The events depicted below are based on real experiences I had in Australia from 2020 to 2022. The names of people and places have been removed. Not to protect them, but rather to accommodate the handful of names that have relentlessly built and pushed forward the same issues I am about to address. Think of…
You know when you’re a kid and someone says to you, “I bet I can beat you to that tree!” so you break into a sprint and run like your life depends on it, just to prove them wrong? My sprint towards proving my identity started well before I could tie my shoelaces.
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“Look…
It’s a look of adjustment. Coloured people have felt it since the ancient time, since the long, long ago when the sun stopped shining where white people come from and race was invented. It’s that fraction-of-a-second shift you see in somebody’s face, a twitch of their eyebrows and then a smile-in-recovery when your English is…
My capsule hotel had bigger beds and cheaper rates than anything else in the area, but it didn’t have walls around its showers. So as I stood in the steam of the sento – the communal bath shared by guests – realising what the next week would have in store, I started to believe that…
"You can’t be into surfing because you’re Asian."
Oh yes, you got me. Everything I do must actually fit your racist stereotype of what an Asian girl must do. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know me at all. That I am allowed to be, and am, into surfing. No, I’m just Asian.
Growing up…