Chinese New Year has always been celebrated in my house. Every year my brother and I look forward to getting our red packets and eating tons of duck pancakes and dim sum that my white father makes us. My mum grew up in a Chinese household surrounded by hundreds of uncles and aunties, whilst my dad grew up in the middle of rural West Sussex where the only Chinese family he knew ran the local Chinese restaurant. My parents met at Warwick University in the early 90s and settled in Surrey where my brother and I were born. Where we live, the population is 87.4% White and 1.26% mixed White and Asian, a figure so staggeringly obvious that in my hometown, I only know of one other person who is white and Asian.
The rhyme
At primary school, I did not realise that I was different until I was 7. Perhaps because I believe I am white-passing, but I presumed everyone celebrated Chinese New Year and had Chinese relatives, but this was changed when a girl came up to me in the playground saying a rhyme about Chinese and Japanese eyes and pulled her eyes as she said it. Being 7, I did not really understand what she was doing until I went home and told my mum about it. If you know my mum, you can only imagine her reaction. The next day I went to school armed with a letter to give to my Year 3 teacher and at lunchtime I saw the girl crying and later, she handed me a letter of apology. Looking back now, I doubt she understood what she was saying but that rhyme was obviously circulating in a primary school playground, a playground full of white children. It’s easy at that point to make excuses for this behaviour, you’re young and impressionable, but this trickled into secondary school as well.
the switch
Secondary school was honestly weird. It was a 97% white school and along with all the other ethnic minorities, I was plastered on billboards and at one point, appeared 8 times on the school website; to this day, I am the face of the Senior School. The pictures the school released were not representative of their population, which everyone was aware of and became sort of an ongoing joke. For the most part, I did not really struggle with racism in secondary school, and I had friends who were open to eating Chinese food at my house and my identity was never really questioned. There were however small microaggressions from classmates, in the form of asking me if I could read sentences on the side of Muji pens (this was in Japanese), to asking if I just eat rice at home. The most memorable was being told to ‘shut up you little Chinese c**t’.
China being weaponized to insult me set off a switch in my brain. The boy who said it was one of the strangest boys I ever met, saying it to appease the popular boys he so desperately wanted to be friends with. However, it did not have the desired effect with everyone turning on him and isolating him, which honestly served him right. Despite this, by Sixth Form, everyone liked him again. Girls who I was friends with all suddenly befriended him and everybody had forgotten about the racism to the point he made it quite far in the race for Head Boy which I nearly had a fit over. Even at the time I found myself being swept up in it, I started making excuses for him, telling my friends who knew about the situation but went to other schools that he had changed, simply because everyone else had forgotten about it. I look back at that moment and want to kick myself. The internalized white validation that I swore I never had was so obvious at that moment, the fact that all my white peers had moved on meant I should do so too! This situation angers me to this day, and I do still feel resentment toward those who I was friends with who decided to forgive him for the racism he exhibited, because I, myself, will never forgive him.
A new start
University has been one of the best decisions I have ever made. Getting away from that Surrey bubble has allowed me to make diverse friends, and I now know I am not the only ethnic minority who has had a difficult time in terms of identity in their majority white hometowns. Of course, there are still moments of weirdness like when I was interrogated about if my white father uses chopsticks at home, and a certain fascination with the fact I could use chopsticks. But, I have surrounded myself with friends who call this behaviour out, as do I when people are racist to them. People do not always realise the extent of the harm caused by living in these bubbles until they get to University, and I hope others have been able to come to terms with who they are, but it is hard not to reflect on the past and what could have been if you were born in a more diverse part of the UK.
For the last 2 years I have celebrated Chinese New Year with my University friends, and it has been amazing. None of them are Chinese but they appreciate the food, culture and company and it has honestly been quite a healing experience. Being mixed White and Asian as an identity has always been confusing – too White for the Asians, but too Asian for the Whites. But I have finally concluded that it actually does not matter, being mixed is an identity and that is enough, and I should not have to explain that to anyone. This Chinese New Year I will again be spending it with my University friends and I hope we eat lots of food and my mum will send me a red packet!