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  Near the end of the session, the presenter put up slides with sample multiple-choice questions from previous exams for us to answer. One asked us to measure the amount of liquid in a vial if two-thirds of it was poured into a different jar. Another question had us pick out the antonym of an archaic word. Finally, the presenter reminded parents that before a student embarked on this month-long program of practice tests, her company offered a three-and-a-half-hour pre-practice test – at a cost of $150 – to judge whether the child should even bother.

  ‘The scholarship classes I took were soul-crushing,’ says Tina. ‘A coaching college! Dude, there are five-year-olds walking around that place. What are you possibly coaching them?’ Still, Tina muses: ‘I am yet to meet an Asian child who doesn’t do some form of consistent tutoring.’

  *

  After years of preparation, Tina sat the various entrance examinations for selective state high schools, private schools offering scholarships and schools offering accelerated education programs. She was eight, nine, ten, then eleven. That time now seems a blur to Tina. Each year rolled by in vain. The entrance exams usually took place on a Saturday morning or afternoon, and the women and men in the community – the small-business vendors and managers and migrants with dormant university degrees, as well as the factory workers and at-home sewing-machine operators with their Year 4 educations – sent their sons and daughters along to these exams.

  Raised in a culture that since 605 AD has employed a merit-based civil-service examination system to reward academic excellence with tangible, life-changing consequences, many Chinese-Australian parents understand education as a way to shift class. With insufficient time, energy or resources to change their own circumstances, first-generation migrant parents generally encourage their children to work within the system. This has led to the almost exclusive emphasis on examination results, and often leaves the entire burden on the small shoulders of the students themselves. (When I was thirteen, my parents hired a maths tutor for a month to help me pass the test to get into MacRobertson, the only selective girls’ state high school in Victoria. I did not get in.)

  At the age of fourteen, instead of visiting friends or holding slumber parties, Tina spent a few weeks sitting in scholarship coaching classes after school, to ‘test them out’ for her younger sister, who was in Year 5. ‘I didn’t want her to go through the same awful experience I did,’ she explains.

  ‘I didn’t get into MacRob. I didn’t get into a private school through a scholarship. None of them.’

  Instead, Tina made it into the SEAL program at Box Hill High, and she is flourishing. She has joined the debating team, become class captain and even taken a creative-writing class. Earlier this year, when the class was asked to write about a piece of creative nonfiction, Tina chose the Gospels. Her teacher, Imogen Melgaard, tells me, ‘Tina’s intellect is frightening sometimes, because it is so easy to forget that she is only a kid. At times I have to stop myself from speaking to her like she’s an adult and my equal.’

  Each SEAL school is responsible for determining its own selection criteria, which means students are not siphoned off by a single test. The inclusion of interviews and Year 6 reports means that the SEAL program takes a broader approach to determining which students to admit. Their personalities and characters matter. Melgaard notes that SEAL students feel a level of acceptance here that might be absent if they’d remained in ordinary classes: ‘They would be the one or two kids who would stand out and be picked on. But here, they have their Doctor Who club and their chess club, and they bring textbooks to school camps. There is a strong culture of pride in doing well.’

  Half of Melgaard’s SEAL class is Asian. She remarks that ‘it is fascinating how much Asian pride these kids have. They will joke to me about the “Asian Five” subjects that students study for VCE’ – two maths, physics, chemistry and English – ‘and also about the “Asian fail”, which is an A-minus’.

  Box Hill High used to be a working-class boys college. But its SEAL program has done more than just revitalise the school; it has helped change the demographics of a suburb. In 1996, the median house price in Box Hill was $150,000. Yet as more and more parents moved to be within the school zone, property prices soared. In 2001, the median house price was $280,000. Ten years later it was $960,000.

