Polish | Nepalese
The student body at the University of Cambridge is definitely very open to discussion and understanding. I don't think I've ever felt actively discriminated against because of my gender, cultural identity, or sexuality. Coming from Poland, the amount of support I get as a bisexual woman from my college, university, and fellow students is astounding. One of the highlights of my 1st year at Cambridge was being involved in a student written play about a queer, mixed woman. The fact that the platform exists for such ventures is amazing to me. There's still a lot of work to be done in the university representation wise, however, I'd say it is considerate enough for now.
As a child, I spoke fluent Nepali but my parents never placed any significance on the language as in their experience, English was the gateway language to education and success. In hindsight I really regret they did that since over the years my interest in South Asian studies has grown very significantly. Mum made me sit down every weekend as a child and go through all the textbook material my friends back in Poland were learning at school so the Polish stuck. Overall, I don't think my parents ever gained a larger sense of admiration for the other partner's culture and they tended to raise me in two different, wholly separate identities. I think that's why when I moved to Poland when I was 11 to live with my Grandmother, it was so easy for me to lose touch with my Nepali roots.
There have been a lot of challenges regarding how I perceive myself and how I don't necessarily fit into the typical standards of a Nepali person or a Polish person. I still get Polish people asking me where I'm ‘really’ from, even though I speak fluent Polish and spent a sizeable amount of my life there. A turning point for me though was meeting a lovely person who was also mixed Polish-South Asian and having the opportunity to talk about all the common experiences we shared and that really made me appreciate how special we are and how our upbringing really enriched who we are as people in the end.
University of Cambridge student studying Asian & Middle Eastern Studies with Persian & Hindi.
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