Dutch | Chinese
I’m Chinese and I am Eurasian. My mom is from Shanghai (China) and my Dad is from Venhuizen (The Netherlands). In Shanghai we lived together with my Chinese grandparents, who raised us. We moved to the Netherlands when I was 8 but we visit our family in Shanghai every summer. When I was young, I would struggle with the fact that I wasn’t really part of any culture. Especially when we moved to The Netherlands. The way I viewed myself completely changed due to the difference in the way foreigners were viewed. In Shanghai people always acted so positive about me being mixed-race and I never had the feeling I didn’t belong. In The Netherlands, however, there was such a big difference in the way people treated me as a mixed-race. I felt like a foreigner and I didn’t feel like being mixed-race was something favourable anymore. I feel most connected with the Chinese culture because it’s the one I grew up with and it’s the culture from the part of my family I am most close with.” A negative experience would be when a person would talk badly about Chinese because they assume I am something else. On the one side I am happy I am able to find out what people truly think but it’s never nice to hear someone talk bad about a group your family and other people you love belong to. A positive experience has been my trip to Xinjiang past summer. It was really cool to get to speak to people who look like my sisters, me, and other East Asian/White mixes. I became really interested in their history and it actually makes a lot of sense we look like each other if you read into the way people migrated there and the contact they had with other ‘races’. Being mixed-race in today’s society is realizing you are part of a phenomenon which is increasing very quickly due to globalization. But also realizing being mixed is not something new. People tend to think being mixed-race is really something from today’s society due to globalization, but you can find mixed-race people at any place people have connected in the past.
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