The Halimah Yacob race identity debacle

Hi guys, apa kahbar? I have been following the Halimah Yacob race debacle and felt that the whole issue of race is utterly totally ridiculous, particularly in Singapore. Singaporeans have this notion that you can conveniently stick people into simple categories like Chinese, Malay, Indian - when as Yacob's case demonstrated, you can be mixed but still self-identify with one category over another culturally. So it turns out, Yacob is half-Indian, half-Malay, but she chooses to identify culturally with the Malay community and represents them politically: is that so hard to understand that this is in fact her choice? Her Indian father is a Muslim in any case, thus both parents are of the same religion and she was brought up as a Muslim in Singapore - is it not enough for Singaporeans that she is indeed Singaporean? I feel really bad for her as people are now scrutinizing whether she is 'Malay' enough just because of the ethnicity of her father. All this because of some arbitrary rule about only Malays being allowed to run for the next president of Singapore. Whilst that rule is silly, if Yacob will make an excellent president, who cares what her parents' ethnicity may be? And why the need to shove her into one category or another, as if your little minds can't handle her complex cultural identity? The reaction of Singaporeans splitting hairs over her parents culture, ethnicity and race is equally ridiculous. Things got ugly and racist, particularly on social media. So just to clarify: I'm not a fan of Yacob but I don't think anyone should be subject to this.

It is 2017 - surely we have moved beyond skin colour by now.

This is an issue that is close to my heart because of my experience: you see, I grew up in an ultra-conservative Singaporean Chinese family. I had never gotten along with my parents for a multitude of reasons, so imagine my glee in 2012, when I took a DNA test and found out that I was Eurasian, well, at least somewhat mixed. That blew my father's theory that we were pure Chinese out of the water - oh but being my father, he just went into total denial and claimed that the lab had made a mistake with my DNA test results. I chose not to argue with him, as usual. The irony of course was that the Eurasian blood came from my father's side of the family, not my mother's. Turns out, my father's mother was a beautiful child bride purchased to serve my grandfather's family and they got her at a child bride market in a coastal town in China where many foreigners came to trade. There was a huge red light district near the port and a by product of the whore houses were unwanted mixed-race Eurasian babies who were either sold into servitude much the way my grandmother was, or they grew up to join their mothers as prostitutes. By that token, my grandmother was one of the lucky ones not to have followed in her mother's footsteps. How's that for a colourful history of my family's roots!

My grandmother was bought by a rich Hakka-Chinese family as a bride for my grandfather - this was common practice in those days, arranged marriages were the norm and young people didn't look for love the way they do today. In those bad old days, getting a bride was no different from going to a pet store and picking the cutest puppy, but in my grandfather's case, picking the most beautiful girl from child bride store. People didn't keep paperwork in those days about who sold which girl to which family, those girls were but a commodity to be traded then. As the story goes, it seems that my grandmother caught my grandfather's eye because she was very pretty and stood out from the crowd as the most stunningly beautiful girl in the room. And that's when it clicked: yup, mixed race, white blood, big eyes, a sharper nose, fairer skin - of course she was more beautiful than the other Chinese girls abandoned by their families: they probably had slit eyes, flat noses and dark skin. Mind you, I have my grandmother's rather big nose - my nose is far bigger than the average Chinese nose and I was even teased in primary school for having such a big nose. My sister has my grandmother's big eyes - if you were to combine my nose with her eyes, you would get a distinctly non-Chinese face.

Is the concept of being mixed too hard for some to understand?

Life was both good and bad to my grandmother - yes she married into a rich family with servants, that was extremely lucky but she was sent to Johor with my grandfather prior to WW2 and they survived the Japanese occupation on British Malaya, those were difficult times for everybody rich or poor. Given my grandmother never knew her father and barely ever knew her mother, she may have been half white but culturally, she was totally assimilated into my grandfather's Hakka-Chinese family. Her first language was Hakka, she eventually picked up some Cantonese and Malay after living in Johor for a long time. We don't even know if my grandmother or her mother were even Hakka (somewhat unlikely but we just don't know) to begin with, we don't know anything about my great-grandmother and my grandmother never spoke about her childhood before she was bought by my grandfather's family. So in my grandmother's case, she had chosen to identify with her husband's family's culture rather than her own - it was her choice to do so and no one questioned it. This begs the question: what should define your ethnicity? Should it be your cultural experiences based on the people you identify with, live with, work with and call your own, or should it be something fixed in stone, based on your parents' skin colour or country of origin? I prefer to allow to look at one's cultural experiences because it tells me far more about the individual rather than default to some box we have chosen to shove the individual into, whether or not that individual actually wants to be there. So Yacob wants to identify as Malay and not Indian or mixed - so what? Does it matter?

