This article is a part of the Cultural Confusion series. Read more here.

A Miniature Nomad

By the time I arrived at my all-girls high school in London at the age of eleven, I was already onto my eighth school. Through a combination of parental relocation, emigration/ immigration, and moving house between the ages of six and eleven, I was something of a miniature nomad.

I would arrive in an alien classroom, scan it, and pick out my henchmen and companions-in-mischief.

But before long I would be torn from their familiar bosoms and forced to start the friendship-making process anew. I tried to protest loudly but in vain. My parents had decided I wasn’t learning English fast enough in my first school; the school around the corner was better than the one I was already at; we were moving, so no, I couldn’t stay however much I loved learning the steel drums (the epitome of cool to a piano-reared child).

And so I learnt to make friends very quickly. I got very good at arriving in an unfamiliar place and immediately working out the essence of each school, each clique, each person. It helped that I was naturally curious. I had a knack for intuiting what someone was about and so had a strong antenna for whom I liked and to whom I was indifferent.

Culture—a Battleground with the Parents

I don’t recall feeling outside English culture growing up, even when I had just arrived in London not speaking a word except “hello” (1) and had to mime to play with my day-old friends.

It didn’t phase me that all my schools were mostly white. Culture, ethnicity, and background never seemed that important when making friends.

What I cared about most was whether I took to someone’s character—that indefinable, mysterious thing called chemistry, where one hour turns into three, and three turns into a day.

The cultural disconnect I felt was mostly at home – an indoors-outdoors tension.

My parents hoped that I would remain Chinese and each negative foreign trait they detected was met with dismay and warnings of imminent “moral decline.”

I was frustrated by what I saw in all of my eight-year-old wisdom, as “Chinese” close-mindedness. I, on the other hand, fancied myself a cosmopolitan and relished being able to choose which bits of each culture I wanted to throw into my personal pick-and-mix.

However, I’m painting an incomplete picture. Despite their keenness that I not lose my mother culture, my parents also recognized and admired the qualities of the English: their politeness, level-headedness, sense of fair play, honor, and the good old “stiff upper lip” get-on-with-it attitude to life. Incidentally, not that dissimilar to Chinese pragmatism.

An Exotic Brit and a Chinese Foreigner

A few years after we moved to England, my parents befriended an old-fashioned couple in their seventies who were full of joie de vivre. Even after a long day of hosting my parents and I (a rambunctious child who liked to kidnap sleeping cats and drag them off for walks) Grandma Meryl and Grandpa Ronald remained just as good-natured, warm, and serene as they had been upon our arrival. Consciously or not, I tried to develop these extolled English virtues.

I became a shape-shifter: English at school except when it suited me to be “exotic”; Chinese at home except when it suited me to be “foreign.”

I was constantly switching back and forth between two cultures and languages. People who only met the English me had no idea I argued with my parents in Mandarin but reverted to English if I became really annoyed. My lack of combative Chinese and mutant expletives would elicit hoots of laughter from my parents, completely undermining my dignified pique.

Those who only saw the Chinese me knew little of my parallel world of Jane Austen and adopted English grandparents.

Or the devoted drawings I used to present with embarrassing regularity to two of my early teachers: one a young woman with almost translucent blonde eyelashes and masses of curls; the other a cultured, slightly bohemian headmistress, both of whom were sweet enough to respond encouragingly to my cringeworthy big sister adoration.

At Home Anywhere

Naively, perhaps, it didn’t occur to me that I was beyond “Englishness” so keen was I to immerse myself in this new world, despite being warned by my family that the world didn’t see me as English and never would. Right as they turned out to be about many things, in this, however, they didn’t quite hit the mark.

Whenever I try to claim that I’m Chinese thank you very much, English friends shriek that I’m more English than they. In trying to enter their spirit, I’ve gone above and beyond.

To my American friends, I’m as English as rain and tea. They strongly suspect that I inhabit some sort of hybrid Mary Poppins-Downtonesque-Dickensian world, whereas English people detect in me a dollop of unabashed “American” enthusiasm. Sometimes the Chinese whimsically disown me for “looking Korean,” but more often than not, they do claim me as one of their own. Speaking like a native and liking sick-bed food helps (2). This proves that I’m a real Chinese person with true Chinese tastes, as opposed to that most abhorrent of creatures, a “banana” (yellow on the outside, white on the inside)—something I’ve been carelessly labeled on occasion.

The saying that “you hold all your ages within you” is exactly how I feel. Somewhere in me there is Englishness, Chineseness, and Americanness, swirled into a unique cultural cocktail.

In having to adapt constantly as a child I’m sure I could be happy in any country—the proverbial snail who carries his house on his back. However, I‘m content with my collage of cultures. I’m at home in all three places, but while I’m in one, I also miss the other two. If I could clone myself, I would put one of me in each.

Notes

1. Although a marvelous word, from which a hundred possibilities can spring, not a very helpful one when asking for the bathroom on my first day of school.

2. A past boyfriend, more au fait with international cuisine than most, when fed one of these wonders promptly spat it back out and declared it the worst tasting food” on this planet. The culprit was fermented tofu curd.

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By Zhu Song