What are your intersections?
I am a Chinese-Canadian cishet woman. I was born in Hong Kong, and immigrated to British Columbia with my family when I was six years old. I belong to a branch on my family tree where we all moved away from the homeland, all within a few years.
My father’s siblings + families are flung all around the world: Australia, the UK, San Diego, Toronto…
I belong to a generation of cousins that remember a before, and an after.
What is your background?
We left Hong Kong shortly after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and before Hong Kong’s sovereignty was to be given back to China. Politically, things in Hong Kong just felt untenable for my parents. Many, many people left in that timeframe, adding to the Chinese diaspora.
We moved to a predominately white suburb in BC, and I distinctly remember my otherness, and my need to grasp the English language like right now.
It was terrifying. I only had a few phrases, including “dog”, “cat”, “where is bathroom”. I remember crying a lot that first year in ESL.
I have such empathy for english language learners, and feel frustrated that the general North American perception is that people who are not fully fluent are lacking somehow. I work in the education field, and I think that most people have this sense of impatience and superiority over those who struggle with English (even though these same folks likely only speak ONE LANGUAGE THEMSELVES).
How do your intersections affect you?
Honestly, I feel like I so rarely see the process of immigration discussed in North America, but this life event has had more impact on the foundation of my identity than anything else -- including marriage and motherhood. It really shaped me.
It felt like being struck by lightning to realize how different I was, to have my tongue feel fuzzy when talking to native English speakers, to know that my eye shape didn’t match anything I saw on these endless channels of TV, to intuit that no one had a crush on the one other asian boy in my class, but yes yes yes to the Andrews and Scotts and Michaels. So what do you do when faced with this type of choice? You choose white.
Or more specifically, I chose white.
White friends, white crushes, white boy bands. I stopped speaking Cantonese abruptly.
I mean, I think the tenets of white supremacy would have reached its tentacles to me, even if I had stayed in HK (light skin is a prized Asian thing after all), but not in the same sucker-punch way that it did when I discovered I wasn’t enough at the age of 6 in Canada.
Being told to “go back to where you came from” by strangers, seeing the word “chink” etched onto the back of a bus seat, being fed and swallowing up so many stereotypes of who Asian women are (can’t drive, meek, a fetish for men). It left an indelible mark.
I feel like it’s only in my 30’s now that I have truly acknowledged, honoured and accepted my culture. I wanted to be white subconsciously and consciously for so long, there are STILL things I’m unpacking. Monolids, feeling proud when someone said “wow, you have no accent”, all of it.
Two things that have helped me heal my internalized oppression as of late:
The birth of my beautiful biracial son, who shares so many of my Asian features
The sense of belonging I’ve felt since finding a sisterhood within the previously very white slow fashion community, and the participation in #10X10representationmatters
While I wish I didn’t waste so much time trying to be anything but who I am, I am deeply grateful to these two life events, as well as just being a woman in her mid 30’s. I have less time to worry and wallow, and so I am reclaiming instead. There is a tinge of regret that I didn’t start this process much sooner, but identity takes time. I’m so glad I can see my culture for what it is now.
I am learning to take up space. I am learning to be whole.
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#TWintersectionalfridays: Space to explore intersections of identity and systems of oppression. Space to tell your story. Space to listen. Every Friday of 2019. // Week 14/52. 'Jo' / 8x8 in. / mixed media on paper