We all want to know where we come from, don’t we?
For as long as I can remember, I have felt an identity crisis around the way I look and who I am. This in part, is due to racism, of which I have experienced plenty of in my life. The casual comments that get thrown in passing such as ‘Go back to X’ (insert country of your choice because they always assume and get it wrong), or that time I got called a ‘Darkie’ on the street. Then there are the many times when people have placed their fingers on the outer corners of their eyes and pulled them up. That happened to me not so long ago, actually. You’d think it’s the type of behaviour that is strictly for children, but it’s amazing how many adults actually do it. Even my own (ex) friends threw about casual racism like it was nothing. ‘Thought I saw you on the bus today, but it was some other Chinese woman’ (I’m not Chinese, for those who don’t know me). ‘Are you eating for all of China?’ ‘Are you buying that to support your people?’ (about items that are made in China). I could go on and on and on, really I could. But I won’t, because this isn’t really about racism, though I have largely accepted these days that it is just a part of my life now.
I’m mixed race. I come from two very different countries and cultures. To make it more complex, my parents chose to raise me in a different country altogether. I was born in Germany to a German father and a Malaysian mother. Naturally, I was given German nationality therefore. It probably made the most amount of sense to my parents at the time and they were not to know that we would be moving to England later down the line. I moved to England when I was 2. I have absolutely no recollection of it. There is no defining moment in my memory bank of it happening. My earliest memory is when we lived in Guildford. I remember this family we used to hang out with a lot. I think the mum’s name was Jenny and I used to play with her little boy, Tom. In fact, I have the photos of the two of us playing. The childhood joke was always that he was my first boyfriend. I don’t actually remember doing much with him, just his voice and how he looked. I do remember though, that Tom had a friend called David and that the three of us went out to play one time. David offered up his scooter to me. Me having no idea how to ride one because my parents were massively, over the top strict, absolutely took that offer up, and I most definitely had an accident on it that then meant I had to own up to my parents, who naturally went beserk at me. From Guildford, we moved to Dronfield, and it was here where my heart felt most at ease, where I grew up until the age of 12 and where I have my most fondest memories. I have no idea why we moved. There was never any explanation from of my parents. In Dronfield though, I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was really the only girl who ‘looked different’ at school, which invited a lot of bullying. At one point, I was pushed around a lot that I would come home with bruises. I would constantly have either my looks or my nationality thrown in my face. If it wasn’t that I looked different, it was that I was German, and there was almost a constant onslaught of slurs about the war, about nazis, and it was always in a way that made it sound like I was beneath them. Always done by boys at my school. I can still remember three individuals in particular, who just went to town on it, because they could. From a young age, I felt isolated because of what I was and who I was. I think some of that isolation may have also been my own non-diagnosed neurodiversity.
It became a lot harder when my parents very randomly decided we had to move to Bournemouth when I was 12. I moved to a very big secondary school, and yet, there was maybe only two or three other individuals who ‘looked different’. I hated that school, and I very much disliked a lot of the teenagers in it. When I was 14, I was racially bullied to the extreme. For three months I had this girl from my year throw insults about my looks left, right and centre. Whenever she could. We didn’t share any classes or any friends. I didn’t know her, only of her. She just took a huge disliking to my face. One day, she pinned me up against a window as I was trying to leave the school to walk home and had to walk past her to do so, and she wrapped her hands around my throat and started strangling me. I had strangulation marks around my throat and neck for weeks. Along with bumps all around my head.
My parents never spoke much about their own families. We weren’t allowed contact with either side. My dad told me stories about his family. He told me that I’m named after his grandmother, and I could tell in the way he spoke of her, just how fond of her he was. My dad called her ‘doolally’, but really, I think it was Dementia. Three generations of the family lived on the farm they owned. My great-grandmother would often sit on the wall outside laughing until she fell off it. Or drinking. Then there were the many times she would go to the shops in their village and open up tabs, taking whatever she wanted whilst claiming that her husband would be in to pay for it all. The none the wiser husband, my great-grandfather, was a real hard man. He very much did not appreciate his wife’s shopping habits. He also often took my dad into the slaughter house to make him watch. It’s by some sheer miracle that my dad didn’t end up as a serial killer. My dad rarely spoke of his parents. Actually no, he rarely spoke of his mum. I think his mum was pretty hard on him growing up and he resented her for that. His dad died when he was 8 in a tractor accident on the farm. He had somehow fallen out of the tractor and hit his head on a rock. I think life must have become quite difficult for him from that point on. My mum, on the other hand, is one of eight, four boys and four girls. I could not, for the life of me, tell you much about any of them. My mum never really spoke to me much about her upbringing, but my dad said it was very much based on the principal that the boys were more important than the girls, and my mum in particular, was not a favourite. I think she was somewhat neglected as a child.