I remember discussing this issue at my university and one lecturer made a really good analogy. She said, "imagine you are in a wine shop, shopping for wine: what would be your criteria?" The students started with the obvious, "do you want a red wine or a white wine?" Then others piped up, what about rosé, sparkling wines, desert wines and fortified wines (port)? The lecturer then asked, "do you think the bottle matters? Say the colour of the bottle, does it matter?" The students paused - is this a trick question? What the hell does the bottle have to do with it?  The teacher then asked us, "if you were the store manager, how would you categorize the wine to help the customers find the wine they want?" Then we all more or less said the same thing: the wine should be separated into their various categories: nobody comes into the shop looking for a wine that comes in a nice blue bottle, they are more interested in the actual wine that is in the bottle. When presented with a mystery bottle of wine, I would taste it to find out what it is, "ah that's a Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon from the Valle Central region." The conclusion was simple: never judge a book by its cover or in the case of wine, never judge a wine by its bottle. The course was about modern cultural identities and how it is becoming increasingly impossible to make assumptions about a person's cultural identity based on the colour of their skin or appearance. A black American woman like Michelle Obama may look like an African lady from a country like Senegal, but her culture experience and identity would be vastly different. Imagine how liberated I felt, knowing that I was surrounded by people who were then going to get to know me for the person I am, rather than jump to silly conclusions.

Do you just the book by its cover or the wine by the bottle?

But this is what upsets me about Yacob's case: the way people are questioning if she is Malay enough, I think that's ridiculous. Let's take my father for example: he is so painfully, stereotypically Chinese - he is a retired Chinese teacher and has spent his working life teaching thousands of students the language. He doesn't speak English but speaks Mandarin, Hakka, Hokkien and Cantonese fluently. If you met him in Ang Mo Kio today, you simply wouldn't question whether he is Chinese enough as his cultural identity is more Chinese than most Chinese Singaporeans. Yet if you were to look at his ancestry, you would uncover that he has a Eurasian mother and probably a white (or Middle Eastern) maternal grandfather. So if you were to focus on that aspect of his ancestry, you may decide quite accurately that he is Eurasian and not completely Chinese - and you know what? You'd be right (though he'd disagree with you). However, I promise you, you wouldn't anyone more culturally Chinese than my father. Sure he is aware of his late mother's story about being the beautiful child bride purchased at a child bride market (I got all the juicy details from him) - but since his mother chose to cut her ties with her past upon marriage and she raised all her children to be as Hakka and Chinese, that thus became my father's identity. I find all this freaking hilarious of course, as I am the one who is so Westernized I speak French fluently as a second language and Mandarin is a distant third, but according to our DNA composition, my 'Chinese teacher' father who can't speak English is far more white than I am.Yeah, go figure. Oh the irony.

This is why I was so glad I participated in the We R No Race project back in 2012 to dispel the notion of 'racial purity' - that was a very dangerous concept that fascinated Hitler as he tried to create the perfect Aryan race. I had a chance to look at the results of my friends who took part in the test and it was fascinating to see how everyone was a bit mixed - some more than others. So even if most of your cultural influences comes from one country or culture, that may have little correlation to your actual DNA and where your ancestors came from, as in my father's case. This brings to mind the bizarre case of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman in America who tried very hard to pass herself off as black until she was 'exposed' to have white parents. Her case was a most bizarre one - whilst she had white European ancestry, she grew up in an unusual family which included quite a few adopted black siblings so she identified as black with her siblings from a very young age regardless of her skin colour. Most people wouldn't really mind or care what she did in her private life but as she became a civil rights activist, an African studies instructor and the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter in Spokane, it was only then people took an interest in her background. Dolezal is still actively challenging the concept of 'race' as a social construct today and is never far from controversy. Dolezal can easily take a DNA test to prove that she is mixed - everyone has a little bit of African DNA in them, but it may vary person from person. I do wonder what percentage African DNA Dolezal must have before people are satisfied that she can claim to be black? Is 10% enough or would they demand 30%? Who gets to make the rules?

This then raises a different issue - many Singaporeans have pointed out that since Yacob's father is Indian, then she should identify as Indian and not Malay. That's an extremely sexist, patriarchal approach to the issue. Imagine if a child has a Greek father and a Swedish mother, then the child would be considered half-Greek, half Swedish rather than 100% Swedish. It is only in sexist, misogynistic Asian cultures whereby the mother's half of the equation doesn't matter - only the father's cultural heritage counts and that's completely wrong on so many levels. My father is Hakka and my mother is Hokkien - yet somehow, in Singapore, I was classified as Hakka despite the fact that I don't speak a word of Hakka, don't identify as Hakka at all and I actually do speak Hokkien fluently. I would have been happy to identify as half-Hakka half Hokkien ("Hokka" or "Hakkien" I suppose) or even just as Hokkien given that it was the mother tongue I spoke as a young child, when my maternal grandmother took care of me. Par contre, my Hakka relatives lived in Malaysia and I had virtually no contact with them, apart from the awkward once a year Chinese new year gatherings. But oh no, it the ridiculously sexist Chinese culture, my mother's cultural heritage doesn't count because she is a woman and frankly, that aspect of Chinese culture is just bullshit and I don't give a fuck what fucking stupid sexist rules exist in Chinese culture on the issue. No, Limpeh doesn't give a flying fuck: sexism and misogyny are wrong and you can't use culture to justify it.