  Now when you emerge from Box Hill’s train station, 14 kilometres east of Melbourne’s CBD, you step into a shopping mall that would not look out of place in Singapore. There is a Giordano store selling polo shirts in every conceivable bright colour, and well-made pants in conservative cuts. There are Chinese cake shops and bubble tea outlets, and the whole centre gleams Domestos-white. Youths wear flip-flops down the street, but they wear them with designer jeans.

  Beyond Box Hill Centro lies an inner-city foodie’s dream – stretches of dumpling restaurants and kopitiams. The largest group of overseas-born residents in Box Hill is from mainland China. Almost all shopfronts have signage in Chinese, in addition to English. It is said, half-jokingly among Asians here, that a person could live in Box Hill and never have to deal with the English-speaking populace: they could shop, eat, bank and even bury their loved ones in their own dialect. It was recently expressed in more charged terms through a now-banned Facebook page called ‘Playing “Spot the Aussie” in Box Hill’. While it was up, the Facebook page was liked by nearly 12,000 people, many of whom posted rants about unhygienic, job-stealing, unassimilated Asians.

  One thing is clear, though – there is a sense of community. The new migrants in Box Hill have added an air of cosmopolitan sophistication. Restaurants now open later at night, and the eating strip near Whitehorse Road teems with families and fast patter. For new arrivals seeking manual or market work, this is where you can make connections and find out where to send your kids to school. Lined woollen blazers, alumni networks and new swimming pools don’t mean much to people who might have been in this country for only a handful of years, but they’re quick to switch to a system that boasts the greatest number of graduates to top universities, or the highest Australian Tertiary Admissions Rankings.

  Recently, Tina was invited to talk at Melbourne University about the SEAL program to a postgraduate class studying ‘gifted education’. ‘I was a SEAL student for three years before my mum heard my speech and went, “Oh, so that’s what you’re doing, Tina. Well, good luck. Is that why everyone else is doing it?’’’

  *

  At the Box Hill library, I meet Tina’s friend and classmate Aaron, who is sixteen. He lives locally but, like Tina, does not go out much. After school, he walks his three younger sisters home, prepares some food for them and returns to his studies. Aaron’s father, an engineer, arrived in Australia in the early 1980s from Vietnam, and his mother migrated two years later. They moved to Box Hill after hearing about the local SEAL program.

  Aaron is shy. He wants to become a corporate lawyer. Asked why, he replies he’s keen on ‘security’. ‘Are you happy?’ I ask him. He looks at me for a long moment before replying: ‘What is happiness?’

  ‘You know it when you feel it,’ I suggest.

  No, it’s more complicated than that, Aaron insists. ‘It’s different for everyone.’ Happiness, he tells me, has a lot to do with security.

  Aaron keeps glancing to check on his sisters, who are also at the library. At the back are small carrels – tiny rooms where a person can sequester themselves all afternoon to study. On the library noticeboard, in addition to flyers for the Henry Lawson society and Chinese-language classes on internet use, there is an advertisement for a parents’ forum on ‘supporting stressed, anxious or depressed teenagers’.

  *

  Tina and I are walking down her favourite running track. ‘I hate running,’ she tells me, ‘but it makes me feel good afterwards.’ We are in her new suburb. Her parents moved to Balwyn so that Nicole would be within the catchment zone of Balwyn High School, which also has a SEAL program and whose students regularly top the state’s Year 12 results. The f
amily relocated their Elwood fish-and-chip shop, where business was good, to The Happy Snapper in Canterbury, closer to where they now live. Meanwhile, Tina continues to commute to Box Hill.

  I ask her what she is most afraid of.

  ‘Failure,’ she answers instantly.

  ‘But when was the last time you failed?’

  ‘Does burning toast in the morning count?’ Then she says, ‘I think the fear comes from not being able to come back from being stuck in a horrible place.’

