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Minou is described as having a face with ‘the gravity, the appearance of having lived
through many lifetimes, that Asian features can suggest’ (TB, 21), but d’Alpuget offers little to
support or clarify this. That her old life had been cruelly hard is not to be doubted, but Minou
has invested herself in the clichés of her new life, and most of the images make her seem silly
and frivolous.
Her husband, the Ambassador, has procured a job for her as a special attaché for the
refugees, which gains her access to the boat people camps. She is beloved in the camps, not
for her valuable accomplishments, including securing a refrigerator for the vaccines, but for the
absurd films she shows the children who cannot even speak English, including titles which
equate Perth, Gateway to the West with Donald Duck’s Birthday and Goofy Goes Fox Hunting.
In her private life Minou comes off as a manipulative playmate for the Ambassador, who has
traded half his wits for a jaunt with a sexy young wife.
D’Alpuget’s extensive use of stereotypical images may be annoying at first, but she
weaves her clichés together well into characters and a story which, in the end, are very original
and, more importantly, evoke the reader’s sympathy. She manages to avoid the problems of
stereotypical perceptions, including the tendency of clichés to veil latent racism, or the
phenomenon whereby all individuality melts away into generic description, which Fitzpatrick
calls ‘undifferentiatedness’ (Fitzpatrick, 36).
4.6. The Oriental Female Stereotype
This ‘undifferentiatedness’ has been rule in the long tradition of Asian stereotyping.
While there are few Asian women represented in early Australian literature, due to the fact that
there were few in Australia at all, by the 20 th century they were receiving special, but
prejudiced, attention. The mythical image of the beautiful and mysterious Oriental woman
appeared as a special lure for Australian men. She was ‘deified’ as beautiful, artistic,
idealistic, courageous, full of initiative, highly-educated and, most importantly, westernised.
Ouyang Yu remarks that her deification ‘reveals a basic racist assumption about the great
potential in her for Christian or Western conversion’, and represents ‘a sort of fetishization’ in
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