Talking Tiananmen in Sydney: my childhood with two Chinese women

This was published 1 year ago


Talking Tiananmen in Sydney: my childhood with two Chinese women

Sydney’s north shore is a long way from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, but the 1989 massacre was a more prominent talking point in my household than most.

I was five years old in 1992 when a woman called Xiao-xing responded to a job ad my mum placed with Sydney University looking for an au pair to come and live with our family of five.

Mum had originally gone looking for a young French speaker who liked cooking. But soon enough she settled on Xiao-xing, a fortysomething scientific researcher who spoke no French and intensely disliked cooking.

We didn’t know much about Xiao-xing, apart from the fact that she had a teenage daughter and husband back home in Wuhan, and that she had been taught English by a Russian tutor, which explained why she spoke English with a Muscovite lilt.


She watched local news intently. And just five years on from the Tiananmen Square massacre, footage still featured regularly on the nightly bulletins.

But Xiao-xing refused to believe what she saw.

She dismissed clips from the massacre, including the infamous ‘Tank Man’ stand-off, as Western propaganda invented to hinder China’s advancement and to discredit Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who at the time was making strides on an industrialisation program.

Two decades on, my parents still recall how initially they’d gently press her on what she saw on television, and ask her why Australia would grant asylum to Chinese students if the massacre was a fabrication. But after months of continued denials, they gave up.

Even so, she slotted into our family easily. She was generous with hugs and efficient around the home. She also tolerated my five-year-old self following her like a shadow.

But she also had a temper, which she showed when my mum returned home one day to find Xiao-xing had fired our northern Chinese gardener, Bao Jao, for what the matronly Xiao-xing called unsanitary use of the bathroom.


She spent her days working in a laboratory at Sydney University, while also studying for a language diploma.

On weekends, she went to countless Chinese get-togethers thrown inside cramped share houses in the city’s industrial belt and on cracked concrete slabs in terrace backyards overgrown with weeds.

I knew because she let me tag along with her.

I remember being the only blonde in a room of Chinese women, wide-eyed and mesmerised by the lustre of their hair which was so thick they could corral it into a ponytail as neatly as a rubber band over dry spaghetti.

I can still remember the smell of a tiny kitchen thick with steam from a stove groaning under the weight of giant broth-filled pots. I can also remember impromptu violin performances in barely furnished rooms, lit by cold fluorescent lights.

It was at one of these get-togethers that a young student called Faith* came into our orbit.

Xiao-xing is seen with Faith (face obscured, right) and a child.


I don’t recall when the decision was made that the twentysomething Faith would move into a room in my grandmother’s house down the street from us, but I was rapt to have a violin-playing Chinese idol to follow around.

(As a teenager, I would hear that Faith initially came to stay as an emergency stopgap after a nightmare stint in a share house fending off nightly advances from an older male flatmate.)

But if I was happy, Xiao-xing was more content to have Faith nearby, even if the only contact they appeared to have was their ferry ride together each day to uni.

Xiao-xing returned to China in 1993, a move which puzzled my parents, who struggled to understand why she wouldn’t stay on the six weeks longer it would take to graduate. But she didn’t seem to care.


Faith stayed on at my grandmother’s. If the young student was sad to see her older compatriot go, she never let on.

In the years after Xiao-xing left, Faith would tell us about her life back in China, how her own mother was disliked by the government, how she wasn’t allowed to join her family on the streets to celebrate Chinese New Year, and how she had even been forced to wear a placard once.

Faith continued living with my grandmother for around five years before moving to Melbourne, where she retrained as a nurse and eventually married an Australian.

More than two decades later I was working as a reporter when my colleague John Garnaut reported on a Chinese plan to send out loyal party members to Australia to keep tabs on Chinese students living here in the early 1990s.

I still wonder whether we were unwittingly caught up in the plan.

* Not her real name

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