  On the day of Tina’s Year 12 biology exam, she is hyperventilating and breathing into a paper bag. (At the end of Year 8, twenty-five of the seventy-five SEAL students at Tina’s school are selected to study a VCE science subject. ‘So I’m like the accelerated of the accelerated,’ she tells me.) Confessing that she gets sick after every exam, to the point where she has to take antibiotics, Tina tells me that this one is particularly nerve-racking because the marks count towards her Australian Tertiary Admission Rank. To prepare, Tina has completed fifty practice biology exams – 150 hours’ worth. She sourced the practice exams from teachers, tutors and friends, and bought more online.

  Over the six months I spend getting to know her, Tina’s self-esteem seems precariously balanced between soaring confidence and debilitating anxiety. This is the price paid by a constantly coached student: underneath all that stoicism, there is a quiet resentment at being forced into a system that judges you by very narrow parameters.

  Even private schools are beginning to acknowledge that a coached student may not necessarily have the type of rounded, inquisitive mind they are after. Sydney Grammar School, for instance, strongly discourages academic coaching as preparation for its scholarship exam. If the purpose behind education for the gifted is to ensure that the brightest students are sufficiently challenged, then this idea of extra, relentless tutoring cranks the dial all the way back around to the beginning, where naturally curious intellects are no longer being challenged in the ways that matter, and students’ skills are limited to test-taking and thinking within the rules.

  Indeed, when Julia Gillard declared that the Asian Century begins in the classroom, coaching colleges were hardly what she meant. Amy Chua’s controversial book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother raised an unsettling question about education: is giftedness inherent, or is it all about the hard slog? Asian cities such as Shanghai may top OECD charts for educational attainment, but many teachers in Australia are sceptical about whether the rigid, rote-learning techniques used there will create the sort of adaptive and flexible future workers and leaders needed in the decades ahead.

  My last meeting with Tina takes place inside a McDonald’s in Balwyn. She tells me about her sister, Nicole. Tina’s careful scoping exercise for a suitable coaching college eventually yielded the same one that hosted the information session I attended. ‘It cost $2000 for a month, and Nicole cried every week of that month,’ Tina confesses. ‘But it worked.’ So much so, that Tina’s sister didn’t even end up going to Balwyn High, the school that was the reason for their parents’ relocation. Nicole won a scholarship to Camberwell Girls Grammar School, which has annual fees of around $20,000. ‘She did better than me,’ says Tina with a half-laugh, half-sigh. Then she is pensive. ‘You know, I’ve never really met any Asian parents who believe the whole “not everything that counts can be counted” thing,’ she says. ‘But I have that phrase plastered next to the “How to Succeed in Year 12 Biology” sheets on my wall. It keeps me sane.’

  LETTER TO A

  You ripped down the wallpaper one day when you were fourteen, ripped it right off the walls, all four of them, and then stuck up posters all over the room to hide the scabby paint. One day it will get painted over, you told yourself. One day the broken window will get fixed. One day the carpets will get changed. One day the ceiling will not fall down. One day the cracks will not be there, one day the smell will not be there, and when that day comes you will be out. Out of there. You will not be there to see it all. One day you will be out of there and one day you will live a freshly whitewashed life. Yes you will, and the ceiling will no longer peel and fall on top of you and these four walls will no longer close in on you, and you will have cauterised your wants.

  There is a depression in the wall. These depressions come about when your knuckles itch and your upper deltoids ache to exert themselves and your mind is nothing but a blank black hole screaming to see red, that is when you strike and don’t think of the consequences. This is when your inarticulate rage causes you to bunch up your fist and punch the wall so hard that the clock falls down on the other side, since there is no one to listen to your choked half-finished sentences about a cousin, a cousin who was once like a brother but is now nothing more than crap for all you care, a cousin so far gone that you don’t think of the money he has borrowed from you or the money he owes you, the money to get out, you do not think about it at all because you do not want to think about him. To think about him is to stumble down the path of despair and once you are on that path, you have to keep running, keep running or else if you stop and pause to see what direction you are going, you will sink to your knees and realise how much you need water, water like the water bottles they carry down the streets of Richmond, and you can always tell which ones are the ones on the habit because of these water bottles.

