What does home mean to you, when you’ve been brought up in a foreign land all your life with respect to all the rest of your blood-related relatives, with absolutely no family here except your parents, and utilising an entirely different primary language in your daily life?
Going back to China has become more of an emotional burden over the years, the more as I mature and grow up. My uncles and aunts ask me if I have anything against Chinese culture, if I have any prejudice against their government and citizens, if I would ever consider migrating into China again after my parents migrated out of China more than 20 years ago. I am an outsider in my own family, I don’t relate to their daily conversation topics, I am unfamiliar with their system of life, I don’t understand local trends and I can’t hold a decent conversation with a local just because our communication stops right there when I am inevitably asked about my school, education, and aspirations.
I am verbally eloquent in Mandarin Chinese, I understand the dialects that my aunts use, my accent is on point and there is nothing about me on the physical exterior, as far as looks and language are concerned that gives me away as an absolute foreigner in my supposed homeland. But that is as Chinese as I am; skin-deep, barely penetrating any worthy conversation topic because once the conversation exceeds 30 seconds, I am bound to give myself away with my ridiculous lack of supposed obvious knowledge of the Chinese system. I am 18 years old and University-bound, and one of the most popular questions the locals like to ask youths my age is What University do you want to go to? How’s your gaokao results? What major do you want to take? Which city are you from? Of course, I have nothing to answer. It makes me feel incredibly lousy when I get asked these questions because my parents don’t like it when I tell the locals that I am not a local. It’s like betraying your own family by not admitting you’re one of them, yet at the same time, you must then act like a complete idiot when you cannot answer the questions and then watch in silent horror as your interlocutor view you with astonishment as you reply the most awkward answers.
It makes me feel so lost. I am Singaporean at heart, through and through. I have held, and am still holding, a Singapore passport since birth – my pink IC, my Singapore birth certificate all scream my nationality that is guarded by the law. I was born and raised here, taught in English which I was initially very poor at in my early life stages since I spoke all Chinese at home, and completed 12 years of education all the way from primary to pre-tertiary here. And very soon, I will be enrolling in tertiary education, which will probably also be in Singapore. English is a language I am so familiar with, a language that although I do not have as perfect an accent in as compared to my Chinese accent, is a language I am comfortable with dealing on a daily basis, have no struggle reading, writing, speaking or listening to it. I struggle to read long chunks of Chinese texts at times, just because in my mind I am translating it into English. Perhaps, I am a disappointment to my family in terms of struggling with the language that built my empire.
I have no friends in China, only relatives. I see the schoolchildren with their friends after school, only to realise that firstly I must appear weird because I am not attending school when I look like I am supposed to, and secondly because I am with my parents and not with anyone of a similar age group. I can’t bring myself to use Chinese social websites, I don’t understand the popular terms used by the youths, and all the social media that I’m familiar with – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat are all conveniently blocked by the great firewall of China. And it doesn’t help that sometimes my VPN is slower than my grandmother can walk.
We like to talk about home, where we belong, where our loyalty is. We like to know that we are in a place where we feel we belong, where there are people who will support us, where the environment is familiar and warm. We like to know that everyone lives in harmony and share a common language with a common topic of conversation. We like to know that our family is close to us, both physically and at heart.
But I, I am not so sure about the final point. Will family and home ever become synonymous? Am I truly home when I am in China with my relatives; yet completely dumb to the surroundings, or am I home in Singapore where I am thousands of miles away from family but at a place where my heart and body feel welcomed? When going back to China now means visiting the grave sites of my paternal grandparents – don’t you bury the dead where they feel the most comfortable at?
I have an identity crisis.
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