But more to the point, it also goes to show how ridiculous these arbitrary rules are - such archaic, old fashioned sexist rules have no place in a modern society. For crying out aloud, I am far more Welsh than I am Hakka - at least I speak southern Welsh fluently and every time I meet a fellow Welsh speaker, there's an immediate sense of connection because we are both speakers of a very rare language. There are about half a million Welsh speakers in the world and only about 300,000 of them speak it fluently - then consider the fact that there's northern Welsh and southern Welsh, the two are mutually intelligible but are still as different as say Italian and Spanish are. Allow me to give you an example: the words for grandmother and grandfather in southern Welsh are mamgu and tadcu but in the North they say nain and taid instead. There are far more Northern Welsh speakers than Southern Welsh speakers, so the number of fluent Southern Welsh speakers is estimated to be around 80,000 or so. Hence when I meet another southern Welsh speaker, there's an immediate connection - a sense of kakilang as we say in Hokkien ('one of our own') and we would proceed to have a conversation in Southern Welsh. In contrast, if I sat next to someone on the train speaking Hakka loudly on his mobile phone, I wouldn't even be able to recognize the language. I would be able to identify it as a Chinese dialect, but I wouldn't know which. Heck, the only childhood memories I have of the Hakka language is being totally lost in translation at family gatherings during Chinese new year, being unable to understand a word of what anyone else was saying around me. Yet some Chinese people would insist I am Hakka regardless of me having no connection at all to the language nor the culture. Such labels are just meaningless when you ignore the contents of one's cultural experiences.

In my case, I cannot find a label that suitably describes my cultural identity. I hesitate to use the term 'Chinese' for two reasons: I don't people to think that I am from China and I am quite legitimately Eurasian/mixed. I also hesitate to use the word 'Singaporean' because that would make most people think that I have a pink IC (ie. Singaporean nationality) - which I don't.  The only passport I have today is my British passport. So when I use the term British, that does describe the fact that I'm 41 and have spent second half my life mostly in the UK given that I arrived here at the age of 21, but still that doesn't adequately address the complexities of my cultural identity - even within the UK, people would break that down further: you can be English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish. And even within say the small Welsh community of just 3 million, there are distinct regional identities. That is why I really feel at home in London because it is such a mixed city with people from all over the country and all over the world, coming here in search of better education and work opportunities. There are so many people who are mixed here in so many ways and have very complex ethnic and cultural identities. In a London, people are far more open minded about not having to shove someone into one box like "Malay", "English" or "Chinese" and simply treat everyone as a unique individual - thus I don't have to explain myself.

I suppose the acid test for the case of Halimah Yacob is whether or not the Malay community in Singapore accept her as one of their own: if they do, then she is Malay. That would be a far more meaningful measure of how Malay Yacob is - that is a matter for the Malay community in Singapore to decide and if you're not Malay, then piss off it's none of your business. If we were to contrast that to the case of Rachel Dolezal, the black community clearly have no totally accepted her because there was an element of dishonesty in her way she had presented herself as a member of their community. But in the case of my father, in spite of the fact that he is in fact Eurasian and mixed, the Chinese community in Singapore do not doubt for a moment that he is definitely Chinese and accept him. And in the case of Yacob, there seems little doubt that the Malay community in Singapore do indeed accept her - the people who are splitting hair over whether she is genuinely Malay or Malay enough are bakring up the wrong tree; they really should be questioning why she needed to be Malay even to run in the next presidential election. The ethnic/racial quota makes no sense. Don't hate the player - hate the game and in this case, hate the person(s) who made up the stupid rule in the first place but don't blame Yacob - she is but the victim here. You should all respect her right to define her own ethnic and cultural identity.

Finally, I can see where this kind of assumptions come from: most people would expect say Malay parents to teach her daughter their language, impart their culture and religion to the daughter and that the daughter would simply willingly agree to take part in that process. In most cases, that would a valid assumption to make. But I hope I have demonstrated that this is not always the case: my grandmother never got to know her white father and I doubt my great-grandmother even knew his name. And because I never got along with my parents for a variety of reasons, I actively rejected any attempts on their part to impart their culture to me from a young age. Not that their really tried hard either, they just assumed I'll be culturally as Chinese as them and well, how I actually turned out is another story for another day. No, culture and languages simply don't get passed down from one generation to the next - inter-generation interactions can be very complex and if the generation gap is just too big, well, that's when languages and culture fall right through the gap as my family has demonstrated. It isn't unreasonable to assume that there may be some element of correlation between one's culture and the culture of one's parents, but the correlation isn't always there so we should never assume. So that's it from me on this issue, what do you think about this? Let me know what you think please, thanks for reading.