Interview #181 — Dominic Hong Duc Golding
By Emma Do
Dominic Golding is a Vietnamese adoptee who currently works as a disability support worker. He has spent nearly two decades working with refugee and asylum seeker communities through arts and research projects.
Dominic has produced a number of plays including Shrimp and Umbilical—both of which trace his search for a Vietnamese identity and experiences of disability.
Dominic spoke to Emma about creating a family of global adoptees, rejecting the Vietnamese-Australian label and interrogating whiteness in Australia.
This interview was first published as part of Liminal’s first print edition, in 2019.
I want to start by asking about where your love for the arts began. Were your parents artistic?
No, they weren’t. I’d always done illustration and painting because I couldn’t speak about or explain what happened at school. But doing theatre gave me the freedom to express myself and allowed me to create a diversity of experiences on the stage.
Knowing that I would never be a mainstream actor on Neighbours has made my performance work more like poetic happenings. I do poetic prose and readings in a performance art format. Taken from the 1960s and 1970s American arts and later the Asian-American performance art of the 1980s and 1990s—this is kind of where my genealogy of performance comes from. Having these limitations of disability, a Vietnamese background and a hearing impairment actually works in my favour because I'm not restricted by some white gatekeeper telling me that my body, voice and sensibility doesn’t fit within the mainstream.
You’ve worked within the refugee/asylum seeker community and disability sector in various forms. I feel that you have a very strong sense of social justice. Would you agree?
I don't really know the definition of social justice.
Well I mean, the work that you do is about helping people who have been overlooked gain a better quality of life and increased access, right?
Yeah that's right. But I also experience barriers myself. It’s not that I’m smarter—I’m just trying to find strategies to [overcome these barriers] and hopefully get some funding for myself to do it. It’s not a lot of money. By now, I should be rolling in the money with all my experience.
I've worked in community development in Melbourne since the 2000s, starting off with the Vietnamese Youth Media at Footscray Community Arts Centre. I directed a show with them called Walking Without Feet and was able to get Vietnamese people with disabilities to come up with performances and have a wider interaction with the public.
Having these limitations of disability, a Vietnamese background and a hearing impairment actually works in my favour because I'm not restricted by some white gatekeeper telling me that my body, voice and sensibility doesn’t fit within the mainstream.
How did you end up working in this space? Can you tell me a little about your early life?
I’m a country boy from the bush. I grew up in Mount Gambier, on a hobby farm with both my parents who were qualified teachers. So my background was lower middle-class (by today’s standards)—that was my upbringing. Then I moved to Adelaide and thought, “What can I do?” I didn’t have the vocalisation and verbalisation skills of communication, so I did acting training for three years where my acting school gave me speech therapy and taught me accent work to come up with a voice. And then I realised I couldn’t be an actor.
Why is that?
Because I’m not white. I don't have looks like Mel Gibson. And I don't have muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though he was my idol when I was growing up—he could smack someone through the wall. I learned technique and performance at acting school, but of course being deaf, having cerebral palsy and being Asian doesn't really stick you high in the casting category.
So how did you get involved in doing productions with the Vietnamese Youth Media?
Tony Le-Nguyen was an actor who started this theatre/film group for Vietnamese young people. He started out doing stuff on mainstream TV like Romper Stomper and Embassy—back in the early 1990s when mainstream TV shows were flirting with the idea of diversity. Anyway, I heard about the Vietnamese Youth Media and they invited me to join. I had just come from acting school at Flinders University doing drama theory and political theory, so I had these two passions that fed into doing theatre shows with them.
I joined mainly because I wanted to know what it was like to be a Vietnamese person. I’m culturally white, but they called me a banana. I had never heard of the concept of a banana before coming to Melbourne. I was called a gook and yellow in high school, but never a banana. The problem was that I felt like I was really making an effort to understand Vietnamese-Australian cultural norms but they weren’t making an effort to understand me, or what it’s like to be adopted.
I wanted to know what it was like to be a Vietnamese person.
I just want to take it back a step. You were flown out of a Vietnamese orphanage during Operation Babylift in 1975 and adopted by a white Australian family. What was your idea of Vietnamese-ness growing up?
I had no reference to work off. I was in a white country town with a couple of Greeks and Italians and one Vietnamese family that ran the Chinese restaurant in town. I only had Full Metal Jacket as a reference. I grew up reading lots about the Vietnam War and watching movies like Rambo and Missing In Action, and that wasn’t really helpful towards the process of understanding myself (but it did make me grow up to hate whites). My first experience with Vietnam was actually at the end of university. I hung out with these two Aussies and we went around Vietnam video-taping me trying to work out my shit.
What were your initial impressions of the country?
