The Good Immigrant Read online

  In the days that belonged to my school years, friends gathered in my bedroom to study album covers and eat family-pack bars of chocolate. These were white friends, British in a way I could never be, and outside my bedroom walls were the deeply woven rugs thrown atop each other, the colourful mosaics of Ottoman-styled lamps, paintings of my father regal in a keffiyeh, the beauty of my mother peeking between the folds of a niqab emblazoned in oil paints on a wall. My mother had drawn with some dedication the intricate designs of Ankara buildings. My father had painted in thick strokes the mosques of an Istanbul skyline. Someone mocked that this was a ‘house of chintz’. They all laughed, but if this was a joke I needed the punchline to be explained. I should have asked. I should have made them spell it out, ‘The horse is not sad, it simply has an elongated head. The chicken wanted to be on the opposite side. Your parents’ heritage is strange and cheap-looking to us and doesn’t belong here.’

  This house, unforgiving in its Turkishness, became a place I would, over the years, ask my mother to change. I suggested that the flamboyant walls be painted eggshell or chantilly lace. I proposed that the elaborate light fixtures be replaced. I wanted an English home, whatever that meant. I wanted the decor to be Shimen, not Chimene. After all, my father had left the name Şehitoğlu in documents belonging to North Cyprus wars, where in London he was once again Recep Suleyman for the purpose of keeping civics away from the colony. As far as I saw it, we had adapted so much already, why not take it beyond all recall?

  My parents and I have always known a different language to each other. We have always had different accents. Though love has never been lost in translation, our frustrations of this planet have been. When I was 10, a man who worked with my father called for him on the house phone.

  When I answered he said, ‘Oh, I must have the wrong number. How can a child that speaks like you have a dad that speaks with that ridiculous foreign mess?’

  The mess was not that my father pronounces ‘hatred’ to sound like ‘hatriot’. Rather, that there is a whiteness that exists to be so tone-deaf it cannot make out our words, nor our lamp-fixtures, gods, nor our names – where all are as good as the dog-whistle without the Labrador.

  I think back to that afternoon of my school years with a kind of burning envy. What must it feel like to come into someone else’s domain and believe in one’s right to stand so tall within it. To have confidence that your jokes and your jibes won’t land a fist against your face, a bottle against your neck, a grab of your sleeve or cuff and have you thrown from the building, or the land, or the world. My fear of being taken from this galaxy was in fact so strong that I rushed the pronunciation of my own surname. Where I should have elongated the middle to an ‘eyy’ I instead rounded vowels so that they may be lost to the wind and reappear on the other side as Soloman. After all, Suleyman was the name of a murdered man. Şehitoğlu was the title of our punishment.

  We have learned that our ways make us homeless and fatherless, just as there is a whiteness that is fearless to the point of tenure – unmovable and permanent. We have become chameleons navigating the land, answering to white slave names put upon black nations, searching for directions not to Coaquannock – the ‘grove of tall pines’ – but Philadelphia.

  ‘Change your surname to an English one,’ my mother suggested before I moved to New York earlier in the year, ‘I’m worried they’ll wonder what kind of Muslim your name belongs to.’

  Outside my grandmother’s house between the mountains, the tarmac, and the sky is the street name — Şehit Suleyman Recep Sokak. Some evenings I watched my grandmother’s dark sunken eyes stare into the road name, gaze into the olive groves behind, and the rocks behind that, and the coral skies, and the heavens beyond. This was not a man’s life on a sign post, nor in our name, nor on our skin – rather, his death. How can I say this without sounding like I have not missed my grandmother’s smell, her gravelly cackle, and the Pepsi-filled fridge of her modest home, every single day since she has died – but I was thankful for her passing. I am not a woman who has faith in an afterlife but, should there be one, I hope it is kinder to her than the life she knew. The slab of concrete that marked her grave was quickly replaced with its permanent stone. We took hold of the temporary one, discarded in the overgrowth, and washed the soil from it. There are images we never forget – my father standing in his mother’s grave, my father carrying her tombstone, her name, beneath his arm as he walked with it through the graveyard. My grandfather’s grave remained in the South of the island, which may as well have been another planet. Finally on her tombstone there became a place for us to grieve them both. It read, ‘Emetullah Şehitoğlu, wife of Şehit Suleyman Recep’. How many times and in how many places can we say someone’s name and hope they eventually answer?

