You know my life right, I think. I was born in Liverpool, and until I went to Oxford, have spent all my life living close by. And it's all kind of complicated. Because, well, yes, I grew up in a British city, went to a British school, and had British friends. But that's not all it is. My parents came to this country three years before I was born - they're Indian in every sense, they grew up in India, both got their medical degrees from Indian universities, and came to this country expecting to stay only a couple of years.
And even apart from my family, I'm Indian because I have brown skin, I'm a Hindu, and I'm always a tiny bit different. I know it sounds trivial, but things like washing your dishes differently pile up as a huge stack of difference, and when you're in school, all you want to do is conform and this sort of thing rankles. Then comes Christmas - and my first Christmas, the year I started school, was a real, bizarre culture shock. So you can't think of yourself as British, because you're not. You're not-white in a white-dominated culture, and you can't feel quite safe.
I didn't start thinking of myself as British until I was an adult. I mean, I struggled at school but I'm a fairly-well assimilated adult, and perhaps washing my dishes differently doesn't matter so much now. I was a lot more angsty about it until just recently, when I got my dual citizenship papers. Which also sound like they shouldn't matter as much as all that, but they really did, because it dawned on me that there was now no sense in which I was not British and Indian - mentally, religiously, linguistically, by birth and now, legally. So that's the answer. I exist as part and both and in between both cultures.
"English", though, is not something I endorse - it's contingent. (If I'd been born three weeks earlier, I'd have been born in Scotland.) And besides, my name (which is actually a use-name) is Scottish, too. I used to live on the Welsh border. Besides, I've always thought that to assert such provincial identity, people generally refer to their parents being Scottish/Welsh/Irish, etc., and I certainly don't fit in with that definition.
In sum, I think this has to be experienced to be really understood. It's a peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance that I suppose I wouldn't wish on anyone, but still, I occasionally kind of like being a hyphenated person. Does that answer what you wanted to know?
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2007-05-12 01:30 pm (UTC)And even apart from my family, I'm Indian because I have brown skin, I'm a Hindu, and I'm always a tiny bit different. I know it sounds trivial, but things like washing your dishes differently pile up as a huge stack of difference, and when you're in school, all you want to do is conform and this sort of thing rankles. Then comes Christmas - and my first Christmas, the year I started school, was a real, bizarre culture shock. So you can't think of yourself as British, because you're not. You're not-white in a white-dominated culture, and you can't feel quite safe.
I didn't start thinking of myself as British until I was an adult. I mean, I struggled at school but I'm a fairly-well assimilated adult, and perhaps washing my dishes differently doesn't matter so much now. I was a lot more angsty about it until just recently, when I got my dual citizenship papers. Which also sound like they shouldn't matter as much as all that, but they really did, because it dawned on me that there was now no sense in which I was not British and Indian - mentally, religiously, linguistically, by birth and now, legally. So that's the answer. I exist as part and both and in between both cultures.
"English", though, is not something I endorse - it's contingent. (If I'd been born three weeks earlier, I'd have been born in Scotland.) And besides, my name (which is actually a use-name) is Scottish, too. I used to live on the Welsh border. Besides, I've always thought that to assert such provincial identity, people generally refer to their parents being Scottish/Welsh/Irish, etc., and I certainly don't fit in with that definition.
In sum, I think this has to be experienced to be really understood. It's a peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance that I suppose I wouldn't wish on anyone, but still, I occasionally kind of like being a hyphenated person. Does that answer what you wanted to know?