I was flabbergasted; I didn't know what was in it for me. I was clearly out of my depth and emotionally I wasn't there. I went to a couple of orphanages that weren't the one I came from. I tried to reconcile the relationship between my body and the country in its present.
Late in 2006, I went [back] to live for a year and teach English. I purposely decided to live outside of District 1 in Ho Chi Minh City so as not be around white people and tourists. Of course I got ripped off—I’m a Việt kiều [a Vietnamese person living outside Vietnam], but I didn’t get ripped off as badly as a white person.
It makes you feel just a little better, doesn’t it?
Yeah. Being there, it was really good to get to know people—well, the people who could speak English. I talked to as many people as I could to get to know their sense of being, what they thought about American foreign policy, what they thought about Việt kiều.
How did they see you?
They saw me as Việt kiều, but I don’t see myself that way. I saw myself as just an Aussie bloke that was trying to get to know my country of origin. It was only when I lived with a Vietnamese family, and when my mum sent photos of family in Australia did they understand what was going on and could see that I was adopted. I think mum wanted to show them a bit of my background, even though mum has never set foot in Vietnam.
They saw me as Việt kiều, but I don’t see myself that way. I saw myself as just an Aussie bloke that was trying to get to know my country of origin.
Can you tell me about when you really started thinking about your own identity?
Being adopted and non-white always puts you as the outsider in society. I knew from the very beginning that my being was different. Primary school and high school defined that outsider status and otherness. [My identity] is actually not clear-cut for me, even though I’m Australian. I’ve got my Australian accent, I’m ocker, I’m very bogan, I tell people to fuck off. I grew up with a lot of hatred against me so I’ve dished it back.
When you grow up in a rural Australian town, there’s a defined social order and generally it’s a white Australian settler class [on top]. So if you’re outside of that, you’re not seen as being Australian, no matter how much you try to perform the act of being assimilated like playing cricket, going to church, speaking with an Aussie accent. That’s the first part.
The second part is that non-Vietnamese people saw me as Vietnamese and tried to put that on me, but they actually don’t even know what the fuck a Vietnamese person is! They have ideas that are informed by media and ten years of war, and they put that on me. So when I went to Vietnam, I wanted to know what it was that I’m supposed to identify as being a part of.
And what about when you started meeting Vietnamese-Australians? How did that inform your identity?
I don’t speak the language. I don’t have two parents who are Vietnamese. I don’t have the refugee experience. I can’t be the nice Viet boy, even if I cut my hair. I can’t perform this [Vietnamese-Australian-ness], not that I ever really tried. So what does it mean to be a Vietnamese-Australian? I never really identified with that. In some ways, people in Vietnam accepted me more than Vietnamese-Australians do.
When you're from the diaspora, you're forced to reconfigure how you see yourself and how that fits within a settler society. Vietnamese people in Vietnam didn't have to worry about that shit: they dealt with the war, and now deal with communism, corruption, economic boom—they’re just living. The Vietnamese over here are constantly trying to see how they fit against Australians. I found myself having a more similarly aligned sense of being with Vietnamese in Vietnam rather than with Vietnamese-Australians here.
What do you think is behind this lack of understanding of your adoptee experience from the wider Vietnamese-Australian community here?
I think it’s understandable… it comes with all migrant groups. They come with their sense of self and view the world through that experience of fleeing persecution. I’ve never had this trauma of fleeing communism and getting on a boat and landing in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, etc. They have these ideas of how to relate to mainstream Australia through that experience. If you don’t fit that mould, then they don’t know how to place you.
And there is this one public presentation of the Vietnamese-Australian narrative: the successfully assimilated, middle- to upper-middle-class whose kids are uni graduates. I think that’s bullshit. It’s not just refugees—you’ve got people who came during the Colombo Plan, those who are overseas students, those who are tradies, those who are like myself. You have a variety of people who make up the Vietnamese community here, but that’s never acknowledged publicly. And that is seen as being multicultural, but in fact it is playing to the political class.
I’ve got my Australian accent, I’m ocker, I’m very bogan, I tell people to fuck off. I grew up with a lot of hatred against me so I’ve dished it back.
What exactly do you mean by “playing to the political class”?
I mean when there are mainstream political events involving Vietnamese-Australian leadership standing with an Australian politician, talking about the experience(s) of multicultural Australia. It’s a performance in itself that demonstrates an assimilationist idea of multiculturalism to the white power brokers in Parliament. [The Vietnamese-Australian] community sets the dominant narrative of coming from a refugee background, hard work and that’s what the mainstream politicians pick up on.
Narrow as it is, I also understand why this dominant narrative is unquestioned by the Vietnamese-Australian community. They would rather protect their public reputation as hardworking, non-threatening refugees—the model minority—than acknowledge a more complicated portrait.
