Mushy Carrots

I am a good immigrant girl.

We only ever spoke English in my family. It is my first and only language. I understand fragments of my mother tongue, but the words twist and turn forming shapes like the shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, obscure and difficult to understand but beautiful in their own right. If you speak slowly enough, I might get the gist of what you are saying.

It was part of my parent’s integration strategy, I suppose. I’m not sure if they thought about it very much; although, to me it felt like a deliberate decision. As Malaysians, my parents were educated in English. However, they were fluent in other languages.

I know speaking English helped me in many ways during my childhood. I was never bullied for having a “funny” accent. I learned to read and write quickly and efficiently. There was no “confusion” brought on by me speaking one language at home and one at school. I learned fast. My parent’s strategy helped me become a “good immigrant,” someone digestible to the masses.

“Bad immigrants” are the kind who club together speaking their own language, inscrutable to outsiders. They wear “funny” clothes and do “strange” things. Their behaviour invites comments about “forming ghettoes.” People ask, “Why did they come here anyway, if they don’t want to assimilate?”

“Good immigrants” know better. We know that mother tongues and cultural conduct are reserved for private spaces, where they don’t invite accusation and disdain. Good immigrants are forever striving not to be bad immigrants, even if it means losing little pieces of who we are, perhaps especially if it means losing little pieces of who we are.

I only felt the sense of loss at my lack of language as I grew older. Maybe it was when I hit high school, and was no longer the only Asian kid in the schoolyard. I could hear the musical tones of the languages the other immigrants spoke. I didn’t have that. I couldn’t revert to a tongue that belonged to me and my family. All I had was English. It marked me as different from the other Indian kids who had come later and left behind friends and schools. Most of them spoke Hindi.

I was one of those immigrant kids that everyone thinks is trying to become white. They thought I was the type that would scrub the brown from my skin if I could, just to make life a little bit easier. They didn’t know that speaking English wasn’t a choice for me. They didn’t know that speaking English was all I had.

My coffee coloured skin and strange name that tangled on the tongues of teachers forever marked me as other, despite my best efforts. I tried so hard to be like everyone else. I remember clearly thinking that the minute I turned 18, I would change my name to something like Sarah, a nice wholesome white girl name that no one would pause at in horror when trying to read it aloud. I would choose an easy name.

I am still a safe immigrant girl. Almost white, but not quite.

I found my friends in people at the margins, people who found their own cultures and communities suffocating for whatever reason—be they brown, yellow or white. We bonded over our many similarities, the chief of which was the ways in which we were all different.

We moved a lot when I was a child, but for a while I went to a day care centre next to our house. I enjoyed the teachers and students, but the food was so strange to me. Carrots and other vegetables boiled to oblivion with barely any salt and certainly no spice. I hated the soggy mush, and refused to eat it. It was so alien compared to the rice dishes and curries I ate at home. I think this is the first memory I have of being an outsider. I would watch the other children eating and wonder if there was something wrong with my tongue. It is a feeling that has never really left me. While I don’t want to change my name to Sarah or bleach the brown from my skin anymore, it is hard not to feel that I will never be an insider.

As an immigrant, it is important to negotiate the muddy waters of being an outsider in ways that will keep me safe.