-- My assignment submission for my PEN Melbourne class: surrounding and defending freedom of speech--
I. Who am I? My Cultural Identity in Context.
Until three years ago, I had never really thought deeply about how I identified myself in a cultural setting. As a person of Chinese ethnicity from both Singapore and Malaysia, my parents’ choice to enrol us in an international school since the age of five-years-old was one that was deliberately considered. They wanted us to speak perfect English, maybe even in a British accent, my mum always hoped. In school, we celebrated everything from Christmas to Chinese New Year, Hari Raya, Deepavali and Thai Pusam. My sister and I were both surrounded by diversity but were taught through a Westernised lens. We left high-school being coined as, much to my extended family’s disappointment, ‘bananas’.
xiāng jiāo rén
banana person (yellow outside, white inside)
Banana is a pejorative term for ethnic East Asian or Southeast Asian people who are considered to have abandoned their Asian cultural identity or lost touch with it in order to adopt a western cultural identity.
(Penaksovic, 1992)
So I grew up confused about where I actually stood. I related to Westernized media, language, and speech, but also traditional Chinese mindsets surrounding school, family, and tradition. So was I a ‘Banana’? Or was I a ‘Chink’?
Beginning to study creative writing and Media- essentially, Arts- at a university that predominantly supported left-wing ideologies, I quickly noticed how often cultural identity was discussed. Suddenly, concepts within identity politics like cultural appropriation, ‘Othered’ communities, and P.O.C (Person of Colour) were brought to my attention more than ever before. While I had received the occasional ignorant racial remark, I had never particularly felt marginalised for it at school. Yet at university, I was evidently thrown into this collective Other, and there was a pressure that I should have felt as such. I started speaking about my ‘culture’ through a minority lens- in ways that weren’t completely authentic.
Fundamentally, I also realised that because I was Othered, anything I had to say or write about other minority groups was usually considered in the blink of an eye.
II. Writing in the age of identity politics- my experience.
Does someone from a ‘minority’ background have more authority to speak to a ‘wider minority’? And who gets to determine that?
I found myself thinking about identity politics with regards to minorities and wider minorities whilst working on a multilingual poem in class. After failing to write a poem in Chinese and English, I had asked my Sino-Mauritian partner to help me translate a few phrases into Mauritian-Creole.
The poem was inspired by Sega*, and was inspired by the song Freedom Fry (I feel the light running through my veins). Sega was born from the music of African slaves, and was a musical form that expressed suffering, but later on, freedom. I had questioned submitting it, wondering if I was appropriating Mauritian culture.
*Sega: Traditional Mauritian Music