Navigating a Triaspora: Reflections On Self-Ethnic Identity
Down the Rabbit Hole
Recently, I’ve shared less about my personal life online so I thank you for taking the time to read this. I’ve been in a reflexive period of my life for the past year, especially due to the pandemic and I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions. These questions also possess answers that I can’t ask for much advice for, from the people around me.
I came into this whole self-identity ethnicity conflict when I moved to Vancouver in 2019 to begin my Masters of Public Health program. Having lived in Edmonton my entire life, I really needed fresh perspective and decided to move there despite knowing few people in the city.
Time flew by during my first semester of my Masters program, and interestingly, I became close friends with an Ethiopian girl and a white girl. I say interestingly, because (as you know, if you know me) all of my friends are East Asian (EA), and this has been my reality for the entirety of my life. I never questioned this until I moved away. After forming these new friendships in Vancouver, and seeing my Ethiopian friend’s passion for her culture, language, and food, I realized I couldn’t say the same about myself and my own culture which led me down this rabbit hole of questioning my identity. These friendships were also a refreshing change.
Because of how all of my current friendships are so healthy and fulfilling, I never really had the reason or introspection to reflect on myself and ask these questions. It took a combination of moving to Vancouver and (perhaps) maturing for me to realize/question the following aspects I noted about myself:
- I have been completely steeped in various aspects of EA culture since my childhood. Why is it that when I hang out with my friends we only go out to eat Japanese, Korean or Chinese food? Why do I also only cook these dishes and learn these recipes ?
- A good majority of my friends are East Asian and looking back I often felt the need to subconsciously hide my ethnicity and assimilate to engage in these friendships. Thoughts went racing through my mind: do my friends even know I’m Sri Lankan? Even today, I am genuinely curious about this.
- None of my friends have been curious about my culture. As an example: Why have none of my friends ever even asked to try Sri Lankan food? Why are none of the food options raised by the group when we go out to eat ever even South Asian at the least?
I discuss food a lot through this because I think that food IS culture. Food, for me, is the easiest gateway to experiencing someone’s culture. I mean, how do people pass down their culture other than language, and other forms of media?
Reflecting on this, I realized that another area of how EA culture plays a big role in my identity is through travel and language. I note how much praise/ surprise I get from my East Asian friends and their parents when I understand parts of their language, have visited their countries and engaged in their culture. I often feel that I’m not in a diaspora (trapped between two worlds: my parents’ culture and Western culture), as is common with many BIPOC first generations, but I’m experiencing something more likened to a “tri-aspora” where I’m trapped between Western culture, different forms of East Asian culture and Sri Lankan culture. Expanding on this idea, often many POC first generations find themselves unable to fully relate to either Western or their parent’s culture, whereas for me- because of this third element of EA culture, I was outed by other Sri Lankan people in the community for “being too [East] Asian” which isolated me from fully forming some connections earlier in life as well.
One huge factor that stood out amongst all my reflections was that there was little reciprocity of cultural exchange in my friendships. As genuinely good as these friendships are, why are my friends not curious about ME and MY culture?
This is when I came to a more painful realization that at a maximum, 50% of the responsibility of my friends not experiencing Sri Lankan food/culture was on my friends, but most likely a larger percentage of the responsibility was on myself, and the self-shame that came with me hiding my ethnicity.
Point blank- although my friends never asked to experience any of my culture, I never invited them either, and this led me to my second stage of reflection: me dealing with my own internalized self-racism.
Internalized Racism and Events Shaping Self-Perception
How did I become like this? When did I start hating and becoming embarrassed of my culture, ethnicity and identity? And ultimately, how did this lead to my lack of invitation for people to experience my culture?
I had a phone call with one of my best friends in Toronto to clear my head and run through some of my thought process with him. One part of the conversation was especially memorable, he asked:
“Are you proud to be a Sri Lankan person?”
I honestly couldn’t say yes to that, but I said “I’d like to be, but that’s not where I am right now.” Then countered with, “are you proud to be a Hong Konger?” To which he said yes. But then I asked him to think about why that was.
