British | Singaporean Chinese
My Mum is Singaporean Chinese and my Dad is British. They met at work in London whilst working for a Hong Kong clothing company. My parents are both open minded individuals and combining their different cultures came naturally to them. My Dad was working for a Chinese clothing company which involved frequent travelling to the Far East and my Mum moved to London from Singapore to work in her twenties where she admittedly experienced a culture shock initially. However as the youngest daughter, and the ninth child out of ten, she clearly had some sense of adventure to make the move.
In primary school, a kid used to stretch out their eyes which I remember being upsetting but luckily it was an isolated experience. I can't imagine what it's like to be continuously exposed to such awful behaviour as a child or an adult. I am grateful to my parents that we were able to spend every school summer holiday in Singapore, spending quality time with our huge family out there, travelling around South East Asia and learning about our culture and heritage from a young age. When I was 10, we visited the village in China where my Grandfather was from and saw the school he built for the village kids. He left China at age 13 to find work in Singapore and laundered the uniform of the Japanese soldiers during their occupation in the war before going onto building a successful construction company. Going back to school after a summer spent in Asia felt like an adjustment and for a week or two, I longed to be back in Singapore but soon settled back into British life.
I think after a brief negative experience when I was a child, I remember feeling embarrassed about being different and I just wanted to fit in but as I got older, the more I embraced my heritage, wearing it like a badge of honour. Who wants to be the same as everyone else anyway?! At school, I'd make friends with the very small number of Chinese girls there and used to love sharing my knowledge in Chinese and Taiwanese pop culture and seeing their faces light up. I love celebrating Chinese New Year and having a good spring clean to bring in new luck for the new year. I also like to wear red which signifies luck and joy in Chinese culture.
My role model has to be my Mum. She moved to London in the 80s not knowing a soul and as the youngest daughter, she would not have been allowed to do so if my Grandfather had still been around. She encountered racism in the workplace when a group of English women repeatedly mocked her accent. She responded by asking them how many languages they could speak and was met with silence when she said to them 'I've come to your country and I speak your language, could you go to my country and speak mine?'. She went on to list all the languages she spoke, Hokkien (her dialect), Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay and English to really make her point!
I think awareness of diversity and cultures starts at home and representation of ethnicities in education, the workplace, in the media helps with awareness. I think the world is slowly waking up.
I am an empath so if a friend is going through a hard time and cries, I end up crying with them because I feel their pain. Emotional intelligence is one of my strengths but it can also be exhausting! The pandemic made me realise what is important in life and no matter what obstacles we face, we can find strength in all that we have right now. So for me it was, my health, my home, family and friends.