Читать книгу Yellow and Confused - Ming-Cheau Lin - Страница 5

My parents, my mama’s siblings and my maternal grandmother made a choice to leave Taiwan and emigrate to a new country – South Africa – where they would start a new life.

I was three years old.

Because I was raised in South Africa but was born in Taiwan, I consider myself an ‘in-betweener’. Understandably, I have no memories of my early years in Taiwan, but when I look at my sister and my older cousins, who had their childhood foundations there, not only am I proud of the success they have made of their adult lives, but I also admire their strength. The challenges they would have had to face – learning new languages and fitting into a completely different society is something I never had to go through. I will never understand how that was for them. Perhaps this also has something to do with why, amongst the five granddaughters, I was always the odd one out.

There is a difference between first- and second-generation immigrants. Our immigrant parents sacrificed more than we can imagine in uprooting themselves from a comfortable life to provide us, their children, with opportunities for success. My parents tried hard to preserve our culture at home. There were no outdoor shoes inside the house – we wore indoor slippers that were placed at the door as you entered. Being a Buddhist household, we had a little statue of Guan Yin with a space for incense and Buddhist scripts. We’d chant the mantra of gratitude before dinner and go to the temple on Sundays. We watched Chinese series on television. We played piano and we went to Chinese school in the afternoon after school. We had the blue Royal Dansk cookie tin with the disappointing sewing kit inside it. The meals we ate at home were Taiwanese, which meant we ate rice, a lot of rice, and we prepared food together. Our families showed their love through food. This was probably why I was an overweight teenager – I ate all my feelings.

In South Africa those of East Asian descent2 – or at least the ones that aren’t Chinese were offered some benefits over black and brown people under apartheid. Taiwan, where my family came from, was not recognised as a country by the UN and so, in order to improve its economy, it relied on building trade relations with other countries that were isolated from the international community – like South Africa.3

This was something I wasn’t aware of until I was much older.

My people were invited to South Africa as entrepreneurs to provide services and start businesses in the National Party government’s last-ditch attempt to diversify the manufacturing industry. In the 70s it was farming, in the 80s it was the textile industry, and in the 90s it was plastics manufacturing. Chinese ‘in general’ were classified ‘coloured’4 but the rest of the East Asians were labelled ‘honourary whites’ – so that is how we enjoyed some white privileges. Those who took up the invitation were given generous incentives.5

After the abolishment of apartheid, Nelson Mandela made the decision to sever ties with Taiwan (Republic of China) and to recognise China (People’s Republic of China) as South Africa’s trade ally.6

Even though we held the unjust status of ‘honourary white’, socially we were all treated the same by white South Africans. It came down to the idea that we all ‘looked the same’. And today, socially, nothing has changed – except that now, due to the illegal activities of a few yellow non-South Africans, we are also associated with corruption and greed. Think rhino horn poaching, donkey skinning, abalone poaching … and of course the often-questioned investment into Africa that’s being poured in by the Chinese government.

As of 2017 (and inclusive of the dominant Indian group) Asians made up 2.5% of South Africa’s population, a small minority.7 I suppose we can say that East Asians, then, make up less than 1%.

As a child growing up in Bloemfontein in the 90s, with very little social representation in my surroundings – a tiny percentage of that tiny percentage – I was mocked and bullied from all sides: for existing, for being ‘too Westernised’, for not living up to the expectations of my community of being a ‘model minority’,8 for not being a ‘conservative feminine Taiwanese girl’.

But on top of all that is the basic fact: when it comes to Asians in the diaspora, we are not granted individualism. No one sees the yellow face as one that is part of the most densely populated race in the world.

We still all look the same.

We’re all ‘just yellow’.

As a child I hated myself.

Buddhism teaches acceptance and encourages enlightenment so that we can find peace and clarity in our lives, but peace and clarity were not what I experienced. I decided there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I struggled to find that acceptance.

It was only years later, as an adult, that I began to understand that before you can embrace the light, you need to find acceptance within yourself.