Bombs Over Burma, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1944, pp 11-12.
12 See George Johnston, The Far Road, Fontana, London, 1971.
13 Christopher J Koch, Highways to a War, Minerva, Port Melbourne, 1995.
14 ibid., p 32.
15 Robin Gerster, ‘Covering Australia: foreign corespondents in Asia’, Rubicon, vol 1, no 2, 1995, p 90.
16 See Ien Ang’s discussion of the ‘excess of meaningfulness’ in Australia and the West’s reporting of the killing at Tiananmen Square in ‘Migrations of Chineseness: ethnicity in the postmodern world’, in David Bennett (ed.), Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory, University of Melbourne, Parkville, 1993, pp 32-44.
17 See, for instance, the recent Australian film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, PolyGram Video, New York, 1995, where the character of Bill Hunter reminds Australian men of the dangers in having one too many drinks in a Filipino bar and finding oneself married to an uncontrollable whore.
18 James Dalrymple, ‘Republic enemy no 1’, Australian, 26-7 August 1995.
19 ibid. In particular Dalrymple describes Gong Li’s ‘delicate features’ and ‘fluidity not even a catwalk supermodel could match’.
20 ibid.
21 Beth Yahp,‘The other Asia’, Australian, 19-20 July 1997.
22 ibid.
23 Ien Ang,‘The curse of the smile: ambivalence and the “Asian” woman in Australian multiculturalism’, Feminist Review, no 52, 1996, p 43.
24 ibid.
25 ibid., p 44.
26 Rey Chow, ‘The politics of admittance: female sexual agency, miscegenation and the formation of community in Frantz Fanon’, UTS Review, vol 1, no 1, 1995, p 14.
27 ibid., p 21.
28 See ‘“Poorer lovers” claim offends Chinese men’, Geelong Advertiser, 19 March 1994.
29 Lucy Wang, Blood Price, William Heinemann, Port Melbourne, 1996.
30 Ouyang Yu, ‘They have married white men’, Imago, vol 9, no 2, 1997, pp 114-15.
31 Patricia A Sakurai, ‘The politics of possession: the negotiation of identity in American in Disguise, Homebase, and Farewell to Manzanar’, in Gary Okihiro et al. (eds), Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies, Washington State University Press, Washington, 1995, p 157.
32 ibid., pp 157-158. Sakurai calls this the ‘possession paradigm’.
33 Kathryn Robinson, ‘Of mail-order brides and “boys’ own” tales’, Feminist Review, no 52, 1996, p 60.
34 Quoted in Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998, n.p.
35 The figure of La Belle Dame sans Merci is taken from John Keats’s poem of the same name. The poem is a story of a knight-at-arms who is doomed by a chance meeting with a beautiful ‘lady in the meads’. She lures him to her ‘elfin grot’ where he falls into a trance and is haunted by the lady’s other victims.
36 Sigmund Freud, ‘The uncanny’, in Writings on Art and Literature, Stanford University Press, California, 1997, pp 193-233.
37 ibid., p 200.
38 ibid., p 201.
39 Ernst Van Alphen, ‘The other within’, in Raymond Corbey and Joep Leerssen (eds), Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship, Rodopi, Amersterdam, 1991, p 11.
40 ibid.
41 Simone Lazaroo, The World Waiting To Be Made, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1994, p 197.
42 ibid., p 171.
43 Gloria has erased her ‘Eurasian’ features through her careful use of hair-colouring and cosmetics. She is the ‘head’ mermaid, the ‘emblem’ of the multicultural parade.
44 See Uyen Loewald, ‘Nightmare’, in Peter Skrzynecki (ed.), Joseph’s Coat: An Anthology of Multicultural Writing, Hale and Ironmonger, Sydney, 1985, pp 107-15; Lau Siew Mei, ‘Until the Wake’, Australian Book Review, December/January, 1994, p 71; and Beth Yahp, ‘The Red Pearl’, in Beth Yahp, Margo Daly and Lorraine Falconer (eds), My Look’s Caress: A Collection of Modern Romances, Local Consumption Press, Sydney, 1990, pp 43-53.
45 While texts such as Lillian Ng, Swallowing Clouds, Penguin, Ringwood, 1997, and Ang Chin Geok, Wind and Water, Minerva, Sydney, 1997, examine more conventional notions of reincarnation, they also investigate feminine alliances between women and the spirit world.
46 Beth Yahp, The Crocodile Fury, Imprint-Harper Collins, Pymble, 1992, pp 143-5.
47 Yahp, ‘The Red Pearl’, pp 46-7.
48 Jewelle Gomez, ‘Recasting the mythology: writing vampire fiction’, in Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (eds), Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1997, p 87.
49 Yahp, ‘The Red Pearl’, p 46.
50 James Dykes Campbell (ed.), The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Macmillan, London, 1938, pp 116-24.
51 In keeping with Gothic stories of vampires and the figure of La Belle Dame sans Merci, the distinction between sex and sustenance, and the lover and the mother/parent is also blurred, and the sailor’s appetites render him infantile and passive. Yahp, op. cit., p 50.
52 Margaret Carter, ‘The vampire as alien in contemporary fiction’, in Gordon and Hollinger, op. cit., p 29.
53 Donna J Haraway, Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, Routledge, New York, 1997, p 215.
54 ibid.
55 Carter, op. cit., p 29.
56 Veronica Hollinger, ‘Fantasies of absence: the postmodern vampire’, in Gordon and Hollinger, op. cit., p 201.
57 Haraway, op. cit., p 215.

Originally published in Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo and Jacqueline Lo (eds), Diaspora: Negotiating Asian Australia: Journal of Australian Studies no 65, St Lucia, UQP, 2000.