This is one of the #junequestions and also inspired by Penny’s post.
I was 15 years old when my family immigrated to Australia from Malaysia, so it was a memorable year for me. I was not particularly happy to leave my school friends. Also I had all sorts of weird preconceptions of what high school in Perth, Western Australia would be like, based on limited viewing of American tv shows (very glamorous looking and well dressed teens, leaning on their school lockers then having food fights in the school cafeteria and amazing parties at each others’ upper middle class homes on the weekends). Needless to say, none of my experiences actually matched these preconceptions. Add to that the joys of being one of the few Asian kids in my year at the school I went to, which meant that I was usually trapped between the feuding Anglo kids and the European migrant kids.
Perth in the late 1980s was a strange place. Very insular and with some weird customs like the petrol roster. Not long after we arrived we were also faced with the racist posters stuck at the bus stop where my sister and I got the bus to school – that was the time of the ANM and Chinese restaurants being fire-bombed. I think many Perth residents were distracted by the America’s Cup at the time, but I had other concerns. It was a strange and discombobulating time.
I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up – no idea how I was going to grow up, for that matter! I worried that I didn’t look Australian or sound Australian. For the longest time I didn’t feel like I belonged here. When I finished high school I thought I would study anthropology so I could learn more about Australia’s indigenous people. I found that ultimately unsatisfying as I wanted to know more about the people I saw around Perth, not as objects of ethnographic study. I swapped courses, and I think that that sense of not fitting in led to me looking for my “roots” and studying the Chinese language at uni. As part of the degree, I had a year on exchange in China – a good experience that showed me that while I might have Chinese heritage, I’m certainly not “Chinese”. I met a few other students from other parts of the world who were on the same sort of “quest” as me, and really started to understand how big the Chinese diaspora is. Also started to reflect on and enjoy my Malaysian heritage. (Oh and the other thing uni gave me was access to libraries and the option of reading lots and lots of things that interested me so I started reading more about Australian history and learning about colonisation and the impact on Aboriginal people but that’s another story.)
This is getting too rambly and long so I should get to the point and tell my fifteen year old self: don’t worry so much about being “authentic” or a real Australian or Malaysian or Chinese or whatever. Being in-between and having many cultures makes you more observant and will help you adapt and get along with others. Oh, and don’t worry about how you speak, you speak how you speak and heck you’ve got so many languages, it’s all good. It’ll all be good.