Hong Kong is seen as an ideal travel destination, people love Dim Sum, and Mahjong is seen as cool. These are a few elements of Hong Kong culture that people are familiar with and able to enjoy. Even examining the recent event around the culturally appropriated Mahjong set developed by a group of white girls who wanted to “refresh” the game (yikes), is yet another indicator that East Asian ideas and cultural symbols like Mahjong are cool. But, the point being is that I have difficulties finding an equivalent aspect or artefact in my culture with such impact, and this ties into the idea of cultural capital that I’ve alluded to above.
Cultural capital, an idea originally coined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is defined as “symbols, ideas, tastes, and preferences that can be strategically used as resources in social action” (Oxford Reference, n.d), as well as “familiarity with the legitimate culture within a society” (Cultural Learning Alliance, 2019, para. 2). Although this concept was originally used to describe aspects of high culture in western society, it can similarly be used to explore the idea of domineering EA culture in media, food, and other cultural artefacts in the West. I could write an entire tangent topic about cultural capital but will keep it short for the sake of brevity.
I think travel is the cherry on top in comparison: many people view East Asia (especially places like Japan, Korea, China) as “cool”, and “trendy”, where places in South Asia are more-so seen as “dirty” and “dangerous”. I’ve seen this firsthand as well, for example when viewing an EA person I follow on Instagram’s responses to an “ask me anything” thread, where their response to someone saying “Come to India!” was
“I’d like to, but I heard it’s too dangerous”
Although it might be true that travelling anywhere in general comes with certain danger, their overall positive reception to other EA locations in that same thread reveals a sort of hierarchy in favorable travel destinations.
As I don’t have the same pride in my racial identity, I reflected on my experiences below:
Memorable racial microaggressions and racialized life experiences
- Grade 4: Being upset about the 2004 tsunami that hit Sri Lanka, and telling my Chinese friend about it in class, his response being “damn did all the dirt roads there get washed away?”
- Elementary- High School: not wanting any traditional food for lunch because I didn’t want to bring things that might be off-putting to people
- Junior High: Korean friends instilling a hierarchy in me that I didn’t question until the end of high school, that Korean people were the best race, followed by Japanese, Chinese being the worst, and any brown people way below any of these.
- Junior High- High School: I was the darkest person in my friend circle, so I got dubbed the “black guy” or played this offensive caricature of a “Jamaican guy”, which led to me saying the N-word, other friends calling me the N-word, and living my life as this “funny” caricature version of myself which perpetuated anti-black racism and other harmful tropes. As an example, for my 18th birthday, some friends bought me a green shirt with a Jamaican flag, and a pink headband with watermelons on it, further casting me into this “role” and perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
- Junior High- High School: Hating my curly hair, straightening it, and getting outed and ridiculed for doing that by EA friends in high school
- 2016: Getting racially profiled while getting a ride to my cousin’s place, on a vacation to New York, getting pulled over, arrested and spending 5 hours locked up in a cell in the New Jersey State Police Department (this is a long one so ask me in person if you want!)
- Throughout my life: Generalization- people seeing all brown people as being the same, all brown food being the same, and people continually identifying me as an Indian person. I wouldn’t assume that all EA people are Chinese, so I’m not sure why so many people identify all brown people as Indian.
*Lately I’ve been super conscious about my use of racial identifiers as descriptors, especially as they’ve been misused so often by the media as racial microaggressions (i.e. black male suspected of robbery on 24th street, instead of 22-year-old male suspected of robbery on 24th street), but here they’re done purposely to illustrate inherent colorism.
Colorism in the Community
I think part of the experiences I’ve outlined above are due to colorism in the Asian community, and I’ll illustrate that through my personal experiences in Singapore, and in virtual communities.
The textbook definition of colorism, is as follows: “prejudice or discrimination especially within a racial or ethnic group favoring people with lighter skin over those with darker skin” (Merriam Webster, 2020).
