Joshua Sim: Shapes and Sounds Interview #12

Throughout 2020, we invited prominent Asian Australians to answer the same three questions about their mental health and their experiences of growing up Asian in Australia.

From clinical psychologist, Dr Phoebe Lau, to household names like Yumi Stynes and Benjamin Law, to author and advocate, Alice Pung, we've been able to dive a little deeper into the nuances of the Asian Australian experience. 

In this very binary world, I feel that Asian Australians are often either "all the same" or "we should all be considered different and unique", when in reality, we're a mixture of the two extremes. Our interviews highlighted so many of our shared experiences while also acknowledging the unique ways in which our own ancestral cultures, families, career choices and personalities have shaped our identities.

To close this interview series, I am excited to share this interview with Joshua Sim with you. He is known as a photographer, with works featured in the likes of Vogue Australia, but Joshua is an artist of all formats who uses his platform to talk about race, identity and belonging. 

I feel that it is very fitting that Joshua's interview is the last of 2020. It's been a big year and it is in these times of upheaval that art plays a very strong role in the lives of human beings. We need art to help us make sense of our feelings, to bring our sensations into a tangible, communicable format and to help us see a changing reality from different perspectives.

I would encourage you to take a deep breath here, find a comfy seat, and move through Joshua's interview without rushing. Allow his stories to take you on a little journey. Thank you for joining us through our interview series this year.

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1. Could you please tell us your name, age and what it is that you do?

My name is Joshua Sim, and I am a 21 year old photographic artist from Melbourne, with my work specifically focusing on the act of combining the mediums of philosophy and photography.

2. What do you do to take care of your mental health and well-being?

A great question, and one that isn’t nearly asked nor discussed enough. I’ll begin my answer by revisiting a time to when I was younger, or more so, a fear.

Back when I was child, for a period of time, I was unable to stare out into our backyard at night due to my fear of the dark. It took me years to overcome this phobia, as time and time again, my younger self would fall into the belief that this darkness housed within the scary monsters and spirits that you might find in a horror film.

Time after time, I had to convince myself that these monsters weren’t real and existed only in my head. Yet despite my efforts, they never seemed to kick my fears and the monsters remained in my conscious.

However, it was in my belief that my backyard was a place of safety and comfort whereby these monsters had no possibility to ever exist, that I was able to overcome these fears. It wasn’t my belief that they didn’t exist, but more so my promotion in the idea that in a space of safety, it was impossible for them to exist.

The same can be said about my mental health. For years I have struggled with those monsters within me – the monsters of self-doubt, of guilt, of shame, and of self-loathing. And for years, with a degree of success, I have spent meditating, reflecting, and journaling in hopes of finding and identifying these feelings and zeitgeists.

I believed that what I had to do was the same with what I did with the monsters; trying to overcome them by continually blocking and rejecting these feelings each time they tried to overwhelm me. Yet just like these monsters, they ceased to leave as they began to find a home in my own sub-conscious - a deep injecting feeling that permeated my life in a multitude of ways as I worked so hard to reject them. I'd find them visiting me in the times of my solitude and visiting in my times of slumber too. 

Just like with the monsters, it was not enough to imagine their non-existence, but instead I needed to encourage the feelings and attitudes that my mind and my consciousness had to be a fertile ground for self-love and safety -  a land where I was unable to doubt myself.

It was through facing the difficult experience of sitting alone with myself, that I began to journal love letters, enjoy tea with myself, and love myself as much as I show love to others, that I begin to foster this safe sanctuary. It was through treating myself as if I was a romantic partner, that I began to listen to myself, care for myself, be easy on myself, and most importantly, empathise with myself, that I began to love myself selflessly.

Often times I still slip into those previously held confronting beliefs and narratives, yet when they arise I never deny them. For I know that if I am to reject these feelings of darkness, they can also grow deeper within me as if weeds left unchecked.

These days for me it’s about watering this garden of self love, and respecting the roots in all their complexity, the roots of my ancestors and culture; where I find a sense of comfort, belonging and safety. Not only with them, but within myself, as I slowly but surely accept myself in the process.