  Understand this – we do not carry our fathers’ names without bearing with them their suffering. We do not grow in London, New York, or Berlin with the bravery we are forever told our parents and their parents had. Such courage is almost a fallacy. That they were lionhearted is part truth, part fable, told by the strugglers to soothe our pain, before being given its stamp of approval by the whiteness that does not mind their martyrdom. Our ancestors were terrified. Do not forget that. Allow them the humanness of fear. Forgive me for saying that my name is a burden. Every version of it. How can I offer you the variations – Shimen Suleyman, Chimene Şehitoğlu – without explaining that there are not four words alone that make my title, but thousands? We are simply the martyrs who are too afraid to die.

  I think of my tattoos and the process they have taken over the years. My second draws the words ‘Bismillah ir Rahman ir Raheem’, the prayer my grandmother often used to part ways. The third is the Ottoman tuğra, or signature, of Suleyman the Magnificent. The fourth, high up on my shoulder, is the Turkish flag my father had bled into his arm with a desire that it may either kill him or save him.

  I once stood on the veranda of my grandmother’s house – the smell of burning olive leaves, the tall grass, the pine trees – and wished the street were called something different. From the veranda there was no wind in the telephone wire. It stretched motionless from the street name and far up the road.

  4 Unrest in Cyprus began with the annexing of the island by the British Empire from the Ottomans. Struggles against the British for self-determination shifted from a colonial dispute to an ethnic one between existing Greek and Turkish communities on the island. On December 21st, 1963, Greek authorities launched an offensive against Turkish Cypriots, which continued until a ceasefire was agreed in 1967.

  5 In 1974 the ceasefire was disrupted by Greek Cypriot militia, prompting an intervention from Turkey. Since, The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus has become a sovereign entity with no international recognition beyond Turkey.

  6 The United Nations buffer zone has been in existence since 1974.

  Yellow

  Vera Chok

  I am yellow. I’m a small, yellow-skinned female and one hundred per cent ethnically Chinese. The longer I find myself in this country and the more aware I am of institutional bias, the more I feel the tensions between my Chinese ethnicity, my ex-colony Malaysian homeland, my British citizenship, and my ‘American Dream’ aspirational immigrant outlook.

  I’ve heard that there’s a kind of bird without legs that can only fly and fly, and sleep in the wind when it is tired. The bird only lands once in its life ... that’s when it dies.

  – from Days of Being Wild, a film by Wong Kar-Wai

  In recent years, I’ve been hearing the term ‘East Asian’ rather frequently and I’ve felt uneasy. In the process of writing this piece, I’m realising that while I am technically East Asian in terms of ethnicity and descent, I’m not East Asian in the way some people might want me to be.

  Hold up. ‘East Asian’? What is that, really?

  Wikipedia lists China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Mongolia as East Asia. Mongolia was a surprise to me. When I was writing this piece, no one I asked, bar
one, mentioned Mongolia. Wikipedia also threw up Vietnam, which though not in the correct location, is included in the ‘East Asian cultural sphere’ meaning that it is ‘influenced by Chinese culture’. Hmm. So are parts of Siberia or Manchurian Russia East Asian due to their cultural relations? In business, ‘Asia Pacific’ and ‘ASEAN’7 are other groupings of countries in that general geographical area. Who gets to label what? When I was growing up in Malaysia, I called myself Asian – I came from the continent of Asia, didn’t I?

  They are the real asians. The orientals are not really asian. They’re just chinese.