Colorism is an interesting phenomenon because it applies not only between different ethnic groups, but within them. A few common examples of colorism are the increasing popularity of skin-lightening cosmetic products in Asia, and the general fear of getting “too dark”. The skin lightening cosmetics in the Asia-Pacific region makes up 7.5 billion dollars of the industry, with China producing 40% of total sales, followed by Japan at 21% and Korea at 18% (CNN Health, 2017).
A UC Irvine Law Review article by Trina Jones (2013) outlines the concepts of colorism in both Asian and Asian-American Communities well:
“For example, a Cambodian-Chinese man stated, “In the Cambodian community, [dark skin is] associated with less intelligence, laziness, working manually and lower class, and unattractiveness. Business people are the lighter-skinned ones, more intelligent, more ethical and morally superior. . . . [People] want to look whiter because it’s associated with wealth and status [in Cambodia].”48 Similarly, a Taiwanese man reported, “Light skin is the standard of beauty in Taiwan. . . . Wealthy people tend to be light-skinned, while darker people are associated more with low socioeconomic status. . . . ” (p. 1116)
One of my personal, anecdotal experiences with intra-racial colorism was my realization that lighter skin was prized and prioritized amongst Sri Lankan people as well. For example, I was shocked when my skin was lightened during the post-production process in a family portrait taken by a Sri Lankan photographer. Moving past colorism that exists within ethnic/racial groups, there is also inherent colorism that exists between racial groups. As Jones (2013) mentions again:
“Awareness of this additional use of skin color is important if, as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues, severe gaps in income, educational attainment, and professional status are emerging between what Bonilla-Silva calls honorary White Asians (Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and Chinese) and those who are more likely to be darker and among the Collective Black (Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotians)…” (p.1120).
In expressing similar sentiments, I would also include the South Asian community in Jones’s “Collective Black” group as well.
From Singapore
It was 2018 when I was looking into Commonwealth countries that I could partake a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Program in. I decided on Singapore, as I managed to find an interesting topic surrounding zooplankton and aquatic ecosystems which I was always interested in. The government website also emphasized “racial harmony” with English being the major spoken language so I felt comfortable in choosing Singapore to travel to.
Singapore was the first time in my life where I experienced both racism and colorism together. I quickly learned that there is prevalent structural racism that intersects with underlying colorism, with the majority Chinese population oppressing the darker skinned minorities who live there: mainly the Malay and Indian people. This was my first time experiencing overt racism from someone who wasn’t white, which had been my typical context in a Canadian setting.
Due to my infamous ankle strength (this is written ironically, my ankle strength is terrible), I managed to fracture my toe after my ankle rolled while at work, and this is when I got to know the real Singapore. I came to the realization that 95% of darker skinned folks that I saw- whether it be Filipino, Indian, Bangladeshi or other South and South East Asian (SA/SEA) workers were all involved in construction or manual labor jobs. A few friends I made in Singapore told me of their country’s huge migrant-worker problem: how thousands of people in SA/SEA are recruited under false premises to work and live a “better” life in Singapore. In reality, these migrant workers are lured into thousands of dollars worth of debt and are almost treated as sub-human: like machines or animals. Their passports become confiscated, and they are not allowed to leave. Because there are no minimum wage regulations in Singapore, they’re likely paid just a few dollars per hour in unsafe working conditions (Singapore Ministry of Manpower, 2020). Talent and wealth become further drained out of SA/SEA and funneled into cheap labor that builds Singapore’s characteristic skyscrapers & high density housing..
From my experience there, I felt that the common notion of darker-colored people in Singapore being in construction or working “low class jobs”, shaped the underlying colorism in Singapore. Because of my fractured foot and temporary disability status, I believe that my experiences were a subtle blend of racism, colorism, and ableism and I felt them all amplify the already unprivileged status of what it is like to be ‘brown’ and darker-skinned in Singapore. One memorable instance I can think of was pressing the disability button on the bus for the ramp to be activated/pulled-out and the bus driver REFUSING to get out of their seat and pull out the ramp for me to board the bus. They proceeded to yell at me in Mandarin, and luckily my Mandarin-speaking Singaporean friend was there to defend me and yell back at the bus driver who begrudgingly came and lowered the ramp so I could board the bus while also swearing at me the entire time.
