I am here now, standing on two sides of a line.

One foot rooted firmly in the land of race. The other foot sinking down the ever-changing waters of culture.  Everyday I see things through two different sets of eyes. Everyday I hear life in two different languages. Everyday I feel the pressure of two different worlds.

When I was a little girl, I moved from the tiny country of Singapore, jam packed with people who all looked like me, to the islands of New Zealand, where I was lucky to find one face that bore some semblance to my own.  Back then anyway.

Suddenly, I could here the way I spoke.

‘Tree’ became ‘three’.

‘Pain!’ became ‘ow!’. 

‘Wed-nes-day’ became ‘Wednesday’.

My life was tossed upside down, dropping me from the cushions of my family onto a foreign land where my face collided into the grass, where blades of strangers stared straight back at me. For the first time in my life, I was called an alien. Amongst others things.

Suddenly I could see that I was different from other people. I could see that I was a minority, a tiny grain of rice surrounded by giant loaves of bread.

I was so scared.

Everything I said, did, wanted, was questioned. And not just by everyone else. But mostly by myself. I didn’t know what was right anymore. My standards imploded on itself and exploded into hundreds of tangents, so fast that my eyes couldn’t follow. On that first day of school, my eyes watered, and my mouth screamed. I wanted to go home.

But that was it. I was already there. That land that I crashed onto was to be my home. I just hadn’t built the house yet.

So I got to work. It started with my family. They are the soil that roots my house firmly in the ground. My friends are the foundations of my home that everything else rests upon. My life are the walls, and my dreams and experiences are the splashes of paint that colour it. My soul is my bed, my drawer, my diary, my phone, things that are personal, things that hide my deepest secrets, things that change over time. And God is my roof, the roof that I look at every night before I fall asleep, that keeps me dry from the rain, and shades me from the heat of the sun.

That’s my house. My home. Still under construction.

Then I grew up a little more. I was happy, content with my new home. I forgot about my many names. I embraced both my culture and race. Or did my childish eyes simply blunt the inevitable daggers of stereotypes? I grew and grew until suddenly, my walls were being painted with colours I didn’t want. I could only see red, blue, yellow. But I wanted fluorescent pink, bright orange, Apple green.

See being Asian meant that I was going to go college. I was going to become a doctor, a lawyer, a accountant, or an engineer. I was going to be a bad driver.

Knives were pinning me against a chart, trapping me on a certain point where my demographic ‘belonged’. To this day, I am being pushed and shoved and cornered. And so are you.

Everyday, I believe we all have different daggers thrown at us, cutting and slicing us down until soon, we all end up looking the same. The fight is endless. It’s gets harder and harder, but we can’t let ourselves be belittled into a simple statistic. We have to take these hits, pull the daggers out and throw them back at the world. Every time we throw a dagger back, we carve new paths for our children, who will themselves face their own wars.

And when you see people suffering that war, think of them as a slab of uncooked dough, cut and chopped into certain shapes and sizes by different people who think they know what they should be. When you put them into the flames of the oven, they are going to rise and grow into something else entirely.

The heat of the real world will inflate their dreams and aspirations, create reactions within themselves that they cannot control, but don’t leave them there too long. Leave them there too long, and the heat becomes too much that they end up burnt.

No, they have to be able to find a way out and let the chill of reality cool them down, and help them set until they become this beautiful unique, delicious cookie. Sitting in their own beautiful homes. 

Homes that sit on different types of soil. 

Soils that are all part of the same land. 

Lands that share the same planet. 

One little huge little planet called earth.