British | Hong Kong Chinese
My Mum is British. I think there's some Spanish back in her family somewhere, but nothing significant. My Dad is Chinese. I never know the right way to specify that his family are from Hong Kong, but I feel like that's important. They met when they both worked at the BBC. My Dad works in IT, my Mum is a librarian. He came to fix her computer. They went for drinks in the bar at BBC Bristol and they say the rest is history.
Every year we celebrate Chinese New Year and it has always been something we do as a whole family, my Mum included. This involves going to London and seeing a lot of my Dad's family who we don't otherwise see, and my Mum is the one who organises the red envelopes we give to anyone who is 'eligible' at the meal. Our family diet has come to rely quite a bit more than most families on rice as a staple, enabled by the loyal rice cooker I've grown up with, but besides that we don't make a special effort to eat traditionally Chinese (or Cantonese?) food.
We have visited Hong Kong twice. Once when I was 7 and only really remember visits to theme parks, and once last year, which I remember vividly. It was on that second trip that I really came to regret not being taught to speak Cantonese. My Dad is fluent and spent the first 5 years of his life in Hong Kong, but he can't write or read it. When we were there we met so many extended family members, some of which spoke some English, but mostly not. I've heard my Mum say that they considered putting my brother and I in Sunday school when we were younger to learn the language but decided against it. I think that I really resent that. My relationship with my English Grandparents is wildly different to that with my Mama and Yeye (my Chinese Grandparents) and that is due in significant part to the language barrier.
I really feel like the culture I grew up in was almost fully a British one. I don't quite know how this differed to my Dad, growing up with Chinese parents and Chinese family everywhere, but I suspect it is quite incomparable. My Dad fits fantastically well into my Mum's English family, but if I feel like I have lost something of my Chinese identity along the way, then I can't imagine the depth of that loss to him.
Perhaps that barrier between myself and my Chinese family, and the discomfort I have with it, might affect the kind of relationship I would desire with a partner's family, whatever their race.
I have become more aware of being mixed-race and what it means as I've grown up. I was so sheltered as a child that I didn't know I was any different from my fully White friends. In some ways that was nice; I never felt ostracised or outcast. But we have to embrace difference rather than ignore it and as I get older I want more and more to recognise in myself the culture of my Dad and his family. I just don't know how. I think I might have hidden my background so well it ceased to exist in some ways. I don't think I necessarily look mixed-race in an obvious way, but in my junior school there were absolutely no other mixed children besides my brother and I. There were very few non-White children and this made it very clear that we were not the same. But because I was raised in such a classically White, middle-class culture, this helped to erase that difference over time. I rarely volunteered the fact that I'm mixed-race unless I was directly asked, and barely ever engaged in conversations about it. When asked to participate in the questionable 'Asian Week' at my secondary school, I refused. It wasn't that I didn't want to draw attention to myself because I never shied away from that at all, but I didn't want being mixed-race to be the reason for attention.
When I was born, my Mama and Yeye refused to see me for 6 months because they disapproved of my Dad having children with a White woman. I don't know what part religion/belief played in that; my parents were unmarried but the only time I've seen my Mama display any sort of faith was on our second visit to Hong Kong to a temple where she prayed to the statues using incense, and encouraged us to do the same. After 6 months my Mama gave in and saw me, and then encouraged Yeye to do the same, and from there on out there's been no tension (that I've been told of). I know there was similar disgruntlement on my Mum's side, where my sister or Grandad made a racist mark on one of the first occasions they met my Dad. But besides this, nothing else has been spoken of. I would hope my parents would support me if I was in an interracial relationship, but I'm not convinced my extended family would do so seamlessly. If I was, I would definitely try harder than I believe my parents have to maintain a connection with the cultures my child might be a part of.
I feel like I have experienced casual racism; kids pulling their eyes, making jokes mimicking the language or referencing my identity when I performed well in school. The times which have felt a little more insidious have happened much more recently, and almost exclusively in workplace environments. I suppose they were challenges because I was made to feel very uncomfortable when I was there to do a job. But in the grand scheme of things, it did no harm. It is totally unacceptable, but it doesn't hurt me. I think that is partly due to feeling discordance from my Chinese heritage; when people have perhaps tried to use it against me, I haven't felt that like a direct attack because the thing they're attacking doesn't feel like part of me.
I have visited Hong Kong twice but I'm not sure how much I feel I learnt about where I've come from. Meeting family there was wonderful, but I visited most recently during the ongoing student protests and because of this, and because I couldn't communicate the way I wanted to with my family, it almost made me feel more distant from that culture than before. I don't know if this damage can be undone by a concerted effort on my part in my adult life to go back to Hong Kong and reconnect with myself and the culture, or if it's too late, and I've already been shaped by a lack of connection.
I think that I have a lot of privilege in most of those areas which means the university is considerate of them by default. I can only speak on a personal level about how I feel and my experiences, but Cambridge has a lot more to do to make it a welcoming place to a diverse range of cultures and accommodating of different genders and sexualities. A lot of this change and momentum comes from the students which is incredible, but the institution itself needs to step up.
I’ve managed my mental health a lot better than I managed it before the pandemic. I guess in a way it's because there is now a clear and inescapable reason to be aware of my own health, as well as the time to devote to it. Before this, I was having counselling and in those sessions I expressed how much I needed life to pause so I could take stock of my life and catch my breath. Of course, I would have rather carried on in that state than take the catastrophe and devastation of coronavirus. But it really has given me the chance to make space away from a really horrible part of my life, as well as the mental clarity to approach my final year.
I feel privileged. I am White passing and middle-class. I feel very much in the position of an ally in the fight against racism. The recent conversations which have been brought to the forefront of mainstream media have challenged the way I have interpreted my own identity. I think that I have hidden behind being mixed-race; thinking that I did not have to educate myself and acknowledge my own unconscious participation in racism and racist structures because being mixed-race is not perceived as a typically privileged group or identity. I recognise that this internal conflict is unimportant. On a personal level I continue to feel dis-attached from what I feel being mixed-race should feel like, and my own reality.
I honestly don't know if I'd like to be reborn after I die at all. Not sure I could do this thing more than once.