There was this moment at Berkeley that is somehow stuck in my memory. It was the first week of class, and I was in a Chemistry lab class. We were supposed to partner up with the other person on the same bench to conduct an experiment that I no longer recall, and my partner was an Asian American girl. I remember that I initiated the conversation, probably either to make some introductions, or to talk about the experiment, but the girl looked puzzled. It was only after a little back and forth that I realized that she was having trouble understanding, and didn’t really bother to understand, my Singlish, a monotonous version of English from Singapore peppered with peculiar grammatical structures borrowed from Chinese and Malay.

Growing up in predominantly Chinese Singapore, and being blessed to have received my education in selected schools, my social circle growing up was, however, unfortunately elitist and narrow. I was always an insider, but in that moment in that laboratory, I suddenly felt, for the first time, like an outsider. My inability to speak naturally the language of the country I was in, put me in a situation where I was made to feel like I don’t belong. It was a lousy feeling, and over the next couple of years, efforts to not feel like an outsider ranged from forcing a pretentious but fake American accent, to hanging out only with other international students, to finally settling on a version of English that is still Singlish sounding but grammatically proper.

That sense of being an outsider in the lab is something that I would grapple with for a while, until I realized that the issue bothered me because I did not have a strong sense of an identity. I realized that without a strong sense of who I was, what I wanted was to just feel that I belong, to whatever social environment I may be in.

Born Malaysian, but growing up in Singapore, it is interesting to note the difference between the Chinese in the two countries since the 70’s. The Malaysian Chinese, being the minority and governed by a Malay-dominant political system that systematically puts them at a disadvantage, strove to preserve their language and culture by setting up Chinese schools where the language of instruction is Chinese. The culture was preserved for the Chinese who chose this path, even though the economic sense of this kind of education is often challenged, since graduates from this system often find themselves disadvantaged in the international job market because of their poor command of English. The Singaporean Chinese, on the other hand, had Chinese education ironically eradicated by a Chinese-dominant government, and were to receive an English-instructed education, with Chinese as a mandatory subject, as part of Lee Kuan Yew’s bilingual education policy. This made economic sense, as in one generation, a workforce able to work for foreign companies was created, but something was lost.

I was a product of the latter system, and even as I thank the system for the international mobility it has imparted on me, I was also an identity-less product of the same system. I was a Malaysian who couldn’t call myself Singaporean. I was a Chinese who realized he didn’t know a thing about China when he started to talk to other students from Hong Kong and Taiwan at Berkeley. I was a product of a British education system, as well as heavily influenced by American cultural exports, but was an outsider standing on a foreign land looking through a glass wall on a culture I could not be part of. And when I worked in China, I was a Chinese (华人, huárén) who could not understand the values of those who now seem have the exclusive right to call themselves Chinese (中国人, Zhōngguórén).

And there in started a process where I slowly tried to reconcile all of these. I remember reading “The Journey of Man” by Spencer Wells a number of years back, and was intrigued by his odyssey to prove that all humans could trace some part of their DNA to a common source in Africa. It was a story to convince us that “all of us are the same”, and of our oneness. I was convinced by that story for a number of years, but over time, I have actually come to embrace another story. That is, humans could have had one common source that originated in Africa, but that source could have intermixed with a number of other independent sources around the world. It could be why there is so much diversity around the world.

And as I come to terms with embracing that I am part of that diversity, that my “non-identity” is part of my unique identity, I also find that being an outsider sometimes might not be a bad thing. At least it is part of the process of realizing that there is nothing wrong with diversity, if we can look beyond our own “foreignness”, and connect with each and every person with the intent to be understanding, and to be kind. And that is something I truly enjoy as part of my travels after I’ve found some peace with myself, and something that I hope you can enjoy along with me and Language Domus too, that is the possibility of “see[ing] fully who [we] shall become in foreign, unpossessed places.”