BY KIM GORDON
*Editors note: The following story was a runner-up in our first ever annual NüStories personal essay contest. This year’s theme was Chinese identity – read more here. Photo: Kim L Gordon
Identity is an ambiguous, elusive thing. It both arises from the self and is shaped by others in myriad ways. The question of what it means to be Chinese, what ‘Chinese-ness’ is, has for me been a lifelong puzzle, a deep source of ambiguity and ambivalence. Mostly this stems from being of mixed race, a child of both East and West born far from the homelands of both my parents. My mother is Chinese, my father Swedish, and I was born in Australia when my parents met there as international students. Like so many others, mine is a migrant story, of diaspora and globalisation, of identities brought into question, shifting, changing and forged anew.
The Chinese diaspora is a vast and complex web of histories of interrelation, intermarriage, colonisation, of languages and loves lost and gained. My Chinese mother was born in Malaysia, as were her ancestors, but for how many generations back nobody actually knows. That history has been lost to the vagaries of time and trouble, including two world wars, two colonial occupations, a stint living in the jungle to hide from occupying forces, and violent race riots during which the family house burnt down – and that’s just within my maternal grandmother’s lifetime. But throughout it all, there was never any doubt that our family was Chinese and proud of it.
For my mother and her parents, born between the turn of the twentieth century and the interwar period, China loomed large as the ancestral homeland, the revered land of Confucius, the great rivers, and thousands of years of history. My grandfather, Ah Kong; the stern patriarch of the family; was very much a Sinophile. He longed fiercely for the ancestral homeland despite the fact that none of his family had even set foot in China for generations. So powerful was his yearning, that upon his death, his daughters – my aunts – travelled all the way to China to scatter Ah Kong’s ashes upon the Yangtze River. In death he was finally reunited with his beloved homeland. My aunts and uncles have all since made that pilgrimage, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Over the years, all my mother’s siblings, bar one, migrated to Australia. With each passing generation China recedes further into the past, yet it is ever-present.
My own sense of Chinese-ness is a slippery thing. Being Chinese for me centres on relationships: on family and food, festivals, traditions and customs I grew up with and find joy in sharing with others. My story is intertwined with my mother’s and hers with her parents and ancestors, as it is for all of us: we carry the ghosts of our forebears within us. That lineage is evident in my face, my eyes, the colour of my hair, though my Eurasian racial ambiguity renders that a suspect and malleable thing. Some people say to me, ‘Oh, you’re only half Chinese’, and I wonder, which half? The top half or the bottom half? These kinds of conversations often imply a lack, an accusation that I am somehow not Chinese enough. The choice of measure that is held against me: my appearance, ethnicity, place of birth, behaviour, language…that rests entirely with the beholder and articulates their desire to include or to exclude. Can I be Chinese and also more-than-Chinese?
Maybe if I spoke Chinese, I would be perceived as being more Chinese. Language is central to cultural identity; it shapes the way we see the world and is the vehicle of history and culture. For a large part of my childhood, my mother’s parents lived with us in a multigenerational, multilingual household. I grew up hearing Chinese spoken daily. Only it wasn’t Mandarin: my mother’s family spoke Hokkien with each other, and Cantonese when we went shopping in Chinatown or ate at Chinese restaurants. My Malaysian cousins and Aunties spoke a mixture of ‘Chinglish’ and Hokkien, but my parents only ever spoke English to each other and to me. English was the common tongue of my parents and the language of the country I was born and educated in. My mother’s English was in fact far more fluent than my Swedish father’s, given her schooling under the British regime in colonial Malaya. So I learnt English from my mother and Swedish from my father, and studied Japanese and German at school. Occasionally I wondered why my mother didn’t insist that I learn to speak her mother tongue but put it down to a kind of unsentimental pragmatism and the mundane practicalities of everyday survival in an English-speaking country as a migrant family.
It was only years later when I started reflecting more deeply on what China and being Chinese meant to me, that I pinpointed one of the sources of my confusion and ambivalence. When people asked, ‘Do you speak Chinese?’, I always hesitated – did they mean Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka? Only a few members of my family, including my mother, had studied Mandarin, yet there is a widespread perception that Mandarin is synonymous with Chinese, as if it were the only Chinese language. What did it mean then that my family’s mother tongue was ‘just’ a dialect, not even a ‘proper’ language, merely a bastardized and subordinate vernacular? Did not speaking Mandarin make them any less Chinese? How are these intangibles measured, and by whom?
Mandarin hails from Beijing and the north of China, whereas Hokkien points to ancestral origins in the Fujian province of southern China. This difference speaks to geographical vastness, historical and political complexity, and the cultural and ethnic diversity of China itself. My mother’s mother tongue is a declaration of the Chinese diaspora, of southern Min people who made their homes all over Southeast Asia, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia: adventurers, settlers, indentured labourers, merchants and traders, skilled craftspeople, mothers, fathers, children. Was this great resettlement and migration not a history to be proud of and be reminded of through the richness of regional Chinese languages?
I learned recently that Hokkien also had a writing system dating from the Ming dynasty, surviving in the operatic ‘Tale of the Lychee Mirror’ dramatic text as an example of Southern Min language and culture. Writing does not make a language any more or less sophisticated or civilized. But having a deeper understanding of the great diversity and geographical spread of varieties of Chinese languages and people makes me, an inheritor of diaspora, feel at home. Maybe I’ll pick up a bit of Hokkien over yum cha with my friends and cousins, or perhaps I’ll finally learn Mandarin and read the Tao Te Ching in classical Chinese, who knows?
What I do know is that being Chinese is not a monolith, nor a singular identity with one face, one look, one nation, one language. Being Chinese means encompassing a long history of change, complexity and multiplicity across different countries, cultural nuances and trajectories. I embrace my mixed heritage and make room for the ghosts of my Chinese ancestors, both near and far. Together we may learn to speak the manifold tongues of welcome, inclusion and belonging, in all the places that have become and are becoming, home.
About the author
Kim Gordon is a Malaysian Chinese Swedish Australian born on Gadigal Country in Sydney, Australia. Growing up between Asia, Europe and the Pacific, she has dedicated her life to building connections and understanding across different cultures, knowledge systems and institutions. She has four degrees, including a PhD in literature from the University of Sydney, and works at the interface of research, policy and practice facilitating multi-sector collaborations to address complex challenges, from climate change to race, gender and diversity.
Photo credit: Kim L Gordon