Chinese | British
In collaboration with Loughborough University
When you don’t share the same identity as your parents, no one can teach you how to be ‘mixed race’. You learn it all yourself. It can be difficult to know where ‘home’ is when it is a multitude of countries and cultures. It’s strange having two families you look nothing like. They never made me feel out of place, but it naturally happens when optically, you look like you are not related.
People guess my ethnicity a lot, rudely asking “what are you”, usually finding proof through language. But I don’t always feel like explaining the reason my family and I don’t fluently speak Chinese is because they were born in Indonesia, where the government attempted to erase my family’s Chinese identity by burning books and changing their names. They fled to Nigeria where they mostly spoke English and came to England for university. They now mostly reside in Singapore, a multicultural, multi-linguistic global hub. Many people still see ‘race’ as this biological identity and not for the social construction it is that shifts depending on your geographical location. I now use these as examples to teach about anti-racism, even having a paper entitled “I’m not white” to amplify ‘mixed race’ women’s counterstories like my own.
I became interested in global and local ‘mixed race’ identities to search for new meaning in my mixedness that the UK hasn’t provided me. Typically, narrations of ‘mixed race’ identities centre around feelings of unbelonging or isolation, but that does not reflect my whole experience. I hold a unique identity that does not want to belong to a racial category on a hierarchy. I previously felt I was taking up space that was not mine by being white passing, but it wasn’t me who got to choose when I am perceived as white and when I was seen as ambiguous or exotic. I have a responsibility to recognise the privileges that come with being able to manoeuvre through different spaces, but at the same time, I stand against others telling me that I am “not really Chinese” or “you’re just white”. I’m not white. The people who attempted to identify me were erasing elements of my identity, but I now see myself as a whole person, not half this or half that, a whole.
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