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Identity and Belonging

1) The author grew up visiting family in Australia at least once or twice a year from childhood, which made Australia feel like home despite living in Malaysia. 2) When the author went to boarding school in Australia at age 16, they realized how different their experience of Australia was from living there permanently and being surrounded by unfamiliar faces rather than family. 3) After realizing how physically different they appeared from their half-Australian cousins, the author had a crisis of identity but was reassured by their cousin that they were still family and Australian. The author embraced a new identity of being Malaysian-Australian.

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96 views

Identity and Belonging

1) The author grew up visiting family in Australia at least once or twice a year from childhood, which made Australia feel like home despite living in Malaysia. 2) When the author went to boarding school in Australia at age 16, they realized how different their experience of Australia was from living there permanently and being surrounded by unfamiliar faces rather than family. 3) After realizing how physically different they appeared from their half-Australian cousins, the author had a crisis of identity but was reassured by their cousin that they were still family and Australian. The author embraced a new identity of being Malaysian-Australian.

Uploaded by

1lin
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Juanlin Yip

The search to discover who we are is one of lifes greatest challenges. Come one! Lets go out and play! As fast as our legs could take us, we ran out of the house, it felt like we had the feeling of being in lockdown for hours. The family backyard was our fantasy land, it was where our dreams were made with no rules or boundaries. My cousins and I, nothing could separate us, we always gave our parents the worst nightmare when we had to leave. That was years back when our innocence was so pure. I was born in Melbourne, raised in Malaysia. As long as I could remember since my childhood, without fail each year my family and I would make at least a trip or two back to Melbourne. Unlike most overseas Asian families who travel back to Asia for Chinese New Year and celebrate reunion dinner with their families, we would fly down to Melbourne, after all that was where most of our family is. Our stays would be from two weeks or stretched to a month. Back then to me, those trips felt like homecoming. It may seem extremely strange as I had never properly lived in Australia in my life before besides the first year I was born, however the joy I get whenever I see the excited faces of my cousins greeting me at the airport, it sends sparks of energy into my veins that I could even jump of the baggage trolley when it was in moving high speed motion. Australia felt like home because of all those familiar faces, faces that I would never be able to see in Malaysia. They were my family and to me, family means home. As a kid I never really saw the difference between my cousins and I, neither did they. We came from a hybrid family of many races, half-Greek, half-French, half-Malay and of course pure Malaysian-Chinese like me. To us, all that matters was who won the game of catch in the backyard, who ate the most easter eggs, who lit the most candles in the dark and the list goes on. What made us felt a sense of belonging together, besides the fact that we were related through our mothers, was the fact that we were Australian. My cousins never said Welcome to Australia! whenever we arrived but a big Welcome back! with a hug. My half-Greek cousin AJ, the closest I was to among my cousins always reminded me who I am, Youre Australian Juanlin, you should be proud! It was something there that made me proud for who I was. When I turned sixteen, my trip back to Australia altered to a whole new level. This time it was no longer a two week trip back home, it was for a whole two and a half months in BOARDING SCHOOL. I started to realize that this was going to be something different, the Australia I knew and grew up in would never be the same. I was not returning to see my cousins, I would be away from my parents and my brother, I would be living in a school with a bunch of unfamiliar faces. The sense of my home and belonging began to change and I started to miss Malaysia. In boarding school, I realized that the Australian-ness AJ had instilled in me since we were young was all a lie. Everything that exit my mouth was Malaysian, the strong accent gave away my real identity. I received strange looks from my peers whenever I mentioned the fact that I was actually born in Australia. My identity of being Australian slowly began to crumble, comparing myself to the true-blue-aussies I realized that I was in fact very different. I was brought up stereotypically Asian, being quiet, low confidence and extremely conservative views on the world. Given the extra fact that my cousins were mostly boys, no one could give me the exact tips on how to survive in a girls boarding

Juanlin Yip

school, I was facing a culture shock in my supposed home country. Being Asian, I naturally blended in better with the my Asian peers, especially if they were Malaysian, somehow within us we had a connection. I slowly to begin to refer myself as a Malaysian and I spoke my accent with pride. At church on the weekends which I spent with my aunt, my cousins and I would reunite as though weve been away for long months. We would hang around together and ramble on about our lives and the good times we had. Suddenly out of the blue one day as I glanced at ourselves in the mirror and church, I realized our differences. I was Asian, I was Chinese, I was not half-Greek nor half-French like my cousins, I had the darker skin, darker hair, darker everything. My heart sank, I suddenly had the feeling of being not belonged, I felt out of place, I was different from my cousins. A friendly stranger then came up to us and asked who I was and introduced himself. My cousin AJ then puts his arms on my shoulders like we always did when we were younger and said, This is Juanlin. Shes our cousin and shes Australian. Something in my heart lifted, the light shining through the stained glass seemed to glow even brighter, I extended my hand out and shook the kind strangers hand. I built myself a new identity, I am Malaysian-Australian. Just like those AfricanAmericans, I will embrace those two places that Ive come from. Australian born but Malaysian raised, that is who I am. My family is where I belong and there is nothing changing that.

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