‘No, but where are you really from?’
Most people of an ethnic minority living in the UK will have been asked this repeatedly throughout their lifetime.
Most times, when someone ask me this question, my go-to response is usually “Ok then, guess”. Letting someone try to identify what they think I ‘contain’, as if I were some exotic wine. It often leads them to reveal their own cultural assumptions – leaving them to reel in their own self -induced discomfort. It can be a fun little game, but it doesn’t always work. Some people love to keep taste-testing that wine.
When someone singles you out to ask you where you come from, what they’re really saying is ‘You don’t belong here’. You are reduced to a puzzle to be solved. It is the equivalent of poking something with a stick to see what it is. What it really means is, “What are you?”.
Some might decry that this little question simply stems from polite curiosity, and that those offended constitute the ever-expanding crowd of horrified ‘sheeple’; the sensitive, overly politically correct and self-victimising ‘wokerati’. But being asked this question again and again, each time forced to ignore niggling feelings of annoyance at being constantly prodded and ‘othered’, has a cumulative effect. This single question can tear a wound in your sense of identity and force you to reconsider how others perceive you, or where you truly ‘belong’. It is a stabbing reminder that for many ethnic minority or mixed-race individuals in the UK, ‘home’ will always be a difficult thing.
My father is from the English West Midlands and my mother is from Tokyo, so I have always had roots in two different soils – I am confusingly magnetised between what feels like two opposing poles. But growing up in the UK, I am guilty of my Japanese identity feeling like somewhat of an afterthought, as if it was a party bag or a ‘fun fact’.
My sense of ‘home’ extends beyond a single tangible space; it stretches across continents, over borders and nations, tongues and cultures. I am split between things and am always ‘both’. Home is almost here or there but never fully this nor that. Too Asian to be British, too white to be Asian. This is something that Kristin Wong calls ‘the biracial bind’ of not being Asian enough. NPR calls it ‘racial imposter syndrome’. Poet Julian Randall described it as having ‘two half-filled glasses and dying anyway’.
For me, ‘home’ is less of a physical place, but a more mutable and tenuous thing. Home is a feeling I’ve had. My mother has always spoken to me in Japanese since I was a baby (I’m told I had stronger Japanese before English), but from the ages of 6 to 15 I went to a Saturday school to learn Japanese formally. Every Saturday, my parents would drive me and my sister to this giant block of school buildings in Acton, West London. The school was called 補習校 (hoshūkō), a form of supplementary Japanese school in foreign countries set up by the Japanese government for mixed-race students or expat students living abroad with their families. Randomly, it was also used as a filming location for the 2009 film An Education starring Carey Mulligan. But my education here was a lot less romantic coming-of-age movie and a bit more gruelling hard work. (I quit the school after a particularly emotionally traumatic time in a notoriously difficult class).
Most dreaded at hoshūkō were the fearfully revered Kanji tests, for which I would be cramming the morning of on the car ride to school, giving me severe motion sickness. Those 8am mornings smelt of headaches, grey winter skies and petrol, swirling together in the backseat of the car to create a cocktail of dread as we drove along the M1.
This school is one of the geographical centres of the Japanese community living in the UK. It is a thriving hub of Japanese culture in London. Never before and never since have I been amongst more biracial people who looked like me. There were thousands of students of all ages, the majority of them had mixed British and Japanese heritage and came from Anglophone homes. Despite making few friends and essentially scraping through every class, here is a place in my life where I feel like I have fully blended in with the crowd. Me and my peers were bilingual, shared exactly the same cultural references, had similar familial dynamics and shared experiences of attending white English schools. I have come to realise how most other people who are not mixed race take this feeling of innate belonging for granted.
There are, of course, many other people in society who are much more discriminated against than myself, and I am extremely privileged to have had this supportive community around me.
But I acknowledge how growing up lacking a sense of belonging, or like I was ever truly at home in one place has had a complex effect on my sense of self. Talking to my peers from hoshūkō and reading others’ experiences online, I sense my own experiences of ambivalence echoed back at me. I’ve been asked if I eat dog for dinner (Welcome Mr Trump, newest recruit of the ‘pet eating’ cult of conspiracy), I have been grossly fetishised as an ‘anime girl’ and I have been publicly and openly mocked by strangers at my workplace as ‘Princess of China’. And countless others have faced far worse.
Despite all this, the greatest privilege in having two places of origin is that I have a doubly rich seam of culture to draw upon. My mixed-race identity has afforded me two sets of eyes and ears with which to experience the world. My mother has taught me lessons, told stories and passed down wisdom that my father has no access to, and vice versa. I have grown to appreciate how I am a bridge between two shores.
I remember hearing my Japanese grandma talk about how she remembers running down the street with her brother as American bombs were being dropped in World War 2. Learning about history from the losing side forces me to take off Britain’s collective rose-tinted glasses that romanticise the ‘victorious’ past of a virtuous and noble nation. This paradigm of pro-Britannica nostalgia and flag-waving patriotism works to sustain the Brexiteer’s wet dream of Rule Britannia!, steering us towards a future that normalises abominable immigration policies like the Rwanda scheme.
Writing in The Guardian two years ago, Diane Abbott wrote, “The system is calibrated for racism. It always was. We know it, and now we know that, behind closed doors, Priti Patel’s Home Office knows it. The dirty secret is no longer secret.” Stemming from Britain’s pre-Windrush legacy of Colonial rule, this country has been seeped in intolerance, rearing its ugly head of intolerance today as demonstrated by this summer’s tsunami of anti-immigration and far-right riots across the UK. Just this October, King Charles has faced pressures to apologise for Britain’s long shadow of slavery, while Downing Street has continued to regurgitate the same old lines that insist ‘we cannot change the past’.
As a mixed-race person, I cannot simply turn my head away from the blinding extent of hostile attitudes, systems, beliefs and prejudices that are still alive and kicking in Britain today. Racial microaggressions and macroaggressions are insidiously embedded into the very fabric of British culture. It’s everywhere, on every level.
Diversity courses through the veins of our cities and streets and energises our culture – it’s what makes Britain, Britain. But this country has a longstanding and deep-running issue with racism. And the reality is that it grossly complicates the concept of feeling at home here for many ethnic minorities.
By Julia Bottoms/Sakurai
– Julia is a Masters student at the University of London, former deputy editor of Quench and Opinion editor for Empoword Journalism. She finds herself writing about quite possibly anything and everything she can get published (let’s be honest) but has a particular interest in post-feminism, drag and investigative journalism.
Grey Bear Culture Magazine 