quiet person, loud thoughts

I am the daughter of two first-generation immigrants from Hong Kong to Britain, who are the children of four first-generation immigrants from China, who were the children of eight people whose families and ancestors had lived in their respective Chinese villages and towns since time immemorial.

Writing that ought to feel very momentous, and in a way it does, like I should suddenly feel some deep connection with my roots and the wonder of what a small probability it is that I would be sitting in London in my Israeli partner’s house, writing in English about my Chinese family.

            BUT

Wondrous as it may be, it is hard to appreciate when the world is constantly sending you subtle (and unsubtle) signs that youdonotbelonghere. (The world will later teach you a word that will prove this to be untrue, but we will get to that in a moment).

I have obviously never fit in in England – my nose and my skin and my eyes and my surname are ‘different’ (‘different’ here being a proxy to mean ‘not like my majority white peers’). This is not a pity parade or an attempt to victimise myself; I was fortunate never to be bullied or treated badly because of my race. In my primary school class, there were other kids of colour, so I was by no means alone, and people were generally respectful – and I fully recognise that this was a privilege.

The issue (as always) was more about how I felt – which was that I was somehow missing out on a special shared understanding that my white classmates and teachers had, which was something that I wanted to be a part of so much.

As one inconsequential example of many, learning about the World Wars always made me feel left out and confused:

            ‘Your great-grandparents would have fought in this war.’

Or:

            ‘Go home and ask your grandparents about their time as evacuees.’

Or when we visited Ypres:

            ‘See if you can spot your family name in the memorials.’

I have absolutely nothing against learning about Britain in the wars, particularly in a British school – learning the history of the country you live in is important, and I totally respect that other kids did have family histories that they could relate to our textbooks and that this would have been incredibly important and meaningful to them.

Me and my family did not fit into the narrative that my teacher said applied to ALL of us, and so me and my family must be a bit wrong or invalid, or at the very least, a bit embarrassing.

What I found difficult was this blanket assumption that we were all a part of this category, with no acknowledgement whatsoever that some of us had different backgrounds. And this wasn’t just in history lessons, but all parts of school life, even (worryingly) Science:

            ‘ALL babies are born with blue eyes.’

Imagine my disappointment when I went home and asked my mother about this, and her brown eyes looked into my own with incredulity to tell me that this is, obviously, not true.

We brown-eyed babies fell outside of my teacher’s conception of ‘all’ – so what were we? My answer, as a six year old desperate for her teacher’s approval, was that me and my family did not fit into the narrative that my teacher said applied to ALL of us, and so me and my family must be a bit wrong or invalid, or at the very least, a bit embarrassing. The lack of recognition of my difference made me feel even more different and incongruent.

Fast-forward ten years, I was starting to appreciate that being a person of colour who is ‘from from’ a different place could be pretty cool. I became best friends with the one other Chinese girl in my class, Asian-American youtubers became my idols, and this element of my identity bloomed into something a little more alive and relevant to my everyday life.

At home, I knew I was Chinese. My parents spoke to me in Cantonese, we ate Chinese food for dinner, and watched Chinese soaps on TVB afterwards. But most of the time outside of the house, my Chineseness was generally left awkwardly unacknowledged, as if ignoring it meant I could pass and be accepted as white.

My new friend showed me that even outside our homes, our Asian backgrounds were something to be proud of, to celebrate and shout about, not something to be hidden away in constant deference to whiteness. In fact, whiteness became something to joke about – no, we weren’t white, and here were all the reasons why that was okay and actually downright hilarious.

We became obsessed with our Asianness – everything came back to it and it gave us so much power. It was exciting and exhilarating and almost certainly very often excessive, annoying and wonderfully obnoxious in the way that only teenagers who feel on top of the world can be. Our white peers had their history to share, and now suddenly me and my Asian peers of all backgrounds, and those of other global majority backgrounds, had something just as rich to share, and it was amazing.

It was a really important period of relief and realisation and everyday celebration that I look back on with a lot of happiness and gratitude. To my old friend who I still see from time to time – thank you so much.

We became obsessed with our Asianness – everything came back to it and it gave us so much power. It was exciting and exhilarating and almost certainly very often excessive, annoying and wonderfully obnoxious in the way that only teenagers who feel on top of the world can be.

However (and I make no apologies for the endless twists and turns in this; it turns out race is a more complex story than a neat, linear, A to Z narrative allows for), although I now had a little more clarity as to who I was at home in England, I was still as lost as ever when visiting my extended family in Hong Kong.

My new found pride in my Chineseness at home secretly felt somewhat of a farce once I was outside the company of white people. Because amongst white people, I was clearly more Chinese and could speak more authoritatively on Being Asian. But although I can slip into a crowd in Hong Kong with relative ease, as soon as I open my mouth, any aunt, uncle, grandparent, family friend, immigration officer, market stall vendor etc etc is entitled to point and laugh at me with undisguised scorn.

