— Article published on Bridging Us, an organisation that aims to drive strategic and organisational change. —-
Disclaimer: Throughout the article, I refer to 'dissociation' and habits of dissociating. This is in reference to group dissociation habits, as defined in the article. It is NOT referring to dissociation as "a psychological experience in which people feel disconnected from their sensory experience, sense of self, or personal history" , which is a very common definition associated with symptoms of certain mental illnesses".
Choosing where to sit in a university tutorial is an awkward process every student had to go through even before COVID-19.
What’s difficult to ignore is how we’re divided in class: domestic students, Chinese (People’s Republic of China, aka PRC) students, and all other international students.
You then have to make the decision whether to sit on the table that you feel is the most “representative” of you, or choose to go against the grain and sit on one that isn’t. Either way, this situation has made a lot of students, myself included, very uncomfortable.
This classroom dynamic has been acceptable for a long time; my parents, who are Malaysian-Chinese and Singaporean-Chinese, shared similar experiences at the University of Western Australia 35 years ago.
They told me that they had never questioned it, understanding that “of course locals want to sit with other locals”. After all, they themselves had felt more comfortable when they grouped up with like students, those that shared similar methods of communication, backgrounds, cultures.
Fast forward to COVID-19 with classes transitioned online - not much had changed. A few weeks ago my class was told to privately reach out to individuals we wanted to work with for a group assignment, and the three categories revealed themselves once again:
When I started to reflect more on this weird and unquestionable student divide, I realised that many of my experiences in the past had led me to the point of accepting it - and I wasn’t okay with that.
When I was six years old, my parents enrolled me in a British international school in Malaysia. Here, we were predominantly taught, both academically and socially, to admire and adhere to Western norms and ways of life. Here I was made familiar with casual racism.
People joked that I “camouflaged” into yellow walls, and made cracks about “how I could see through my small eyes”, how I did my friends’ homework because I was Asian and “logically” smart by default.
I had heard all the racial stereotypes in the book by the time I left school, but I laughed them off and wasn’t personally affected by them.
Anyway, people told me they shouldn’t matter to me because “I was basically White”.
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