Alternative multicultural subjectivities? Indochinese cosmopolitanisms in Western Sydney

I'm attending the wake [heuan dii] of an elderly Lao man at his family home in outer south-western Sydney. Lao wakes are not overly solemn affairs, and guests are encouraged to eat, drink, have fun and even gamble in order to give the departed soul a good send-off. A group of 1.5 generation Lao-Australian men I have become close to is laughing uproariously at a sound file they are bluetoothing to each other on their mobile phones. The piece is a prank call made by Turkish-Australian comic Tahir Bilgic ('Habib' from Pizza), pretending to be a Vietnamese man phoning McDonald's to complain he has found a pubic hair in his Big Mac. The friends find this piece especially funny because 'He sounds so much like a Vietnamese guy. He even knows how to say 'du. ma' [fuck your mother]!' Bilgic, a native of Bankstown, clearly shares the cultural intimacy which these men have with their own Vietnamese neighbours and workmates - a familiarity that makes it okay to laugh at a Vietnamese-Australian accent in the most un-PC way imaginable. In fact, these Lao guys are Tahir's ideal audience, since they are expert judges of his performative competence as a 'Vietnamese bogan'. Profane as it is, this is the stuff of working-class immigrant cosmopolitanism, Western Sydney style.