LITMIR.BIZ

      Born in Taiwan, raised in South Africa, and making sense of it all

      Ming-Cheau Lin

      Kwela Books

      To all the ‘others’ who feel displaced in our society

      Introduction:

      ‘Yellow’ by society

      ‘Ming-Cheau is here!’

      Roaring laughter erupts from a sea of non-Asians.

      ‘The yellow peril has arrived …’

      ‘Our Asian persuasion!

      I never truly saw my skin tone as yellow. It looked more white than yellow. My parents told me I was born even-tone milky white with a mop of hair that stood up like fireworks. In our home languages, we’d talk about our own skin tones as white – the elders would remark how beautiful we were with our white skin and warn us to stay out of the sun so our skin didn’t turn black. This is based on direct translation to English. In Mandarin, these words don’t have those direct definitions and connotations. While, yes, there was a sentiment of colourism and anti-blackness, ‘white’ in this instance meant light and pale and ‘black’ meant dark. However, we do also call East Asians – (huáng zhong rén) – when directly translated, this means ‘yellow type people’.

      In his book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking, Professor Michael Keevak from National Taiwan University dug deep into the history of when and why the colour yellow was used to classify East Asians.1 During the time of early foreign missionaries and into the eighteenth century Europeans classified East Asians as ‘white’. This transitioned to ‘yellow’ when German physician and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) used the Latin word ‘gilvus’ (light yellow) to describe Mongolians. Mongolians being synonymous with Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Timur and their roles in Eurasia invasions, the connotations of threat and of fear became entrenched – hence the term ‘Yellow Peril’ and variations thereof (‘Yellow Terror’, ‘Yellow Spectre’) and the influence far-reaching and long-lasting. Wing-Fai Leung, a sinologist and lecturer in culture, media and creative industries, ascribes the origins of these terms and descriptions to xenophobic and racist ideology, rooted in Western fears of becoming outnumbered and enslaved by the East.

      I hate that yellow became the race colour for Western society’s depiction of East Asians. I hate the biased perceptions that became associated with it, and the harmful outcome of it evolving into broad and ignorant gender norms: the emasculation of East Asian men and the hypersexualisation of East Asian women. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been catcalled with ‘China girl’, ‘Me love you long time!’ or ‘Me so horny’.

      Because the West struggles to differentiate between East Asians and light-skinned Southeast Asians – to them Asia is just one big country of Chinamen, and we all look the same with our yellow skin, squinty eyes and black hair – Southeast Asians are included in this classification. While we have our own problems of indoctrination (which include racism, colourism and patriarchy), we are also misrepresented in Western society. But it is the Asians living outside of Asia who are the ones who suffer the impact. We are stereotypes. We are the punch-line. We are seen as objects, without a second thought or concern. And to add insult to injury, the non-Asian side of the world doesn’t even realise that Asians, alongside those of Jewish ancestry, comprise one of the two biggest diaspora groups in the world.

      Even in Asia itself, we, the ones who don’t live there, are stereotyped. There we are seen as ‘bananas’ (yellow on the outside, white on the inside): white worshipping and Westernised due to our disconnect with ancient traditions and our ‘desire to survive’ in Western spaces.

      In actual fact our identities are complicated and unique. Circumstantial development plays a big part in shaping us, the children of free immigrants who moved their families to different parts of the world in the hope of providing them with better opportunities. We are also the children of history’s cruelty, of slave trade, and colonisation.

      I speak here and through this book of East Asian immigrants from my personal perspective, experiences, interactions and research.

      I am a first-generation immigrant woman, a Taiwanese-born South African, raised, from the age of three, in Bloemfontein in the Free State. While I don’t speak for all East Asian immigrants, since I can’t say we all have the same experiences, the path I have chosen, of intersection and feminism, has one goal in mind: to encourage and create conversations around unlearning and progression.

      My journey is ongoing. Along the road I have chosen to travel as an adult, I embrace my culture and ethnicity, as well as the confusion of feeling displaced, as someone who doesn’t seem to belong in either the country of my birth or the one I was raised in. Only as an adult am I able to make sense of much of this.

      And so, in a society that doesn’t recognise me, I choose myself.

      I choose to reclaim ‘yellow’. And unless you are ‘yellow’ too, don’t call me that.

      Prologue: The answers I never knew I needed

      My parents, my mama’s siblings and my maternal grandmother made a choice to leave Taiwan and emigrate to a new country – South Africa – where they would start a new life.

      I was three years old.

      Because I was raised in South Africa but was born in Taiwan, I consider myself an ‘in-betweener’. Understandably, I have no memories of my early years in Taiwan, but when I look at my sister and my older cousins, who had their childhood foundations there, not only am I proud of the success they have made of their adult lives, but I also admire their strength. The challenges they would have had to face – learning new languages and fitting into a completely different society is something I never had to go through. I will never understand how that was for them. Perhaps this also has something to do with why, amongst the five granddaughters, I was always the odd one out.

      There is a difference between first- and second-generation immigrants. Our immigrant parents sacrificed more than we can imagine in uprooting themselves from a comfortable life to provide us, their children, with opportunities for success. My parents tried hard to preserve our culture at home. There were no outdoor shoes inside the house – we wore indoor slippers that were placed at the door as you entered. Being a Buddhist household, we had a little statue of Guan Yin with a space for incense and Buddhist scripts. We’d chant the mantra of gratitude before dinner and go to the temple on Sundays. We watched Chinese series on television. We played piano and we went to Chinese school in the afternoon after school. We had the blue Royal Dansk cookie tin with the disappointing sewing kit inside it. The meals we ate at home were Taiwanese, which meant we ate rice, a lot of rice, and we prepared food together. Our families showed their love through food. This was probably why I was an overweight teenager – I ate all my feelings.

      In South Africa those of East Asian descent2 – or at least the ones that aren’t Chinese were offered some benefits over black and brown people under apartheid. Taiwan, where my family came from, was not recognised as a country by the UN and so, in order to improve its economy, it relied on building trade relations with other countries that were isolated from the international community – like South Africa.3

      This was something I wasn’t aware of until I was much older.

      My people were invited to South Africa as entrepreneurs to provide services and start businesses in the National Party government’s last-ditch attempt to diversify the manufacturing industry. In the 70s it was farming, in the 80s it was the textile industry, and in the 90s it was plastics manufacturing. Chinese ‘in general’ were classified ‘coloured’4 but the rest of the East Asians were labelled ‘honourary whites’ – so that is how we enjoyed some white privileges. Those who took up the invitation

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