I’ve always felt, and often been told, that I’m a bit of an old soul. So I’ve always felt a little different to everyone else, though I have not always embraced it. Part of it is just my somewhat old-fashioned values, but part of it also has to do with my cultural and ethnic identity and my family’s migrant story.
I was born in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia in 1998. My dad was born in Singapore, one of seven children, to a Peranakan Chinese father whom I called Ah Kong until he passed away, and a Cantonese mother whom I never met, as she passed away when my dad was a teenager. Ah Ma was born in Singapore but both her parents were born in China. My mum was born in Melaka in Malaysia, one of five children, to a Peranakan Chinese father whom I called Kong Kong until he passed away, and a Hokkien mother whom I call Mama. Mama is the only surviving grandparent I now have, and her parents were born in China as well.
My parents met and married in Singapore, before moving to Melbourne to give my younger sister and I a better education, and to be closer to the local Church community. My mum had completed her university studies in Melbourne, but my dad had never left Singapore before.
When I was growing up, my Church was, and still remains, my closest community of friends and adopted family members, many of whom are from the Malaysian Chinese diaspora—we call older members aunty and uncle, we call some of them the Chinese words for grandma and grandpa, and I always feel safest, most at home there. Especially because it’s just my immediate family living in Australia.
Elsewhere, in primary school where I was one of the few Asians, I always felt a little left out, having to go to Chinese Language School on a Saturday, and Church on a Sunday (my sister and I joked we went to school everyday of the week on account of Sunday School), not understanding other friends whose family members had fought in great wars for Australia’s freedoms, not understanding why other people could easily research their genealogy. I would acculturate and try to be white, bringing sandwiches to school but then eating rice at home, changing my name (Netania) to a shorter, easier-to-pronounce Nat (even though my name is in fact the feminine version of a Christian name, it’s not even ethnic).
I didn’t really understand why my parents wanted me to learn Mandarin, though my love of words and culture and history meant I enjoyed learning languages anyway. It was only as I grew older that I understood why, going back to Malaysia and Singapore more often and becoming closer to my cousins, understanding the melting pot of cultures and ethnicities that make up the two countries, and coming to accept my ancestry, as well as everything that my parents gave up for me to have a better life in Australia. (Complicated as that is with the fact that the sovereignty of this land is unceded.)
And even when I did go back to Malaysia and Singapore, although I look like I fit in, I definitely don’t sound like I do—I struggle with the languages (Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien), and I can never get rid of my Australian accent either. And so I always felt like an imposter, caught between two cultures, two identities, and never really knowing where I fit in. I was never going on a holiday, I was travelling overseas to be with my family. And I saw injustices in these societies too that tourists wouldn’t usually (and was so glad to not live in Malaysia especially).
But I learnt what it means to be Peranakan Chinese, a part of the hidden diversity of South East Asia. The Peranakan community is a unique culture that comes from immigrants who assimilated with the peoples living in Malaya or Indonesia. The most well-known are the Peranakan Chinese, like me, who were the Chinese nobles who moved to the region in the 15th Century and married the local women, and of generally higher socioeconomic status than other mainland Chinese born who migrated. The men were mostly from the southern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, and moved to Malacca, Penang and Singapore and spoke a dialect of Malay mixed with Hokkien, though there are some with Teochew or Cantonese background. So that’s why we’re called the Straits Chinese, or the Baba (male) / Nyonya (female). But there’s also the Peranakan Indians known as Chitty Melaka (Tamil merchants marrying the local women) and the Jawi Peranakan Straits-born Muslims of mixed Indian (especially Tamil) and Malay parentage.
Our traditions, customs, foods, clothing, beliefs are all unique—the men didn’t convert to Islam so practiced a mix of Buddhism, ancestor worship, and by the time of the European colonialists, Christianity as well (all practiced by my family generations back).
To be Peranakan is to be a living fusion—culturally, religiously, racially, linguistically, and even gastronomically.
And I think understanding that diversity has helped me accept who I am as someone who is “Australian-born Chinese”, but also ethnically and culturally much more complicated than that. Our community often teases people like me for being “bananas”, but this racial imposter syndrome is a very real phenomenon. (And for the record, in case it was not obvious already, calling anyone a “banana” or any other fruit for multi-racial people is offensive and racist language.) I have always called myself Australian, never Asian Australian which is way too broad, or even Australian-born Chinese which is way too simple. I think that especially cemented my whitewashing and socialisation.
In particular, I spent a lot of 2020 reflecting deeply on my heritage. I have always been interested in learning more about the dying culture of the Peranakan Chinese, exacerbated by the rise of Mandarin and English over Baba Malay and the immigration to Western countries. But something shifted within me in the wake of the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the rise in hate crimes against the Asian diaspora across the world due in large part to the pandemic, and the death of my Kong Kong. It brought up a lot of pain and grief, both from empathy and anger, as well as past microaggressions.
But it also helped me comprehend for the first time the depth and the necessity of knowing where and who you come from. It is something intrinsically in us, handed down from generation to generation, that can never be taken away, but can also never quite be fully understood. The stories, the memories, even the trauma. But talking to friends who are often first-generation immigrants as well has helped immensely, to know I’m not alone, to know there are other people my age who understand what I’ve been through, to know we have both internal and external validation for our experiences.
I’m proud to be a Nyonya, and I care about keeping this culture alive for future generations. I have no doubt that our world is as globally connected as ever, but I also have no doubt that our diversity is what makes us stronger.
