The booth is fashioned out of rusty corrugated iron. It sits in Mon Pop Gallery, a pop-up space on the fake-grass patio opposite the Melbourne Uni tram stop; an area students habitually ignore. Facetiously resembling an outhouse, the booth stands tall; a placard informs us this is an impermanent fixture, an installation by the Asian-Australian artist Siying Zhou. On the back a sign reads ‘Karaoke Bar for Our National Anthem’ in a hokey ‘oriental’ font, which conjures the memory of sweet and sour pork, over-floured and roughly fried. Resting on a wooden platform, the booth is wide enough for just one person to comfortably stand inside.

I open the door, pulling on a golden tasselled rope that hangs where the doorknob should be. Red carpet is stapled to the floor, and cheap gold paper lines the walls. The place is cheaply reminiscent of a KTV lounge I once visited in Beijing, sans the smoke that gutted the place. A lone microphone hangs down from the ceiling, frozen in an eternal mic drop. The television screen, the centrepiece of every karaoke outing, is mounted on the wall.

“Start in 1 minute!” the screen declares. I put on the pair of headphones hanging from the wall, and wait.

I’m no rookie to the karaoke game. I often accompanied my sister to her karaoke sessions in high school, where she’d sing for three hours straight. At the time her repertoire largely consisted of the songs of the Malaysian crooner Gary Chaw. To this day, I know most of the words to his songs, despite not understanding many of them.

One of his songs, ‘??’ remains vivid for me, because two English words are buried in the first line of the chorus: “???????? say goodbye?” I used to hold on to those two words like a lifeboat, lost in the sea of characters that scrolled across the screen. Over time I learned how to sing the song, made anchors out of its characters, though I know the words meant more than the language I’d cobbled together. But for karaoke, this was enough.

“Go!”

The familiar swell of the Australian National Anthem carries through the headphones, its lyrics appearing on the screen in a bright, grainy-green font. It’s been years since I last sang it; I look to the screen for guidance, but find none.

AO-SSU-CH’UI-LEE-AN-SSU AO LAI-T’E O-SSU JUI-TSO-ERH-SSU

The lyric video forms the centrepiece of Zhou’s work, and this is where much of the piece’s complexity lies. The lyrics are written in Wade-Giles symbols, a romanisation system which was once used to teach Mandarin to native English speakers, but had since been replaced by the hanyu pinyin system. I fumble through the newly unfamiliar words, left with the delicious irony of ‘everyday Aussies’ being re-taught to sing a song that’s been long schooled into their consciousness, in a manner of teaching that has become obsolete.

Aus-tra-lians, all let us re-joice…

Back then it was a chore. We were handed out little paper slips with the lyrics to the first verse, but soon crumpled and lost them in backpacks, or left them in pockets that went into the wash. Yet we were led by sight and sound, to be in chorus with our peers, to fall in line. We learned to read and write in English, to enunciate in English, to express ourselves in English. We took handwriting tests until we got our pen licenses; spelling tests until the words appeared as they were meant to be written. Through all this, we learned the importance of giving our mumbles proper meaning.

In singing the anthem our mumbles became words, the voices of peers affirming my own. We anchored ourselves in English and grew confident in our shared language. Confident that after the familiar swell of the opening trumpets, a chorus of voices would always follow. This time it wouldn’t.

FO WEI A YANG AN-TÊ FO-REE

I try to wrap my tongue around each phrase, feeling foolish. Each line, once familiar has become distorted. As the anthem launches into its second verse, I remove the headphones. I can only recall the first verse (we never sang the second in school) and after the chorus I’m completely lost. The holes punched in the iron walls, once benignly rustic, now feel like a hundred ways of seeing.

I open the door of the shed, and the light from outside streams in. Out there lies a world of coherence. But I almost don’t want to leave, to return to the corner of Monash Rd and Swanston St – a world where we scratch our English on signs, in the hope that they will stick. But here in this booth, our language is just as vulnerable as we are.