Then there is me. A half German, half Malaysian adult, who grew up in England, sees England as her home, speaks English as her first language, but has German nationality. As a side note, I also see myself as more British than anything else. But it leaves me with a lot of confusion as to where I actually fit in. Here in England, people see me as foreign. I can feel people leaning in to explain things slower when I have a question in a shop, and I can also see people using there hands to sign certain gestures to ensure I understand what they are trying to say. In Germany, I’m not accepted because I don’t speak German perfectly. So I can’t be one of them. I toured the country for a year solidly going from interview to interview for an apprenticeship when I was 18. No one wanted me because of my language skills and they simply could not get their heads around the fact that a German could not speak perfect German. When I go to Malaysia, it is obvious that I am not Malaysian, but they also don’t know where to place me or what language to speak to me in. When I was 15, one of my Malaysian cousins came to stay with us. She could speak much better English than I could speak Malay, but didn’t really talk to me. A few years later, a different cousin from the same family came to stay with us. I tried really hard, but again, couldn’t get much from her. When I went to visit Malaysia and met up with that particular family, I went to KLCC (the main shopping centre in KL) and walked around with them. There was a lot of conversation going on, none of it was with me. I couldn’t speak Malay but they could all speak English. No one tried though and I felt quite vulnerable at the time. The problem is that Malaysians generally can’t understand why I am not Muslim when I am half Malay and come from a Muslim family. One or two of my uncles are extremely were in extreme despair over this. In Christianity, you are Christened into the faith. With Islam, my understanding is that if you are born from Muslim parents, then you yourself are classed as Muslim. Only I wasn’t. My dad was non-serious Christian who converted to Islam in order to marry my mum. So in their eyes, I have two Muslim parents. I should be Muslim. But my parents had raised us all in a non-religious environment, always claiming that we could choose our own religion one day, should we want to (although I had to go through a period of not being allowed to eat any ham due to my mum’s beliefs, so I have no real idea of what was going through their heads when it came to religion).
This will now sound totally random, but bear with me.
I had a takeaway a couple of nights ago. I know, crazy, right?! Steve was out with the boys and I usually get myself dinner delivered because by the time I get all three kids to bed on my own, it’s usually pushing past 9pm and I still have a million other household jobs to do before bed. Checked out on Deliveroo and was then presented with these offers from various companies. I had no interest in the first one and so declined it, but then came the Ancestry one. Now I had dabbled with the site many, many years ago when I had a free trial. Back then, I never really got very far and the site itself was still in its infancy. It had been something I had secretly been meaning to do and it was offering me a two week free trial. What’s not to like? I accepted it and went through the registration and set up process, eagerly putting in everything and everyone I know on to my family tree. Before the evening was over, I had found my dad’s father’s parents, his mother’s parents, parents for both of lots and then some. I had managed to go back three generations past my dad’s parents (I didn’t even try to input my mum’s side because I would have been there forever and there really isn’t a lot a know about them). For anyone who has started this, you know what I’m talking about when I say that you go down this never-ending, all-consuming rabbit hole. And you just can’t stop. It felt weird seeing the names right there with their matching birthdays, making it feel like they real people whilst simultaneously feeling like you were staring at someone else’s family, a family that couldn’t possibly be yours. Having heard that my dad’s mother came from Romania, but never being told more than that, and finally seeing her family info telling you that they were definitely Romanian, realising that that means you are part Romanian, too. It is absolutely mind blowing. It meant that my dad was actually half Romanian. It means that I am a quarter Romanian, a quarter German and half Malaysian, instead of the 42 year long belief that I was half German and half Malaysian. It might not sound like much to some, I mean, yeah a quarter of something, right? But we’re talking about a whole other country and culture to explore. I’ve taught Romanians English before but I actually don’t know a lot about Romania, compared to the many other cultures I got to learn about throughout my teaching career. I very quickly managed to cross match some of the information by pulling out my grandmother’s photo album and going through every photo in detail and looking at what she wrote. I suddenly knew who was who, mostly. Ancestry gave me a list of my grandmother’s siblings. I had only known of one, who had married an Italian lady and moved to Vancouver. I had no idea there were so many of them. But I could see by the three photos in the album that I couldn’t identify previously, that these people were the siblings on that list. I just don’t know yet who exactly is who. I have two weeks. I need to throw everything at it if I decide not to renew with a ridiculously expensive subscription.
