SBS Nepali Australian News Headlines: Friday, 6 June 2025
Independent news and stories connecting you to life in Australia and Nepali-speaking Australians. Stories about women of Nepali heritage in Australia who are about to become parents.
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SBS Australia
44 minutes ago
- SBS Australia
Hailey is a sex therapist. Her family still doesn't know what she does for work
Nationally, there are only a handful of sex and relationship therapists who offer counselling in Chinese dialects. Source: SBS News / Karin Zhou-Zheng For a long time, Hailey Lin's job has been a mystery to her extended family. Whenever her mother, who lives in Hong Kong, is asked about Lin by relatives and friends, she tells them she's a social worker "doing psychotherapy things" in Australia. But in fact, the Hong Kong-born 33-year-old does more than just psychotherapy: she works as a clinical psychosexual therapist in Sydney, where she helps people explore sex and relationships. Lin says despite her mother's reluctance to disclose her occupation, she is supportive of it. "She can be open-minded, but also she can be very conservative because it is not the norm in Asian culture [to talk] about sex or intimacy," Lin tells SBS Podcast Chinese-ish . Ronald Hoang has had a similar experience. Growing up in a Vietnamese-Chinese Australian household, Hoang watched his cousins become doctors, lawyers and pharmacists — professions his parents enthusiastically endorsed. But he decided to take a different pathway, specialising as a relationship and family therapist, which involves helping couples navigate love, intimacy and family systems. Even after years of practice, Hoang says his mother still feels confused about his work. "I'm pretty sure she still doesn't know what I do. The way she describes it is that I work with 'crazy people'," the 36-year-old says. But she's accepting … I think she understands it a bit better nowadays. Despite mixed reactions from their parents, Hoang and Lin are determined to change the prevailing narratives and taboos around sex and relationships within the Chinese Australian community — and part of a small number of therapists with Chinese backgrounds who offer specialised counselling on the topic. According to 2021 Census data, there are 4,026 psychotherapists — a category that includes psychosexual therapists — in Australia. Only 80 of them speak Mandarin, Cantonese or other Chinese dialects at home. Of that cohort, 42 were born in China, Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan, making the pool of sex and relationship therapists with Chinese cultural and linguistic knowledge very small. Because of this, Lin and Hoang say they find their services particularly popular among Asian clients, who feel they have a cultural shorthand. Hoang says he noticed the influx of Asian Australian clients when he started his private practice. "I do get a lot more Asian clients who specifically come to me because they feel — and they even directly say this to me — that I would 'get them' a bit better," Hoang says. "So they do open up, and they do come [to the counselling sessions] because they feel I can relate to their culture." Lin says for some of her clients, talking about sex and intimacy can feel like speaking a foreign language. "Talking about sex [and using that] vocabulary, it can be like an alien or foreign language when you speak about your genital parts or even your intimacy," she says. She also notices that many of her Asian Australian clients are unfamiliar with how therapy works. Sometimes she says they expect her to act more like a GP who can prescribe them medication or expect an immediate result after the therapy. In Hoang's practice, traditional values around family loyalty are a recurring topic in his conversations with Chinese clients. "[I think] because a lot of us are migrants and come from various places that there is intergenerational trauma that's probably a little bit more frequent than other different kinds of backgrounds," he says. While some Australians may hold the impression that Chinese people tend to be conservative when it comes to intimacy, Lin says it's not the case. "There's a misconception that only Asian or Chinese people find [conversations about sex] challenging," she says. The fact is, even for Western people, they still find it challenging too, because it's against the mainstream culture. But for Chinese Australians, there are some cultural barriers that make it harder for them to have candid discussions about sex. Lin says the lack of comprehensive sex education in schools in many Asian countries is one of the key factors. "They just talk about biological stuff, but they don't tell you how to give consent to help your first sexual experience, or they don't talk about pleasure," she says. Even in cases where conversation is encouraged by parents or educators, Lin says many still focus on abstinence, saying things like, "'don't do this', 'don't fall in pregnancy', 'protect yourself', 'use a condom'". "But sex is something we need to learn, we need to build up; a skill we need to practice," she says. Hoang says shame is a key barrier that many Chinese people encounter when talking about sex. Shame is a weapon that's often used in Asian culture. "Shame is a feeling that we get when we're kind of telling ourselves that we are a bad person," Hoang says. "And the following action [typical for] shame is to hide, to withdraw, because you are such a bad person that you don't want other people to be around you and see you for the 'badness' that you are." As two of the very few sex and relationship psychotherapists with Chinese heritage who offer services in Australia, Lin and Hoang know they bear an extra responsibility in helping to educate their community about sex. Hoang says besides stigma and stereotypes, there is also a prevailing myth that sex should "always be good", especially with a committed partner, which can cause anxiety among some clients. Instead, he encourages them to think about "seasons" when it comes to sex. Hoang explains: "There are times when it's summer and it's hot and heavy, and there are other times when it's winter and cold, and then there are other times when it's spring or autumn when it's kind of lukewarm." Above all, he stresses communication is the key to having a positive sex life and relationships. "If you want more sex, just talk about it openly. It doesn't have to be something serious," he says. Lin agrees, saying it's natural for intimate relationships to ebb and flow and advocates for the 'good-enough sex model' — a psychological concept based on balancing positive experiences of intimacy with realistic expectations. "You will have frustration in your sex life, in your intimacy, but always it remains 'good enough sex'. "Sometimes we allow ourselves to have below-average sex, but sometimes also bring some novelty into our sex life, because this is human nature — we all like new stuff." With additional reporting by Bertin Huynh and Dennis Fang Lifestyle Sexual consent Sydney Share this with family and friends
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Super Monsters: Series 2 Cleo Has The Answers
ABC iview Home Watch all your favourite ABC programs on ABC iview. More from ABC We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn and work.
