Oct 25th, 2022 Tuesday Rainy
An unexpected conference trip took my husband to Sydney, Australia. Naturally, I followed him to explore this unknown southern land.
The moment I stepped out of the airport, I was struck by the subtropical scenery, with palm trees lining along streets and in city parks. However, other than this difference, I could not grasp the feeling of being in Sydney. Despite the thirty-hour flight, the familiar English signs everywhere and the mild spring weather (it was very comfortable autumn weather at home when I left) seemed to signal to me that this is just another North American city.
Soon I realized I was too quick to jump to conclusion. Unlike most of its North American counterparts, Sydney is truly a salad bowl, a city that welcomes and accommodates people and cultures from all over the world.
While the official language is English, I could hear many different tongues on the streets, in supermarkets, in restaurants, and on public transportation. Even the English I heard often had some accent other than Australian ? suggesting the speaker’s mother tongue is not English. When in town, it is safe to use English to get around since just about everyone is reasonably fluent, but people seemed to prefer to chat with others in their native languages. I easily picked up the Japanese accent of the waitress of a restaurant that we dined in, and decided to chat with her and thank her in Japanese after the meal. She gave out a really brilliant beam.
Besides the plethora of languages spoken, a closer look at the landscape also shows that the city is truly multicultural – there are no enclaves of XX town (there is a Chinatown, but the buildings, vendors, restaurants, and the atmosphere of Chinatown are so similar to those outside of the “official” boundary of Chinatown, that everything blended in pretty well). Guideposts inside Chinatown are in a variety of languages, and a Japanese sushi restaurant would very likely be next to a Thai dessert shop. This sign in a grocery store tells the tale of a multicultural community, where ethnic origins of food items are carefully preserved and clearly labeled, instead of being clumped together as “Asian” or just “International”.
Likewise, perhaps due to its relative proximity to Asia, Australia is a popular tourist and immigration destination for Asians, and many immigrants are still first-generation, resulting in a lot of fairly authentic restaurants, whose patrons are not only expatriates from that specific culture, but also visitors and workers from other cultures as well as “native” Australians. On our first day, we stopped by a casual laksa shop in CBD for lunch, and were shocked (though not surprised) by the long queue consisting of travelers like us, college students, locals walking nearby, and businessmen in suits. Laksa is by no means a “traditional” Australian food and it has no roots in British cuisine. But here in Sydney, people, regardless of their backgrounds, embrace it and love it openheartedly.
Even in cafes and hotels that do not specifically cater to an ethnic group, you could often see ethnic flavors and ingredients incorporated on the menu. Our hotel serves beef rendang, a characteristically Indonesian dish, for dinner, and cafes in the neighborhoods feature various pasta and salads with condiments like tamarind chutney, gochuchang, and yuzu kosho.
This is cool. This is what multiculturalism should look like. Real multiculturalism is not a one-time experience. Rather, it is weaved in everyday life, a lifestyle where different cultures interact and intermingle, broadening the horizon for everyone.