  – from ‘Why do British people think Indians are Asian?’, Yahoo Answers

  China scares me. I don’t speak any Chinese dialects, am unfamiliar with Chinese customs, and only use chopsticks under duress. My family, located in Malaysia, is part of the vast and widespread Chinese diaspora. I worry that if I ever visit China I would be shamed because of my obvious foreignness. In England, I have sometimes been asked to talk publicly about the sociopolitical landscape of China. As a British-born Chinese woman I know said, ‘China is like Mozambique or Canada – a distant country but one where I happen to look like the locals.’ I worry as much as the next white person about any possible threat to Western civilisation as I know it. In an interview for Kin Podcast, Episode 3 (‘Oh Shit! I’m Not White’) Dr Anna Sulan Masing and I talk about how, until we are reminded and put in our place, there are moments when we forget that we aren’t white, male, or tall – things we grew up regarding as normal and desirable. In England, I am reminded often: I am yellow. Chinese.

  It is Malaysia that I dream of, a land of coconut trees and equatorial heat, with its history of Malay kingdoms and a colonial legacy of Portuguese, Dutch, then British rule. My nostalgia is for the mountains, seas, and smells of this South East Asian country. My mouth is hungry for the shapes and sounds of Malaysia. Yet when I’m in Chinatown, attracted to anything that reminds me of Asia and gawping at the Chineseness of the space, or when ‘East Asianness’ and ‘Chineseness’ is ascribed to me, I find myself wondering if I would feel more at home if I surrendered to this neater role.

  Being Malaysian Chinese does not make for neat explanations. Malaysia is ethnically diverse, with a population of Malay, Chinese, Indian, and indigenous groups. It is a rapidly changing, young country, having gained independence from British rule in 1957. As a child I was fuzzily aware of racial hierarchies. Simplistically, historical events led to the Chinese dominating trade, Malays farming and ruling, and everyone looking down on the Indian labourers and the indigenous population. Sweetly, propaganda in schools and on our screens held Malaysia up as a stable, harmonious, multicultural country. My closest friends weren’t Chinese but when I got closer to the age when positive discrimination (that might help you get into colleges, win scholarships, obtain jobs, buy houses, etc.) might have counted against me, a family member quietly told me to re-examine my position in society. But even though I was beginning to experience the reality of interracial jostling, being a minority in Malaysia I felt nothing like I do now.

  I looked to England as an extension of my home. My parents had been British-educated and my principal was an Irish nun. I read Enid Blyton and dreamed of midnight feasts. I hung out at the British Council – a boyish Chinese girl so sun-browned people thought she was Malay, looked after so thoroughly by a Sri Lankan babysitter she smelled of curry – mouthing along to Shakespeare on VHS cassettes. But as Malaysia grew less British I believed that in order to be the fullest, happiest, most free version of myself, I had to get to English soil.

  In 1914, British subjects on the ship the Komagata Maru were not allowed to disembark in British Columbia because they were not white British subjects. Skin colour versus citizenship. It’s not black and white. When I arrived in England I felt the freedom of going about unseen and unheard, landed, as I had, in the largeness of London. But when I wanted to be heard, people look puzzled despite English being my first language. They still do, despite my not having a Malaysian accent. A yellow foreign body gets in the way.

  Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity.

  – from Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert

  In his much-studied text Orientalism, Edward W. Said talks about Asia or ‘The East’ as being located in our ‘imaginative landscape’. Said says that it is a place set apart ‘geographically, morally, culturally’ and that it is our distance from it that fuels our desire to know it. In the UK, ‘East Asian’ is replacing the word ‘oriental’ as the politically correct way to refer to people from the countries in that region. For many, ‘oriental’ keeps us mired in a romantic space, distant in both time and geography, and filled with exotic sensations. Ask a person on the street where or what ‘the Orient’ is and you’re likely to receive a fuzzy answer. You might find an ‘oriental’ supermarket selling products from Turkey or another stocking Vietnamese sauces. Say ‘East Asia’ and what we might immediately picture is yellow people and lots of them. China, for example, has a population of close to 1.4 billion. That is 24 times as many people as in the UK. Our next gut reaction might be a flash of uneasiness. Do we associate them with cruelty, in war or against their own – think hara-kiri and unwanted baby girls, dictators and sneaky nuclear weaponry? Do we conjure up pictures of terrible smog and an unblinking disregard for the environment? Do we recall George Orwell’s novel 1984, where Eastasia, a fictitious superstate, upholds a political ideology called ‘Death Worship’ or the ‘Obliteration of the Self’? Any of these associations, valid or invalid, might zip through our brains.

