It’s tacky and mistaken, but what do you expect from souvenirs? In the markets at Fremantle, you can find caps emblazoned “Fremantle, Queensland”!

On the topic of the identities of kids with Australian fathers and Japanese mothers, I was at high school with such a teenager. I once mentioned that “skips” such as myself had been less than 10% of my primary school population. He reacted quite strongly, implying I should be upset at being a minority in “my own country”. I really couldn’t tell what that said about how he saw his own identity.

“Bloody Japanese!” “shoot the Japs!” etc etc are still what you expect to hear repeately in war dramas/movies on TV, particularly in the lead up to 25 April every year in Australia (http://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac/anzac_tradition.asp). I’ve never asked my newphews if they are aware of this, but my sense is they have had plenty of exposure to these anti-Japanese discourses during their 14 and 11 years on the Gold Coast, on and off TV. Born and raised in Australia, they seem to feel not entirely belonging, always feeling different racially and linguistically. Btw, where did you hear the story? In media?

Re an opportunity to learn foreign languages in Australia, I have an interesting observation from my two nephews who grew up on the Gold Coast in Queensland. The younger one, aged 11, was once into learning Italian and used to sing an Italian song which he learned at school. One day he was proudly singing the song in the car on our way to the beach. As an auntie, I was so proud, trying to sing along (quite hopelessly), telling him that I would ask his parents to send him to Italy to study in the future. But his brother, aged 14, and his friend who were also in the car, were relentless in ridiculing the young one, saying “singing is so gay [sic]!”, “Italian is useless”, “stop showing off!” etc etc. Disheartened, I intervened “it’s wonderful he is learning another language!” They looked at me and said, “Everyone in the world speaks English! We can speak English and Japanese and that’s enough”.

Of course this conversation continued, with me insisting on the value of multilingualism, and the older boys claiming that they don’t need to learn any other languages, until we got to the beach. I liked the fact that the young one KEPT singing: he is always rebellious to his big brother. But it made me sad to see a different version of monolingual mindset – monolingual ideology creeping into the minds of bilingual young children…

http://translate.google.com/#auto|ar|australia

But, a click?! That was also a distraction! It was time-consuming perhaps!

This is what was in their mind:

Let’s design! Let’s print! Let’s distribute! Let’s sell! Let’s make more money!

Thank you for the nice post.

Thanks for this post!