You might potentially argue that I’m exaggerating being racially marginalized in Singapore and perhaps am taking different instances of discrimination (disability) and am conflating them with the racial ‘inferiority complex’ that I’ve built growing up in Canada. But these experiences showed me that this is not the case:
- After my foot had healed and I was no longer visually disabled, I was trying to find a seat to eat my meal in a busy food court at one of Singapore’s bigger malls, and I got rejected from every single table that had a few empty seats in the food court for 20 minutes, until my food went cold and I found a McDonalds nearby to eat my meal. I remembered asking one lady who was clearly done with her meal and was on her phone for her seat and she rejected me by motioning with her hands for me to leave. Right as I was walking away, I watched as she gave up her seat with no hesitation to another Chinese Singaporean person who asked her.
- My Singaporean friend who was hired for an internship in Singapore was reflecting on small talk she had with her HR manager while getting her paperwork setup to begin her position. This HR manager was reviewing a few applicants who were going to work at a café in the entrance of the office, and said “this applicant seems great, but I don’t want someone with skin this dark to be working at the front”. She said this during idle talk, to someone who just got hired to the office, as she assumed another Chinese Singaporean person would be able to relate to this sentiment, but my friend was disgusted. She was also unable to say anything due to office power dynamics as a new hire. At this point, the colorism isn’t subtle or a microaggression, it’s plain and out in the open, and it came from someone who is in charge of “human resources”.
I think nothing highlights Singapore’s social problems more than the brownface ad for E-PAY, a new hawker-stall payment system that was released by MediaCorp in 2019 that had a Chinese actor wear dark makeup, a wig and fake facial hair to dress up as an Indian person, a Malay woman wearing a Tudung and a Malay office worker. Given the structural racism in Singapore and current racial hierarchy between Chinese people and Malay, Indian and other minorities this was highly unacceptable. I want to highlight again that this was paid for and approved by the Singaporean government. Having now done a government internship and known how many checks and balances are before something gets released, this was quite shocking. And it doesn’t stop there: two Brown Youtubers who lived in Singapore did a parody skit mocking the ad, and calling out Chinese people for perpetually erasing their culture, and in turn these Youtubers were sanctioned by the police for creating an “offensive video”. People were more angry that these Youtubers spoke out against the racist campaign, rather than the racist act itself…
There is a definite hypocrisy in the legislation that details “racial harmony” in Singapore, and it’s clear that more work needs to be done to shift the perspective of the majority. It was disappointing, but eye-opening for me to have to experience this first hand.
Subtle-Asian traits & Asian Creative Network
The Facebook group, Subtle Asian Traits (SAT) was an interesting worldwide social phenomenon, that spoke on the first gen “Asian” experience- but very quickly became a page for East Asians, and even more so catered towards Chinese Asians. The first time I was told about the page was around the end of 2019 by a friend who said it was a funny page but:
“Not for YOUR type of Asian, though.”
This is when I first came to some reflections about how brown people were generally excluded from the term Asian, and why/how that even came to be. Another friend even told me to join the page “subtle curry traits” instead which I thought was stupid and even more exclusionary. I eventually left the SAT page due to the amount of problematic & explicitly colorist comments, i.e. EA folks (including people I knew) making jokes about brown people, and further telling them they don’t belong on this page.
There were several sub-groups created out of SAT including one that I’m still a part of called Asian Creative Network (ACN). ACN is essentially a networking space for Asian folks engaging in any type of creative work whether it be photography, animation, videography, or even their hand-made items, although it is again a very EA dominant space. I don’t have as many qualms with ACN, other than the quality and repetitiveness of the content that has generally fallen into some clichés like endless Bubble Tea/Boba affiliated merchandise, but I definitely do still feel a level of exclusion or a lack of being able to share in broad sentiments like “a win for Asians!” when yet another EA person is cast into a movie role for example.