This silly little English girl who calls herself Chinese but doesn’t even speak the fucking language!

What.                a.                  shame.

I always looked forward to going back to Hong Kong so much, but it was also always such an intense experience of otherness, and not just otherness in some far-off foreign land, but otherness in a place where everyone (including me) expected me to belong. It made me feel sad and confused, but also bitter, as if I’d been rejected from what should have been my birth right, to feel connected to my heritage.

I have a similar disconnect with my friends who were born and bred in Hong Kong, and moved to England for work or university. At first, fetishised, oriental blush, we ought to just click on a cultural level, and in some ways, we do. But I still find myself slightly lost at some of their in-jokes and Cantonese slang – and when I smile and laugh along anyway, I’m nervous of being caught out as a fake.

So I dock myself of a few Asianness points, and place myself lower down than them on the scale of ‘proper Chinese person’, all the time aware that I’m too Asian to be part of the white-English camp as well.

But I have come to learn that although I can’t relate to some friends’ upbringings because I wasn’t brought up in Hong Kong, I can relate to other friends whose parents also moved here from somewhere else before they were born, and that is as much a shared heritage as anything else.

[Enter the word ~diaspora~]

The word ‘diaspora’ traditionally refers to the Jewish population living outside of Israel. But it also has a wider meaning, to cover anyone living outside of their ancestral lands. Like I said at the start – all rather grand and momentous. Basically, diaspora means anyone who is ‘from from’ somewhere else (as in, ‘okay sure, you were born in Essex, England, and have literally lived there for your entire life, but that’s obviously not what I was asking – where are you really from from?’)

Basically, diaspora means anyone who is ‘from from’ somewhere else.

Cathy Park Hong has written an incredible collection of essays on the East Asian experience of living in the West, called ‘Minor Feelings’. She talks about this immigrant/descendant of immigrant sensation of always being in between cultures and not quite belonging to any definite, concrete location, and this weird expectation we have that we are just on a constant search for the right GPS coordinates positioned somewhere in between those two (or more) cultures, and that when we locate those coordinates, we will breathe a sigh of relief as we find ourselves at home.

The word diaspora is a rejection of that idea that we are caught in between places or identities, that all we are is merely a compromise between two superior cultural absolutes.

Instead, our experience as children of immigrants is a new identity in itself – and this experience is valid on its own as a freestanding type of existence, without constantly having to be measured against some binary white vs [insert other culture here] benchmark. This, for me, is the beauty of diaspora.

The word diaspora is a rejection of that idea that we are caught in between places or identities, that all we are is merely a compromise between two superior cultural absolutes.

It is why most of my friends are children of immigrants – it is why I have more in common with my American best friend whose Polish Jewish grandparents moved to Canada and parents moved to Chicago, or my other best friends whose parents moved from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan to our little corner of Essex, than I do with cousins who share my face but grew up in Hong Kong in such close proximity to our roots. It is a shared experience of growing up with the pain of not belonging anywhere, the pain that however I may look to you, I will always feel like an outsider on the inside. And then it is the joy of finding each other and realising that together, we do have a place after all.

And obviously, within this community, there are multitudes of differences between us. Many of the kids in the British-Chinese diaspora go to Chinese school on a Saturday or Sunday morning, where they learn the language and get to hone in on their culture a little more than usual. I missed out on this pocket of community because my dad worked late shifts every Friday and Saturday night for twenty years, running our local Chinese takeaway restaurant, so couldn’t do the early morning Chinese-school run. And I am so proud of that.

But in this clash of stereotypes, who wins? Who is the real British-Chinese kid, the one diligently copying down Chinese characters on Saturday morning, or the one munching on prawn on toast brought home by her dad on Saturday night?

With the word diaspora, the answer is – both.

The diaspora is a shared experience of growing up with the pain of not belonging anywhere, the pain that however I may look to you, I will always feel like an outsider on the inside. And then it is the joy of finding each other and realising that together, we do have a place after all.

Diaspora is a rejection of the linear sliding scale between East and West (or whichever other cultures run through your veins); it rejects this two-dimensional either/or and in-between that people try to force us into. Instead, diaspora accepts each and every one of our individual experiences as a world unto its own, a multidimensional concept which is neither validated nor invalidated by its relation to a discrete country or cultural identity.

The word diaspora has brought me peace. And I hope that if you too have found yourself lost between homelands, that it will bring you peace too.

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Where are you from from? Is that different to where people tell you you’re from?

Have you managed to avoid being torn apart by competing cultures, and instead to find pride in your mishmash heritage and kaleidoscope identity? If so, how?

What does being at peace with who you are look like to you?

Share your wisdom/struggles/random shower thoughts! And as always, thank you for reading 🙂

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