Trauma: A living archive

Luoyang Chen

How do you archive trauma? Like you archive posts on Instagram that people can no longer see, if they weren’t there to see it. That you yourself can’t see unless you seek it out. If it were that easy, I would not be stuck with this one. I would be able to handle ten thousand traumas if it were that easy.

I wish it was that easy.

Dr AI still doesn’t know me. Neither does his supervisor – Head of Discipline, nor Head of School to whom I should be grateful (should I?). 

I was invisible in his class. Week one, week two. Weeks went by. Week ten, his email found me. Then I was in his office:

Yes please, close the door. Tell me about what you know about the ‘One.’ Is this what Simone de Beauvoir means by the ‘One’ or is this what you think Simone de Beauvoir means by the ‘One’? I don’t believe that you wrote this essay. As a teacher of ESL students for many years, I can tell. This essay is too well-written. The language doesn’t look like it’s written by a non-native English speaker. You know I study German and…Did someone help you write this? I am not sure if I should believe you. No, don’t take this as an offence. I will think about it – whether or not to raise an academic misconduct investigation. You may leave now. Yes, please leave it open.

I wasn’t sure how to take it. As I walked down the stairs – more like dropping, step by step – I felt detached, disoriented, and depleted. I couldn’t make it to the ground floor. Instead, I found myself curled up against the wall in the corner of the first floor, sobbing. I texted my friend Eddie, feeling painfully alone, and immediately he replied with the f-word.

‘That is pure rot,’ he said.

I belonged to the least desirable demographic of international students in Australia, which is to say, Chinese. I was aware of that. Chinese – so many; dishonest; awful English. I was aware of that. That’s why when a barista asked me if I was Japanese, I replied, ‘Unfortunately.’ 

‘It is unfortunate that this happened to you,’ one might say. Really, this incident is bad but it is not that bad. I know that. Sometimes I do feel maybe I am dramatising this.

But I cried whenever I talked about this. This was what happened the day following the meeting: at 1pm, unexpectedly I saw my teacher J and unexpectedly, I cried out loud while talking about what happened yesterday; at 2pm, in company with my teacher R, I burst into tears while consulting with student advocacy who didn’t support me that much, emotionally and strategically; at 7pm, I texted my friend Kye and burst into tears. I found myself repeating the same story, same tears, to different people including those who I did not consider myself close to during that period. I didn’t know I was that easy.

It took over a month for the Head of School to respond to my concerns. I showed up in her office because she didn’t reply to my emails. But she was not there. I was so fragile. I gradually felt aggressive as well. I pictured myself smashing the window in her office and jumping to my death. I thought that could be her punishment. But I didn’t dare to do it.  I dared only to imagine. In the meantime, the Head of Discipline attempted to intervene because Dr AI told him that my writing was suspicious. My teacher P said the Head of Discipline is a coward because his initial email began with ‘investigation’ and his final email ended with ‘I hereby withdraw my invitation’. He is a coward because I told him that without any valid reason for his so-called ‘investigation’, it would only be bullying, though teacher P called it racism. ‘I hereby withdraw my invitation,’ I laughed.

Because, really, there was no valid reason for suspecting me of collusion or plagiarism, except that Dr AI believed that it was too well-written. Another teacher certainly disagreed that it was well-written. She marked my essay because the mutual trust between Dr AI and I was broken, and the mark I received was 78. I mean…

If my essay was too good to be written by a non-native English speaker, why 78? If it was not that good, and only deserved 78, then what was all this about? From the beginning, I was not expected to be good. If I were good, I would be seen as too good and thus too bad. Too bad.

To be powerless, one is expected to encounter absurdity. I suppose Dr AI didn’t know that I would fight back, that my teachers from other courses would write letters of support for me, would be willing to advocate for me. I doubt he knows that I write poetry.

But Dr AI did break the fragile me. I guess I tried so hard to prove that I was not Chinese because Chinese, to me, was associated only with negative images. I indulged myself swimming in the pool of my fake identity, but really it was just self-racism and cultural insecurity in disguise.