  When we talk about race, the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ are familiar. ‘Brown’ too has come into play. I use the word ‘yellow’, offensive as many find it, because this is how I believe I’m seen. I use it because while we can’t often tell what someone’s race is, we do see colour. I use yellow because I’m not black, nor white, nor brown, and I feel I need a little flag to fly – and goodness me, what’s this the band’s playing? Passers-by catcall in Chinese or Japanese or use that well-known Vietnamese call-girl cry, ‘Me love you long time!’ referencing Kubrick’s modern classic Full Metal Jacket. Sometimes, it’s shouted in a Thai accent because we all know about the sexy ladies in Thailand, right? Who really knows the difference between Thai and Vietnamese accents anyway, right?

  Oh! This talk about sex might have you hankering to dissect ‘yellow fever’ and the fetishisation of the exotic female body, but hold your horses. Notice first that Thailand and Vietnam aren’t East Asian countries. Technically, they’re South East Asian countries alongside Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, etc. Uh-oh. There seem to be yellow people who don’t even come from East Asia. For my money, Thailand and Vietnam – we are familiar with their cuisine, right? – are countries with yellow-looking folk. I could include Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Myanmar. How do we feel about including Nepal, Bhutan, or Kazakhstan? Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are yellowish. There’s also rather a lot of tribes indigenous to other countries who look yellow e.g. the Inuit of the Arctic or some Iban subsets on the island of Borneo. Anyone notice this before? Does it matter? I reckon it’s OK, right? We don’t spend much time thinking about the nitty-gritty of these distant countries or the specifics of their faraway people because they don’t reach our daily lives. But. What happens when they’re not so far away?

  The label ‘East Asian’ has been helpful to inch us past the ‘oriental’ tag. It feels like a fresh new way to talk about the yellow folk in the UK today. But the earliest recorded Chinese settlement dates to the early nineteenth century. Yellow folk have made up a large part of the UK demographic and have done so for some time. Wikipedia gives an approximate figure8 of over 1 million British-born East Asians in the UK compared to 1.9 million black British (3%), and 3 million South Asians (7%). East Asians are the third largest ethnic grouping in the UK but are we only now seeing yellow people on British soil due to recen
t shifts in global economics? Yellow folk. So pale and silent.

  Peter Andre’s hit, Mysterious Girl, is in the air…

  Why did an old white English man in a Nottingham pub shuffle up to me and shout, ‘Chinese!’ to the room? Why did a young black man in Brixton murmur Chinese words to me on the street? Are these examples of racial abuse, misguided sexual advances, an assertion of male power over female, or a combination of all of the above?

  In 2013, 2.4 million heterosexual interactions on the Facebook dating app ‘Are You Interested?’ were analysed and showed that ‘all men except Asians9 preferred Asian women’.10 ALL. The fetishisation of the Asian female body is highly problematic. Sexual submissiveness, sexual voracity, and voicelessness is a particularly tricky and damning combination. When I googled ‘Asian babes in films’ (sorry!), IMDb – the key database for film and television – threw up a list called, ‘Asian women White men romance movies’. The Asian women in these films worked very hard to keep their white boyfriend, mostly to no avail, and many of them died as a consequence. Googling the less provocative phrase, ‘Asian women in films’ still gave me the list ‘Asian American stereotypes in Hollywood movies’. In instances where I’ve seen Asian women in traditional,11 hard-core pornographic films produced by Western and Japanese companies, they are the opposite of silent. They are screaming either due to extreme pleasure or extreme pain via violence. Violation scenarios are common.