Asian Indigenous Relations

Dear Ty,

It was so nice meeting you last year. How fitting it is that we met each other in the context of two research projects aptly named “Transnationally Indigenous”¹ and “Indigeneity in a Global Context”²?

Who would’ve thought that a member of We Wai Kai First Nation and a half Bidayuh-half Hakka girl from Ottawa would ever meet and connect over issues of identity, belonging, and Indigeneity? I guess life has a funny way of placing people in your path when you least expect it, and most need it.

I have to say, meeting you, a scholar interested in Asian-Indigenous Relationalities, was baffling to me. When I wrote my Master’s thesis in 2019, I felt quite alone in writing about the connection between settlers of colour and Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. Before I chose where to pursue my Master’s degree, I had spoken with a few professors in a number of universities and was asked with disdain, “Why would you ever research this topic? You’re trying to combine two fields that have nothing to do with each other.” There were many moments of doubt about the significance and purpose of my research.

Yet, here we are 5 years later, and I’m just starting to meet other people who are interested in these intersections. It means more than I can express.

I read your “I, the Gutless Indian”³ article. It’s truly a beautiful piece. Thank you for sharing parts of yourself that we often keep hidden away. I think it takes a lot of courage to put something out there for the world to respond to. 

There are so many things that I will never be able to fully understand about your experience. 

The collective trauma of residential schools/efforts to “educate” and “civilize” that introduced the (false) concept of “Indigenous deficiency” that you write about. The structural, measured, intentional history of assimilationist policies in this country intended to divide and render people inferior. The painful separation from homelands due to settler colonialism. 

While there is so much difference in our experiences, there is also so much that is similar.

You talked about an “Indigeneity that is intellectualized and approximated.”⁴ I struggle with this one so deeply too. 

Because I never learned my mom’s language, most of my knowledge of Bidayuh traditions and customs has come from English-language books and articles I’ve been able to find over the years, or through WhatsApp messages with my aunts. I also only started to learn more about our culture when I entered university and had opportunities to explore it in my Indigenous Studies classes. I’m so grateful I’ve been able to speak with my aunts and grandparents about Bidayuh culture. But I still feel like an imposter.

I struggle with the shame of never having lived in my homelands and feel fraudulent writing about Bidayuh customs and traditions. Who am I to write about this? Is my identity even valid if it’s only been developed in an ivory tower test tube?

And yet, I think about white academics who parachute into an “exotic” community and so easily claim to be an expert. I think about the number of American, Australian, British men I met at Oxford who were self-professed “experts on China”. Why can’t I feel that confident? I am afraid that I might never reach that level of confidence.

You talked about how “…validation was only ever sought through transmutation into a good little white boy” and that you “do not correct people when they call [you] a white man.” Funny how comparing ourselves to whiteness is a universal learned habit. 

I cringe thinking about how badly I wished I could pass as white. I remember watching Taylor Swift music videos on Yahoo! Music⁵, realizing that all of the girls who fell in love were blonde or brunette with blue or green eyes. Because of my last name and inescapable physical appearance, there was no way I could pass as anything other than Asian. 

Most people assumed that I was Chinese. When I was a child, I became acutely aware that people had stereotypes and prejudices about “Chinese people”. The pulling of the eyelids, the “ching-chong” chant, the claims that Chinese food smelled bad (which is so absurd looking back. I used to beg my mom for Lunchables instead of bringing any food to school that we actually ate at home. We really thought Lunchables were the peak of the food market?!).  

I absolutely hated the idea that someone thought they knew who I was based on what I looked like. I spent so much of my childhood and youth making my identity anything-but-Chinese. This attempt to break out of stereotypes made me hide and reject the fact that my dad was Hakka, who actually are a Chinese sub-ethnic group. One of the most significant memories is when my (white, male) grade 7 religion teacher told me I was Chinese, even after I had corrected him that my parents were from Malaysia. He told me, in front of the class, that all Malaysians were actually Chinese, because he had in fact visited Malaysia before. ⁶

It became very convenient to tell people I was Malaysian, because they often had no idea where or what that was, and I could control the narrative. It’s now interesting to reflect on the fact that the internalized shame of my Chinese side made me relate a lot more to my Bidayuh side. 

I feel embarrassed that my pride in Indigeneity came at the cost of suppressing other parts of myself. 

I have finally come to fully accept the unique combination of heritages I have. I used to feel that I couldn’t claim either identity because I wasn’t enough of either of them. It’s a lonely space to be in. Other than my brother, there are not many other half-Hakka, half-Bidayuh, second generation Canadians who grew up in South Ottawa. 

Thanks to a wonderful Malaysian psychotherapist, I learned that these notions of what it means to be a “real” Hakka person, or a “real” Bidayuh person that I kept holding myself to and being constantly disappointed that I wasn’t meeting, were all fabricated. Cultures change and evolve every generation. People choose to take some parts of their culture and leave others. People are shaped by new environments and new relationships with other cultures. There just isn’t an answer to the question of how I become a “real” Hakka or Bidayuh person. And I need to stop thinking there is.

You so beautifully say that “[o]vercoming gutlessness involves a radical acceptance of [your] life as an Indigenous one.”⁷ My journey of overcoming gutlessness involves a radical acceptance of my life as one that is shaped by both my Hakka and Bidayuh heritage, my experience as a child of immigrants, and my experience as a person of colour who benefits from settler colonialism in this country. A radical acceptance that my life involves many intricacies, contradictions and confusion. I’m just starting to find the beauty in the messiness.

The last thing I’ll mention is your discussion of never having visited your homelands. According to Google Maps, you live 230 km from your Nation. I live 12, 433 km from mine. Funny how distance doesn’t seem to matter with this kind of heartache. You talk about living a double consciousness that has “bred an obsession with identity and authenticity.”⁸ I chuckle ironically to myself because I think this obsession is precisely what connects us so deeply.

P.S. I learned what the “bildungsroman” term means, thank to you. What are you, an English lit major?!