I AM NOT CHINESE ENOUGH TO ACTUALLY BE CHINESE

My skin is white but tinted yellow.


People say I look exotic. That is just a manifestation of their Eurocentric ideas of beauty. Someone who can pass as white, yet has the slightest dash of minority across their face. If someone asks where I’m from, 




I panic. 




What are they asking me? probably curious as if they stared at my face long enough maybe they noticed my nose is ever so slightly wide and flat, my eyes smaller and slanted, and my cheeks full and high. My face is round and my height fairly small, my skin is not rosy and pink but subtly olive (I guess ?) they looked long enough and are now curious. Hoping I answer the answer they want to hear and not just telling them I’m from




a town outside of Cambridge.


Where are you really from ?




where are you really from. That question circles me and so many others until it becomes the centralised meaning of your existence. Without that question I am no longer a being. 




I am an ethnic nomad. 




Unplaceable by those who must categorise. By those who must seek out those palatable enough for the majority white public to consume but yet still provide a feeling of inclusivity. yet without, 




actually


becoming 


inclusive.




When I was a child I was told to go back to China. A fellow classmate. We were 8. I remember we were queuing up in the hall for lunch break. 




I cried.




I didn’t understand. I had and have still never been to China. My mother has never been to China. Generations of my Chinese heritage were born and raised in Trinidad, Chinese-Trinidadian however is an ethnicity I have, at almost 22 given up on explaining. No, I am not quarter Chinese and quarter Trinidadian. I am so tired of trying to explain my ethnicity to people who push for a deeper answer, that saying I am just half Chinese is far simpler. 


Hesitations in answers and obvious exasperation.


Where does pride and exhaustion meet ? where is acceptable to stop trying to explain ?




Narrowing of eyes 


comes with questions of race.




But you don’t look Chinese 


I know. 




All my life I have wished what is deemed as a further hardship on myself. Darker hair. more mono-lidded eyes. a petite-er frame. Wishing these things upon myself seem almost a crime. Am i willing myself to experience more racial prejudice? No, just a sense of belonging. Neither completely welcome in either ethnicity. I don’t feel double-y emboldened into a sense of community. Just more empty than I really am. No one have I met who has the same exact ‘ethnicity’ as me. Apart from


my sister 


We have both cried the same tears, both thought the same thoughts, both wanted to be more this and more that. No-one else will ever understand the exact diasporic feeling of despair when you find out your mother was told by her sisters when you were born that she 




just keeps making white babies. 




Rejected from the collection of family who look enough the part to fit in, so outcasts in our own people mean for outcasting in society too. No-one of us can speak any form of Chinese. I don’t even know when the last family member could. Maybe my mother’s grandparents ? Not sure. Does that make them not Chinese ? It certainly is a factor on people deciding that 




I am not Chinese enough to actually be Chinese. 




If so, but I still am a personification of the palatable exotic that people want, that means I neither belong in white society. Therefore, I have to question my own place of association every single day. I feel no community, 


only alone.




Suddenly. I am 16 and being *kinda* Chinese is cool. they call it 


yellowfever 


the word is disgusting, and just a derogatory slang for men to fetishise Eastern Asian women. 




I am 


exotic.




But I am also white. I am exactly what a man wants to project his fantasy onto. But It also gave me a sense of actually finally being wanted in a society. A place to belong. A disgusting one at that but yet still. My 




racially ambiguous 




face was something I didn’t completely hate. for once. 




I’m 16 and 17 and going to festivals. I am seeing girls in slutty versions of the dress that is hanging in the back of my cupboard. The one my great aunt passed down, a beautifully handmade cheongsam, so small just for her tiny frame, and only just fit me at 16. From then on no way was it going to zip up. The cheongsam’s silk fabric, reproduced into 


cheap satin, 


cut into the smallest triangles to make a bikini top, and a couple inches of length to make the shortest mini skirt I had ever seen. seeing this made me angry. I wasn’t sure why the first time. but, years later I know. 


At 18 I saw more and more, and then ‘rice hats’ with wooly braided plaits trailing down the back. One time I was so pissed off I snatched it from someones head and chucked it. I then ran off, but realistically I should have told them why 
what they were wearing was racist. But what if they told me 




You have no right telling me what is and what isn’t racist




You don’t even look Chinese.




I know.