3. Can you think of one example that demonstrates how growing up Asian in Australia has impacted you?

I think the best example that comes to mind in my experience growing up in this country, was through my encounters with the idea of ‘love’. Not in a sexual or romantic way, but more so the notion of love through filial relations. For growing up in the West is nothing short of confusion for any Asian child – and this perplexity is often birthed out of the disparity, and sometimes incompatibility, between the values of your own culture, and the standards of a White Australia. Of what you see and learn on the television, and what you experience in your own home-life.

Growing up here, much of my experience and engagement with Western notions of ‘love’ came from what I would see through my peers. As a child, I'd see that White families would hug one another and seemingly be so ‘loving’ and warm too. I also learned from viewing what was presented to me in the media, that ‘real love’ was expressed through hugs, gifts, and words of affirmation. Love then, was taught to me to be something so physical and visual, that in the West we ought to ‘prove’ our love by showering it to the ones we care for. Like much of the Western attitude, it must be seen and felt to be proven to exist.

Yet as my eyes veered away from the television, and the focus would be left on my family, I was met with a love almost invisible.

Young me didn’t know that love operates differently within an Asian household, young me didn’t know that love didn’t have to be so visual and upfront, but more visceral and omnipresent.

Young me didn’t know that love from the Asian family was food in my stomach, a roof over my head, and the tireless hours of work my parents would sacrifice to ensure I was met with all my necessities. Young me didn’t know this.

So young me believed that the ‘love’ was not there, and that because I wasn’t use to physical and visual affection from my family, it meant that it failed to exist within the household.

Throughout my formative years this interpretation would evolve into a resentment instead. It took me far too long to realise that there did exist a love in my family, but it was one that I had to feel, not see. Because the concept of ‘Asian love’ is still something I am continuing to learn of and grapple with to this day.

Growing up here, we are inundated with the notion that we have to prove time and time again how much we love those in our life through the capitalistic trend of gifting and and visual affirmation. It took me too long to see, and more so feel, that love was often all that I could not see.

All the sacrifices my parents made for us to have this life in both time and money, cooking our favourite meals, or saving funds for us to have when we became adults, and all the times they would swallow their deep-seeded pain within them, was a testament of the love that existed.

Over time, I began to realise that just because it appears as all 'sunshine and rainbows' from the outside, the Western way of love does not necessarily equate to a true and authentic experience of affection. So often are the words and language of love used in this land and time, but how often is it truly felt?

It was in this cognitive dissonance that a focus on mental health arose too. For once I began to see that my parents weren’t trying to withhold love from me, but more so express it in the only ways they knew how, did I see that my childhood was not necessarily broken, but misunderstood.

It doesn’t help that our parents have to work such long hours in this country and forgo much of the needed time we need with them, that we can experience this 'love', yet it was their time away working that would make them feel closer to us knowing we’d be provided for. 

I believe that a lesson that much of the Asian youth need to learn in this land is that our culture and our people are different. And no matter how many times they sell this country as multicultural, we must not ever forget it’s brutal history against our people, other minorities, and the rightful owners of this land too. That when we express our culture authentically, and it does not fit within this narrative of a ‘cohesive Australian’, our differences will be stigmatised and looked down upon. Regardless, we should never see our differences as inferiority – despite the beliefs of those outside our cultures.

I’ve seen time and time again a resentment in my Asian peers that echoes the feelings I had as a child towards my parents. But the lesson I see is that what is needed is an understanding. I am not trying to justify any of the misdoings and inadequacies of parenting by the Asian diaspora, but instead, if we are to understand why and how these ‘failings’ come and came to be, we might start to see that there aren’t as many failings as we thought. Perhaps, we might find that many of us experiences a way of being lost in translation against the backdrop of an ever engulfing culture.

We have the potential, as second-generation children, to choose the elements we love of the cultures we have lived within, as well as forgoing all that which has failed us.

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Connect with Joshua and view his artworks via his Instagram

Photography featured in this blog post - by Jamila Reyes