Colonisation: The Greatest Impostor
As a woman of Vietnamese and Chinese descent, I’ve never felt I belong here in New Zealand, the land I was born in. The land that sent their soldiers to fight in my country to colonise our people. Growing up, I worshipped blonde wavy hair, white bread sandwiches over rice, and dishwashers because mine was used to store plastic takeaway boxes. Like many other Asian kids, I feared speaking my native tongue in front of my classmates. Giving myself another reason to be ‘different’ in this sea of white… on top of already looking different... would put a target on my back. It was always evident that conformity somehow equated to safety in Aotearoa.
In my first year of high school, I started to welcome this side of me I had tried to hide for a long time. I was in maths class and my teacher was reading out the roll.
A string of James's, Rebecca’s and Holly’s said before me. “Celine,”
“Yes, Miss,”
“Celine, are you Vietnamese? I love Vietnamese food, I really do…” Another student chimed in, “Me too!”
Like music to my ears, a choir began to sing a song where all the lyrics were poorly-pronounced dishes from my childhood. I went home, looked into the mirror, and smiled at the yellow skin and slanted eyes. At that time, my young self mistook my classmate’s love for phở as an acceptance of my people. Boy, was I wrong.
I’m nineteen now, and although I was born into a land that prides itself on its melting pot of cultures, we are still stirred into the same ideal. Colonisation is the greatest imposter and has disguised itself for many years behind the facade of equal progress. It is masked behind Chinese New Year decorations at the mall and in the surplus of Asian immigration to New Zealand, but I’ve learnt to look closer.
White men call themselves cultured because I was their one-night stand. People give themselves an entitlement to say ‘chink’ when they have a friend who is Asian. They don’t know it originates from the sound of hammering together the American railroads, the railroads my ancestors worked on as slaves. Fashion Nova sells my traditional clothing with half the fabric and half the decency. They don’t know that it’s made by the women whose culture they are appropriating, women who don’t make enough to afford the clothing they make. I am tired of my culture being your culture, your fetish. I’m tired of your ignorance.
Even my history is being colonised. America has sewn the Vietnam war into their history and not mine. How come the world never talks about the fight in Vietnam, a country they had no right to be in? A war that killed 58,000 of theirs and 2,000,000 of ours, yet the latter is always forgotten. Why doesn't the world speak about how my people became refugees in their own country? My heritage doesn’t run through my blood without acknowledging that it carries the semen of white men. Vietnam’s most devastating years as a nation are still being used as some joke to describe one’s hardship, but there is nothing funny about what my family went through. My family and many others in Vietnam still suffer from Agent Orange, a herbicide the Americans sprayed across our country, causing deformity, lung cancer, and many more horrendous diseases. We still live in the rubble of a mess we didn’t make.
My father was a refugee because of the Vietnam War, and as much as he loves New Zealand, he’d simply found himself in the country of those that prompted his escape in the first place.
Colonisation has stripped many Asian nations of their history and culture. During the early 20th century, the American colonisation of the Philippines called for widespread indoctrination of the English language. Today, in the country’s capital of Manila, the main language of Tagalog has evolved into ‘Tag-lish’, the integration of English so considerable that their main language has been moulded to fit Western standards. For example, call centres worldwide outsource to the Philippines to take advantage of cheap labour for moderate English fluency. In Bali, Indonesia, the extent of gentrification has stripped the island of much of its culture and heritage. Tourists have moulded Bali so extensively that today, Bali is no longer for the locals but a transformed ‘paradise’ for outsiders, who, without realising it, are progressively uprooting all of the local cultures.
For the longest time, I have been ignorant of the deterioration of my own culture. As a new Chinatown is being built in my area, another Chinese town is being dismantled, transformed, and colonised. Replacing its ancient bricks with new white tiles attracts tourists to a place familiar enough that they don’t have to acclimate. I had longed to fit in for so much of my youth that I only bought clothes from the shops that everyone else did, forgetting that, like the clothes on my back, parts of me are also ‘Made in China’, which will never change.
Over the years, I’ve started to feel I’ve been too complacent. I’ve bleached my skin too often and failed to retain my Chinese. Now I realise that my ancestors fought too hard for me to watch the world undo their progress. So I began to work to be curious and furious because those who came before me weren’t allowed to be.
