Struggles of Being Mixed Race
Friday, February 17, 2017
Hello erhhbody (lol, doubt anyone comes here, honestly). Anyway, here's a personal narrative essay I did for my COM 300 Written Communications module. It's slightly personal, and about an issue that's constantly been bugging me ever since I was young.
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“Are you angmoh? Where are you from? No, I mean where are you really from? Which country? And your parents? Huh...then your grandparents? Really? You don’t look Singaporean at all. What's Eurasian? So can you eat pork?”
I can't even put to words the amount of frustration I feel everytime I hear these words. Especially the amount of energy I have to exert to hold back my eye rolls. If I could receive a dollar for every time I heard these questions and remarks; I would probably be a millionaire by now. And every time I answered these questions, they would be received with blank, puzzled stares and further questions.
When I was younger, back in primary and secondary school, I never received such interrogations. It was probably due to the fact that as kids, we were blind to skin-colour and ethnicities. We were oblivious of the social stigmas and discriminations surrounding the different races, hence, we treated everyone the same way. Majority of Eurasians were Catholics or Christians hence, studying in a convent school for 10 years of my life meant that I was lucky enough to not be the sole Eurasian and I did not get questioned too much about my race and ethnic background.
However, after graduating from secondary school and enrolling into a polytechnic, I started getting exposed to people who had never met a Eurasian and did not know what it meant or vaguely knew of our existence in Singapore but were confused about our heritage. This is because we are living in a country where the people are predominantly Chinese, at least three-quarters of the population, and the other races, Malays and Indians, even though they were minority races, they were more prominent and of a higher percentage than Eurasians, which are merely lumped together as “Others” at 3.3%. Eurasians were, and still are, a dying race in Singapore, which is why many people are unaware of our roots. Just the other day, an elderly aunty approached me to ask what country my parents and I had come from, and upon hearing that my whole family was born in Singapore, she remarked, “Oh, but you don’t look Singaporean. You look like other people.”, which I loosely translated to the fact that it meant I do not look Chinese, Malay or Indian. Even though she probably did not meant what she said, I was offended, took it to heart and was affected by it for the next few days, which is also what spurred me to write this essay. What exactly was I expected to look like then? I wondered if she knew Singapore was made up of other races, and not just of her race - Chinese. Even when you compare Asians from different countries at a macro level, or even at a micro level, everyone has different facial features and skin colour. So I wondered why I constantly received comments such as these, that I looked different. Even though people meant no harm, it honestly really hurt. It broke me and bothered me so much that I, and other Eurasians, were treated like foreigners in a land we were born in and call our home. We were born and raised here. And yet people still doubt it, just because we have European features. For example, in the case of Joseph Schooling, Singapore’s National Swimmer. He is a Eurasian, as is his dad. They are Singapore citizens and even though Joseph trained in the United States of America, he still represented us in the Olympics. When he won a Gold Medal for one of the events, there was so much controversy over his nationality and even Singaporeans called him a foreigner, just because he did not look and sound like a “typical Singaporean”. Thereafter, it led to a lot of articles springing up about what exactly Eurasians were; to educate people about us.
No matter how irked and tired I was from answering strangers’ curious questions about where I come from, I would always try to find patience within me, to explain that even though my heritage was that of Portuguese, Spanish, Peranakan and Indian descent, I was in fact Singaporean.. Being an introvert, there were also days whereby I would feel too drained for human interaction and I would simply tell them I was from Portugal, without bothering to explain the other ethnicities and how my family came to live in Singapore. Thank goodness no one has asked me to converse in Portuguese yet.
There are also people who tell me how lucky I am to be of a mixed race. However, there are times when I feel it is of a disadvantage, especially because I do not speak Mandarin. There is currently a high influx of foreigners working in Singapore, predominantly from China, and many come here without knowing a word of English. I find myself suffering on a weekly basis trying to communicate with them, especially when it comes to ordering food, and eventually, I just give up and bring my business elsewhere, where they speak the common tongue. I personally feel it is unfair that these people are allowed to work in Singapore, knowing only their own language, and yet we were all forced to take up a Mother Tongue in school, something which I struggled with as what should have been my Mother Tongue, Portuguese, was not offered in mainstream school, hence, my parents advised me to take Malay as it looked easier amongst the 3 options and looked the most similar to English. However, I failed it throughout my education life.
I long for the day where everyone finally understands that there are four races in Singapore, not just one. I hope one day I’ll stop feeling and treated like such an outsider in my own home. I can’t wait for the day that Singaporeans finally accept Eurasians as their fellow countrymen.
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