Being Chinese | What I know as a Chinese-looking person travelling the world
- It is remarkable how assumptions and expectations of a Chinese-looking person have evolved, as China’s fortunes changed over decades
Looking back, I wonder if the black floral dress I was wearing would have seemed more frumpy than timelessly romantic to a fashion-conscious Hongkonger. Was my insufficiently brushed hair to blame? Perhaps my excitement somehow looked like the anxiety of a fish out of water.
I had been found inadequate before I could open my mouth. After I replied in Cantonese that I was just browsing, the sales assistant let me be and I left soon. Still, I found myself wishing I had bought something pricey, as if it could prove I wasn’t whatever she had presumed I was. Which was what? Someone from a sleepy backwater of mainland China?
Born to a Chinese-speaking family in Singapore, I had always been comfortable in my skin as a child of the Chinese diaspora. We lived on a high floor in a public housing block, and the corridor outside our flat every so often rang with neighbourly chit-chat in Mandarin, Hakka and Cantonese. At my secondary school, English and Chinese were taught as first languages.
It also fell to me, the firstborn, to send annual greeting cards to an uncle in a village in Dabu county in Guangdong province: an address I can rattle off to this day, even though our village relatives have long since been reachable by video chat.