  We were powerpoints, powerpoints with the three holes, two that slanted upwards and one that was a straight stroke down, straight and narrow and sad, like the prospect of some of us spending the rest of our lives doing PowerPoint presentations because our names are Andrew Chan and we wear glasses and sit in front of our PCs after school each evening because our parents want us to study hard and become successful, because this is a land of great opportunity and we must not waste it, it is a land of great fairness where even Ah Chan selling BanCao at the market in Saigon can raise a son who can decipher strange symbols in front of a screen merely by pressing many buttons in different combinations on a black pad, and it assures him to hear the clackity clack noise like an old abacus coming from his son’s room, because then he knows that his son knows more than he does. Old Ah Chan doesn’t have a clue about what the information superhighway is, all he knows is that there are no casualties, none at all, and that it can only go up from here. And so he buys his son the magic machine with the clopclop buttons and with a few clackity clacks and clicks he can transport himself to a nice office and a house in the suburbs and a shiny new blue Mazda.

  Chink is an insult, but chink is also the sound that money makes as it rattles in your father’s pockets, it is also the sound that those machines at the casino make when he hits the jackpot, so chink is not necessarily too bad a word. Chink is the only word that governs the life of your father, chink chink chink of the coins in the gaming machine, chink chink chink one at a time and not all at once, and so he sits there to wait for the sound of all-at-once chinks, meanwhile at home the boy and the mother and the kid brother sit together for a dinner of rice and vegetables and bits of beef before parting to play computer games or watch Chinese serials in separate rooms. You go off to your room and turn up the music, real loud music, and you look at the white wall which you had determined to paint a mural on, ’cause your art teacher says that you have real talent, but what the hell, what now? What is determination now, when the father won’t come back and when the father won’t stop spending the money and won’t stop believing in the glorious sound of the chinkchinkchink of the machine.

  A steady beat of chinks from the coins in his pocket, waiting for the rapid succession of chinkchinkchinks like the quickening of a heartbeat until the glorious rushing sound cannot be separated into its individual tinkles but all pours forth like a mad gold rush.

  This is a different gold rush from the gold rush of the nineteenth century when we men had to carry heavy buckets and sift away to find the little pieces, and we needed strong stomachs to swallow the pieces and keen eyes to sift through the processes of our digestive tracts to find that little hard lump.


  Meanwhile, swallow that lump in your throat you big sook, ’cause big boys aren’t sooks goddam it, and look at your comic books and pictures of Dragonball Z and pick up the phone to call the number of that little pale-faced girl with the dark eyes and the black hair, even if she makes you write her letters instead of wanting to talk in person. Let the phone ring and ring and goddam is there anyone home? Keep your finger on the little soft grey ‘off’ button on the cordless phone in case her parents pick up and interrogate you worse than those Mao guards during the bloody cultural revolution that would not leave your family alone, that sent them to Vietnam, and then to this new land where little white-faced girls with black hair laugh at your stories of killing chickens in the Guangzhou countryside, and all your history becomes a funny after-dinner anecdote. Others would see your acts as barbaric, and squeeze their clean faces into squished looks of shudder-shake – ‘eww, how gross’ – even as they are seated opposite you eating a McChicken burger or severing the joints of the skinny bones of KFC chicken wings with shiny fingers.

  And so you lie on your bed in your room waiting for the father to come home, and you can hear the sound of your mother’s footsteps padding to the kitchen to wash the dishes from dinner. You sit up and decide to write the girl a letter, a poem even, although you know all of this means nothing to you even though the girl means something to you, little ivory-faced girl in a tower. Grab a few sheets of Reflex paper, A4, nothing fancy. Goddam if the girl is expecting perfumed notepaper, well this was the best she was going to get and she had better be happy with it. Bloody hell, how are you going to do this when you couldn’t give a damn about this decomposed Keats your English teacher keeps mentioning?