I realise that I can never, and it is absurd to, prove that I am not Chinese. I am Chinese. Before I change how other people perceive Chinese, I need to change how I see myself as Chinese. I need to see myself as Chinese. I guess one could say that at least the outcome of this incident is good. It is, I attest. Because I finally understand that being Chinese is innocent. But a good outcome doesn’t necessarily mean that it can justify the traumatic experience I had.

I appreciate studying in Australia. Honestly, I think that studying abroad is the best decision I have ever made. But living in Australia is extremely hard for international students, especially students whose native language is not English. For us, being disadvantaged is the ubiquitous condition. We are unacknowledged, ignored, exploited, excluded, despised…It is suffocating to listen to some of my classmates whose disengaged tones and intimidating glances often silence my voice while they talk so eloquently about inclusivity. Multicultural Australia is not so multicultural. International students seem like a norm in multicultural Australia; we are, for Australian citizens, just there. There is no deep communication between Australians and non-Australians in Australia; they don’t really have interest in knowing different cultures other than their own. They don’t have patience for one who speaks slowly. They don’t appreciate how hard one has worked to be here. They don’t realise it is a privilege to be disinterested.

When spending time with my Australian friends and acquaintances, I often felt ashamed for not being ‘Australian’ enough. How can you be culturally competent if every conversation we have is based on the assumption that I know about Australia as much as you do? I guess the criticism on White people being colour blind can be applied to Australians who think that international students have the same ‘Australia experience’ as they do. The fact is that we don’t.

In Perth, I once again felt being embraced and less alone when I heard ‘Prego’ from Italian people. Even though our relationship was purely based on that between consumer and vendor, I could sense the joy and appreciation from them. In Melbourne, I used to go to Tiamo on Lygon Street for their marinara but also for that sense of celebration – I felt my interest in knowing another culture and language was being celebrated there. Speaking English, on the other hand, can be very painful. I feel like English is more often used by native speakers to exclude, rather than communicate with, non-native speakers. I thought language was meant to bring people together. But English tears us apart.

Listening to People of Colour talking about cultural differences, one might think; ah, so lame, cliché, can’t relate. I considered myself as one of those people, too. But really, every person’s experience is so unique and multifaceted. It is limiting to categorise this or that as anti-racist writing. There is so much going on behind a concept. Generalisation is the essence of stereotype. How can I claim to dismantle stereotype when I myself am at the same time weaving out another kind?

Wirajuri academic and social worker Sue Green writes:

‘...culture is not the same for every member of a particular cultural group and is also constantly changing, making it difficult for anyone to ever be culturally competent.’ (2019, p. 179).

It is that I am Chinese, not that Chinese is me. It is that I write about anti-racism, not that anti-racism writes me. Green’s words resonate with me. My Chinese-ness is not defined by your interaction with other Chinese people; it is determined by my interaction with you. There are over one billion Chinese in the world and there is only one me. This is a reminder to other people but also to me.

Now I can talk about Dr AI without shedding tears. However, it is not easy, if not possible, to archive this trauma. Because how can I? Incidents are physical. Trauma, on another level, is metaphysical. It did not just happen; it is happening. It manifests differently in the everyday, in different conversations I have with other people. It changes how I perceive the world, how I see myself and how I see other people. It is a way of being. I can’t archive it. I just have to live with it. And how I live with it varies.

I choose to write about it. Inspired by one of my favourite poets, Bhanu Kapil, writing can transform the utterly undesirable experiences into something aesthetically beautiful and tangible. Perhaps you could say that writing is my way of archiving. But my writing doesn’t really archive my trauma. It is more like I-and-my-trauma write about I-and-my-trauma. The former is a Subject that writes, whereas the latter is an Object that is being written. This writing/Object you are reading can never do justice to representing this I-and-my-trauma Subject. Because trauma doesn’t know dualities; it is all-pervasive. Trauma, really, is a living archive. If you want to access it, you should come live with me.