Comedian Michael Hing’s family have been in Australia for generations, but he still gets asked that perennial question

There’s a scene in the first episode of Where Are You Really From? in which the host, comedian Michael Hing, takes a class in the traditional Chinese art of lion dancing. But there are some elements of the experience that are, well, a little unexpected.

For a start, he’s not in China but in Bendigo, a rural city in central Victoria. And then there’s the matter of who was doing the teaching and who was being taught.

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“People always think of me as Chinese,” Hing tells Guardian Australia. So it was something of “a trip” to suddenly find himself “being taught lion dancing by a balding white dude with a beard”.

He laughs. “I’ve never felt less Chinese. But why should I feel Chinese? I absolutely shouldn’t feel Chinese. I don’t do any Chinese stuff. I can’t speak Chinese ... [but] a guy who doesn’t look Chinese, but is culturally more Chinese than I have ever been is teaching me a Chinese thing. So I totally feel like a fraud.”

The objective at the heart of SBS’s new documentary series is to pick at the knotty issue of identity and cultural heritage, and the curious and contradictory ways our assumptions about those things interplays with our understanding of who Australians are – and what they look like.

Hing’s mother’s family, for example, hail from Walgett and Lightning Ridge; his dad’s from Maitland and Thursday Island. Hing grew up in Illawong, which is part of greater Sydney. You have to go back at least four or five generations to get to an ancestor who was a migrant. But people have always assumed he was born elsewhere because of the way he looks.

“The fact that I am of Chinese descent is basically irrelevant in who I am as a person, but it is very meaningful in the way other people treat me,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bendigo resident Dennis O’Hoy (centre) and his family. Bendigo’s Chinese community is over 150 years old. Photograph: SBS

“Once every six months, some drunken guy on a train yells at me to ‘go back to where you came from’. That still happens in 2018,” he says.

The question – “Where are you really from?” – is often a more pernicious version of the same sentiment.



“I think the discussion about people’s ethnicity and ethnic heritage is probably good to have,” says Hing. “The difficult thing is when people ask, ‘where are you from?’ but what they actually mean is, ‘why are you different?’ And the reason why that is difficult is because the implication is you look a certain way therefore you’re not from here.”

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In order to dispel that myth – and to highlight the diversity of Australian communities – Where Are You Really From? follows Hing to three different rural centres. Along with meeting members of the 150-year-old Chinese community of Bendigo, he visits Woolgoolga, a town on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. It is the heart of the Australian blueberry industry and home to the country’s largest regional settlement of Sikhs. He then heads further north to talk to members of the South Sudanese diaspora who have made Toowoomba, Queensland, their home.

Their stories skewer stereotypes of a homogenous “white” Australian identity, but also highlight the ways in which those stereotypes and associated cultural expectations can affect people.

Only a few decades ago, Hing says, there was a lot of pressure on new arrivals, or those who appeared to be so, to embrace mainstream Australian culture, “to show that you are one of the good ones, like a model migrant”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Hing talks to journalist Margaret Nyakan Agoth from Toowoomba’s South Sudanese community. Photograph: SBS

For some people, that meant giving up a lot of homeland traditions. “For my grandparents, I know it was very important for them not to speak Chinese – to speak English, to go to the races, to do stuff that white people do, so they could integrate into the community,” Hing says. “That was a loyalty test, I think. It was performative national loyalty.”

But it’s also one of the reasons why a family with Chinese heritage but less distinctively Chinese physical characteristics found it easier to retain Chinese cultural practices.

“If you looked Anglo or could pass as looking Anglo, that same loyalty test would not be applied to you. That meant that you were more free to hold on to these cultural traditions, because that was not seen as betrayal,” he says.

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With a discussion of cultural diversity inevitably comes discussion of racism. But while the people Hing talks to throughout the series have stories to tell on that score – as, indeed, does he – they also have stories of acceptance, community growth and positive change.

Hing says he initially approached the show with a real agenda, but by the end of it, he didn’t need one: the stories of his subjects were enough. “You meet such interesting and fascinating people, whose stories are so compelling ... It really broadened my understanding of what it meant to be Australian.”

• Where Are You Really From? is showing from Friday 8 June, 7.30pm, on SBS and available to stream any time on SBS On Demand

