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Michelle Neeling's avatar

This is such a wonderful piece, Lani, and I LOVE your reading voice!

What a layered and complicated topic. I have friends here in Beijing who present as Chinese, but because they were brought up in Australia or Brunei or the UK and have a complicated heritage, they don't speak Chinese. Their English, of course, is faultless, but the complexity of their ancestry and upbringing is not considered by people who imagine that if they look Chinese they must speak Chinese.

My parents were immigrants, having both moved to Australia from the Netherlands with their families after the war. They chose not to teach me and my siblings Dutch, as they thought it more important that their kids integrate than that they share their parents' mother tongue. I consider this an enormous loss, but no-one has ever labeled me as anything or had any particular expectations of me as a (non-Dutch speaking) daughter of two Dutch parents. The rules and expectations do not apply equally to everyone!

Thank you for this fantastically interesting and thought-provoking piece. 🙏

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Sarah Li-Cain's avatar

Oh boy can I relate to this post! I used be called a banana all the time and wondered if there was something wrong with me. Of course not, but I was ashamed by the way I was brought up and when I lived in Asia, would internalize the jealousy people felt towards me when they heard me speak English. After a while, I was more sad and a bit angry that certain languages were revered, and that somehow we have to put certain markers of an identity on a pedestal.

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