I remember once making a comment on a post in this group about the lack of South Asian representation, and someone mentioned Aziz Ansari and Russell Peters as proof of equal representation for brown people… I think if you have to mention Russell Peters for brown representation in 2020 there’s definitely an issue, and the last time Russell Peters was funny was probably in 2005. When thinking about creative work, I can easily think of many white, Black and EA artists that I look up to, but I really have to wrack my brain to think of any Brown ones, let alone someone Sri Lankan. When discussing this with one of my only other Sri Lankan friends, I found out that he’s in a similar boat. We both realized that part of the reason we can’t find more pride or solace in our own ethnicity is the lack of prominent figures or respectable people in the fields we’re in. This again relates to the idea of a lack of cultural capital in the SA community. We don’t really have anyone to look up to, and this is reflected in the culture that people consume around us.
Where do we go from here?
So you might be asking: what’s the outcome of this entire reflection? Do I completely stop consuming EA culture & throw away all my friends? NO. I have to insert here that I feel truly blessed to have experienced all the things that I have, and possess the richness of cultural knowledge that I do. This reflection is just a start to my personal journey in reclaiming and combatting my internalized racism, and I hope that in the future I will be able to have work that builds a form of cultural capital for Sri Lankan people and makes them proud of their own ethnicity. I hope I can find that for myself first.
I’ve dropped a lot of unnamed people in this article. I know it’s difficult but I want to reiterate to de-center yourself, and not take any of this personally- I hope you’re reading this until the end! There’s so much here that took me so long to unpack, and we’re all learning to be better, including myself.
I’m going to leave off with something a friend sent recently:
“THE CURIOUS PARADOX OF CHANGE: SELF-ACCEPTANCE
So what should we do if we want to set a resolution? Well, the first thing to do is take some time to reflect inwards. Fox Weber advocates taking an honest inventory of who we are first. Getting an accurate picture of ourselves so we can really comprehend the material. This means not only “tolerating our conflicts, exploring in a compassionate way the various parts of ourselves” but also, becoming aware of our environments, to understand what might circumstances might challenge our ability to stick with our goals.
“When we accept ourselves” — as well as our circumstances — “we understand what we are working with, and we feel less judgmental of ourselves.’” We see the good bits and the problematic patterns, and we can look at ourselves in a calmer, kinder, more considerate way. While she cautions that it is likely we won’t like everything we are, but we are willing to face ourselves, and that in itself is courageous and motivating.
“We think that by not accepting ourselves, we will somehow push forward and be our best selves, but actually, this is a form of denial, and denial and intolerance actually blocks progress.” In fact, if we refuse to accept where we are, we are starting from a premise of shame and intolerance. Instead, when we have a more realistic picture about ourselves and our circumstances lay the foundations for which we can truly develop and flourish. As the founding father of humanistic psychotherapy Carl Rogers infamously noted “the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change.” (Prendergast, 2021, paras. 14–16)
Happy New Year, and here’s to more self-reflection and being more accepting of ourselves in 2021 !
Kasun
References:
Cultural Capital. (2021). In Oxford Reference. Retrieved from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095652799
Jones, T. (2013). The significance of skin color in Asian and Asian-American communities: Initial reflections. UC Irvine Law Review 3(4): 1105–1123.
Liu, M. (2018, September 2). Skin whiteners are still in demand, despite health concerns. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/02/health/skin-whitening-lightening-asia-intl/index.html
Prendergast, C. (2021, January 11). New year, same you? Why accepting yourself is the best resolution for 2021. Dazed Digital. https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/soul/article/51609/1/new-year-resolutions-self-acceptance-improvement-mental-health-2021
Singaporean Government Ministry of Manpower. (2018, September 4). Is there a prescribed minimum wage for foreign workers in Singapore https://www.mom.gov.sg/faq/work-permit-for-foreign-worker/is-there-a-prescribed-minimum-wage-for-foreign-workers-in-singapore#:~:text=No.,demand%20and%20supply%20for%20labour.
What is cultural capital? (2019, July 1). Cultural Learning Alliance. https://culturallearningalliance.org.uk/what-is-cultural-capital/