The community does fundraising work and such and it’s great, but it’s purely superficial and based on trying to make themselves look good. It’s not what I consider grassroots community work, which is not sexy or glorious or anything like going to the Victorian Premier’s Awards.
You’re 43 now. How do you see your identity these days?
I've come around from hating white people, growing up with racism and bullying, to working out what it means to be Vietnamese-Australian, and now coming to a happy point where I see myself as a Vietnamese person who has grown up white and that's okay.
What’s your definition of family?
Connections. My friends and peers are probably what I consider family. And that will shift— I’m happy that the construct can change. I’ve got my global adoptee family that I consider close to me too. I think the word ‘family’ is too restrictive and based on social order and blood, and I think that as an adopted person, I've learned not to believe in blood dictating your relationship to someone. But I do understand the power and the need to know about blood family. I’m doing my own search for my blood family right now, but I’m not fixated on it.
Where are you currently in this journey to find your blood relatives?
I was at two orphanages as a baby and I’ve found the second orphanage. It had been torn down and turned into some kind of modern building. I’m now in a search to find the first orphanage. I’ve engaged with a Vietnamese adoptee living in Vietnam who runs an orphanage in Vũng Tàu and she has done some searches for me. She has located my first orphanage, which is actually spelled wrong on my adoption records!
Oh, of course it is.
Which is why no one could find it because they spelled it wrong! Damn white people, can't even spell in Vietnamese properly. So I’ve found out that this place is a temple and [also] an orphanage. On my next trip to Vietnam, I’ll go and explore that, but it’s likely they won’t have records or anything of my family. I understand my expectations and the reality: if I don’t find anything, then I don’t. But like my dad used to say: you gotta be in it to win it.
In all honesty, I've done two DNA tests. It came out with fourth and fifth cousins and people that are quite distant. What’s interesting though is that there are a lot of Vietnamese people, Việt kiều, globally, who are doing these tests due to conflict and separation. So family reunions are a huge emotional thing. There are shows about it in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City that I’ve been involved in.
I think the word ‘family’ is too restrictive and based on social order and blood, and I think that as an adopted person, I've learned not to believe in blood dictating your relationship to someone.
Have you met many other adoptees from around the world?
Yeah, I’ve got a group of friends who are adoptees who were adopted from Korea, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong, and Vietnamese adoptees living in Europe, the U.S. and the U.K. Culturally, we are alike and similar in how we look at the world. We're assimilated and we're part of the mainstream, but we just don't look it. Most of us have tried to engage with the Vietnamese community in France or in the U.S. and we get the same reactions: we’re not Asian enough, or we’re too white. So fuck it, we’re going to be who we are.
Change of topic—what are you passionate about in life?
I’m interested in Australian politics and whiteness theory. I love reading sociological texts on race and migration history. Arts, museums and galleries are my thing—especially if the subject matter is on colonisation and empires.
I’m interested to know what motivates you and keeps you going with your work.
Honestly, I’m burning out at this stage. I’m struggling with the refugee sector. I’ve been in it for 17 years and dealing with white structuralism and the white mainstream…I’m having a hard time dealing. I see all of these different strategies but they’re not working.
As someone who constantly feels angered by the government’s treatment of refugees, I can’t even imagine how hard this would be to deal with on a daily basis, working in the refugee sector. What would you like to see change?
I would really like to see the government pull their finger out of their ass and start talking to mainstream Australia properly, not just scaring people to score political points. We need a complete revolution of government policy and willingness of government to communicate social policy, not class policy.
We almost need to go back to 1950s Australia. [Of course], it had its racist white undertones but when we “accepted” migrants from Europe, there was an acceptance [from the government] that we needed to sell this idea to the Australian people: that we need people to come here to grow the nation. Unlike today where we accept skilled migrants but tell everyone else to fuck off. I’m simplifying this of course. We need political will to compromise on these racist beliefs. We need to come back to a point where we accept border crossings as a natural part of the flow of migration. It also helps not to bomb the shit out of another country. We're not going to be flooded. There might be changes but we need to let that migration flow happen.
What arts or writing projects have you got on the backburner right now?
I’m just painting. I’m working on a comic about the Vietnam War. I’m also looking at doing a blog of writing about whiteness, white privilege and the culture of whiteness in Australia. A lot of research has been done on American whiteness but not in Australia. I’m grappling with my family’s sense of whiteness and why they don’t understand my positioning as a person of colour. They don’t see me as a person of colour. So I’m writing this piece about whiteness in Australia, really in relation to myself as an Asian adoptee who has grown up white.
We’ve talked about a lot of heavy stuff today. What do you do to relax?
I like gaming, drawing, and eating crispy pork belly with rice and bún bò huế.