YOUNG ASIAN-AUSTRALIANS CARVE OUT AN IDENTITY
Tan Falconer stood in the crowd milling outside the Sanctuary Hotel, a classic Sydney pub, cigarette in one hand. With the other, he greeted a stream of fashionable friends — men in tight shirts with hair smoothly buzzed on the sides, women with highlights and heavily drawn brows.
Nearly everyone there was part of an emerging cross-cultural scene centred on an Asian-Australian identity: electronic music, athleisure fashion and social media savvy.
They often call themselves the “little girls” and “little boys” of Sydney and Melbourne, or LGs and LBs for short.
“We feel comfortable and more at ease when we share the same issues,” said Falconer, 23, who is of Thai-Chinese heritage and a project manager at a construction and engineering firm. “We come together to drink and laugh it off.”
For most white Australians, the terms LG and LB do not mean much, but find a group of young Asian-Australians here in Sydney and they will reel off an archetype. LGs and LBs are attractive, confident and outspoken. They hail from the city’s diverse western suburbs and they have the accents and the work ethic to prove it.
They are devotees of trance or hardstyle (two differing genres of electronic music with ethereal vocals or a harsh, aggressive bass) and build their style on a foundation of expensive Adidas sneakers and Nike sports bras.
Almost certainly, every one has an Instagram account.
And they represent what Australia increasingly looks like. According to census results released last month, half of all Australians either were born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas, and that cohort is more likely to have
roots in Asia than Europe for the first time since colonisation.
In a country that is still trying to reconcile its multicultural population with its “Australia First” rhetoric, the LGs and LBs — who have grown up melding the expectations of immigrant heritage and traditional Australian identity — have carved out their own community, online and off, with a self-image that is still very much in flux.
The little girl label seems to be a spinoff from a somewhat contemptuous shorthand applied by Asian-American communities in the United States to young Asian women who wore designer clothes and acted tough: ABGs, or Asian Baby Girls.
Both terms have been batted around by young people in North America since
the early 2000s.
But by the time Falconer and some friends created a Facebook page in April dedicated to the LGs of Sydney and Melbourne, and another for the LBs, the term had already landed in the Asian-Australian community, with a mix of amusement and annoyance.
Giffie Ngo, 19, a student at the University of Technology Sydney from Bankstown, is reluctant to call herself an LG even though she is an administrator of the Facebook page and a regular at the raves that its followers attend. Many of the other young women in the scene also do not quite embrace the title, even as they concede that they fit its parameters.
The term can be “sort of derogatory”, Ngo said, like an Asian-Australian parallel
to the “Guido” and “Guidette” personas for Italian-Americans popularised by the reality TV show Jersey Shore.
That is part of what Falconer is trying to change. He said he created a presence on Facebook to mobilise the existing community and reverse the label’s negative connotations.
The page, which reaches more than 30,000 people, invites Sydney and Melbourne residents to submit photos of themselves or friends who fit the aesthetic and consent to be featured. Falconer and a team of administrators look through about 50 submissions a week, posting memes that poke fun at the subculture’s silliest aspects (like a reverence for Sanctuary’s Long Island ice teas) while also paying tribute to those who exemplify the group’s ethos:
“Party hard, work and study hard”.
And despite their ethnicity, they say the page is multicultural and open to all young Australians.
Catharine Lumby, a professor of media at Macquarie University in Sydney, said that for young Asian-Australians, and other groups of young people, social media and face-to-face social life have become indistinguishable.
“The positive side of social media is that it’s giving young people a voice and a way to explore their identities,” she said.
The danger, she cautioned, is that these explorations are pushed out to a world with pre-existing biases of race and gender that may seek to undermine those seeking freedom and safety in a more welcoming setting.
Some of the women in the LG world acknowledged that broadcasting their look on social media came with risks.
“Some comments you like, some comments you don’t,” said Bianca Ha, an administrator of the page from Liverpool, whose picture was posted in the page’s early days.
While some of the LBs can at times seem to be playing the role of traditional Aussie lads, acting crass and carousing, she said the Facebook page can be empowering — a way for some women to take control of how they are portrayed.
Eventually, Falconer wants to create a brand, produce merchandise and figure out how to make money with the LB-LG scene. A meme he made about a coming trance music festival went viral; he is now partnering with the festival’s promoters on ticket sales.
Maybe, he said, the scene will eventually lead him further up the economic and social ladder, beyond his upbringing by a single mother in Parramatta.
“I want to be married and have kids,” Falconer said, when asked where he saw himself in 10 years. “I want to go to a restaurant and not have to worry about the menu price.”
But on a recent Friday night, with the chorus of The Weeknd’s I Feel It Coming picking up, none of that mattered. The crowd of young Australians, sons and daughters of immigrants from China, Thailand, Vietnam and elsewhere, were raving on.
Two white men, huddled over beers at a table nearby, looked bewildered. “I don’t know why there are so many Asians here,” said Mark Williams, a local resident from St Leonards. “I’m trying to work it out.”
© 2017 New York Times News Service