Dancing to a new tune

Once vilified, Chinese immigrants to Australia have endured the many difficulties of adapting to a different society to earn a reputation as ‘model migrants’. China Australia business spoke to some successful Chinese Australians who’ve been there, done that, and are proud to tell the tale.

The first book Wang Zheng Ting bought in Australia was probably also the most useful. Unemployed and alone, he was armed only with his book of 900 elementary English phrases when he entered one of the many Italian restuarants on Melbourne’s iconic Lygon Street shortly after his arrival in 1987.

“That’s how I could say, ‘I’m looking for a job’,” he recalls. “Then they said, ‘Come back tonight at 9 o’clock’. I didn’t even know the English word for ‘come’. They had to point to a watch to show me what they meant.”

The Chinese composer and graduate from the Shanghai Conservatorium of Music had previously conquered formidable audiences of thousands of people, playing his sheng (Chinese mouth organ) in leading Chinese orchestras all over the world. But for the next three years Wang worked in the restaurant business and, soon after mastering his first English words (‘cucumber’ and ‘zucchini’), became fluent in the language.

By 2004, he had become an Australian citizen, completed a Masters degree in Ethno-musicology at Monash University on a scholarship placement, and finally achieved a PhD in music at Melbourne University. Wang is now the director of the Australian Chinese Music Ensemble, a group that he founded with a few amateur musicians in 1989.

“My intention was to show off Chinese music,” he says. “I wanted to show mainstream Australia how good Chinese music sounds.”

The ensemble is now made up of mostly mainstream Australian performers, who specialise in the fusion of traditional Chinese music with Western orchestral music.

The model minority

Wang’s success story is not an unfamiliar tale for many Chinese migrants who have made the dramatic and often difficult journey from their homeland to what is affectionately called the ‘Lucky Country’.

Australia has changed significantly since its first Chinese migrants arrived during the Gold Rush of the mid-19th century, with social attitudes towards foreigners now far removed from those underpinning the White Australia Policy, which limited immigration to people of European or Anglo-Saxon descent for almost thirty years before being abolished in 1973.

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