Daily Telegraph
an hour ago
- Daily Telegraph
Sutherland: Sydney's friendliest neighbourhood
Nearly three quarters of Aussies don't feel like they know their neighbours anymore, with many avoiding saying hello and even sending passive aggressive messages. Exclusive data from Real Insurance and MyMavins reveals Australians are socialising less with the people they live near, highlighting a generational gap in behaviour when it comes to a sense of community. One of the biggest discoveries from the report was that 72 per cent of people nationwide feel Australians are less interested in knowing their neighbours compared to 20 years ago. Meanwhile, a whopping 62 per cent of Aussies admitted they'd lived next to someone for more than six months without ever having met them. Among Gen Z and Gen Y Australians, that number rises to 71 and 70 per cent respectively. MORE: Mum with prize home has surprise dilemma Sydney's 'Roman Palace' sells for $15m Psychologist and founder of the Happiness Institute, Dr Tim Sharp, said many of 2025's neighbourly habits came from a changed relationship with how people socialised. 'For Gen Z and Gen Y, community isn't always next door,' he said. 'It's often online, interest-based, and built in comment threads and DMs rather than driveways and cul-de-sacs.' 'That community is not so much defined by geographical boundaries, but more by other things like passions, interests … the need for connection hasn't gone anywhere. It's an inherent part of being a human.' The data, taken from the Real Neighbours Report 2025, was collected from interviews with more than 5,000 Australians aged 18 and over. The report calculated the country's happiest neighbourhoods, using a scoring system that ranked friendliness, likability, helpfulness, community spirit and noise. Australia's top three areas include Sutherland in Sydney, Cairns and South Australia's south east. On the other end of the scale, Central West NSW, Ballarat and inner Melbourne were ranked with the lowest scores. The number one source of judgment between neighbours is noise level: with 48 per cent of Aussies judging neighbours for their volume. That Judgement is not always invisible, either. One in four Aussies have received passive-aggressive messages from the people around them, with that number jumping to one in three among Gen Z responders. MORE: Nude model's jawdropping $3m loss Insane cost of iconic Aus holiday exposed To make matters worse, more than a third of Aussies have felt their privacy was invaded by a neighbour, from observation without their consent to even entering their property without permission. It's not all doom and gloom for Australian mateship in the data, either. 48 per cent of people surveyed said that a casual conversation had eventually led to friendship with a neighbour. Around 2 in 3 Australians see their neighbours to be overall helpful and likeable, and 80 per cent consider good neighbour relationships to be important for safety and emergency reasons. Jo Taranto, founder of community outreach group Good for the Hood, said she often saw online groups being made for people to connect within their suburb, using social media apps such as Facebook. 'Online groups are great to supplement and support existing relationships, as well as create new connections for events that are coming up,' she said. '[They] have a really positive place to build local identity and support local activities.' Beck Thompson and her husband first became friendly with their neighbours during Covid, communicating across their balconies and dropping food to each others doors. Shortly after, the couple and their son made the decision to move to Batemans Bay, a town where they had no connections. 'We have shared land where we hang out our washing, so we got to know our neighbour who is a single mum with two kids,' she said. Developing a close friendship, now their kids play together, while they also help each other with babysitting or school pick ups. 'She's now our emergency contact,' she said, encouraging others to make the effort to get to know their neighbours. 'I think people are getting over online, they want to meet people in real life, (start by) saying hi or smiling, (my neighbour and I) learnt about each other before we entered each other's houses, you talk on the periphery, there's small ways to build that connection.' MORE: Kobe's, Jordan's guru reveals secret to their success Wild number of Aussie millionaires revealed
