Banana (slang): A (typically) Chinese born into a Western environment and are more inclined towards Western culture compared to their familiars’ traditional values. They usually consider English to be their primary language of communication and are not as fluent in Mandarin or any Chinese dialect or capable of holding up a conversation in the latter two at all.
Yellow on the outside, white on the inside.
Double Consciousness
I was reading a book by the critical thinking Dissect podcast host, Cole Cuchna called The Blacker The Berry . The book analyses the lyrical context together with the historical and contemporary African American politics behind Compton-bred rapper, Kendrick Lamar’s upbringing. It commits to exploring the song in accord with how the music flowed, unpacking the poetic genius of Kendrick’s penmanship piece-by-piece. On the intro before the bridge, Kendrick murmurs this contrasting dichotomy of yearning for two completely separate desires: “I want everything black, I ain’t need black”.
Cole mirrors these few lines of spoken word with each other by drawing an analogy to an academic concept, called double consciousness. Double consciousness, as an idea materialized from the harsh reality of living in a world where your skin color does not match the general population’s (in this case, blacks in white America). He then goes on to elaborate on the long, internal conflict within the black community as they struggled to find, build and adhere to a solid identity in a seemingly diverse country in color that was overwhelmingly white. They were often presented with the psychological dilemma of two contradictory choices: to stay true to their origins but remained oppressed and openly discriminated for not living up to society’s expectations or to adapt and succumb to white aspirations and “bleach their negro blood white”.
While double consciousness was formed and rooted in black hardship and suffering (the term was formulated by a black scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois), I find it uncannily relatable albeit not having experienced half the injustice and inhumane treatment these people and their ancestors have gone through. I am not black, I am not white, and am certainly not American. What made it relatable to me and a lot of Kendrick fans worldwide who have not undergone these depicted stories was how down to earth and at times, intimate the listening experience was. It was surprisingly familiar as many of the dots connected were ones we commonly shared as humans despite entailing different stories. We were still able to acknowledge the original narrative to be personal and real to Kendrick and his people.
The Story of a Musa Acuminata
My grandparents were Chinese. They migrated to Malaysia in hopes of something better. While my heritage is of mainland Chinese origin, all of my thoughts and inner-monologues are in English unlike many of my town’s people who lived with Chinese mediums throughout their childhoods. My dad didn’t study in a Chinese vernacular school which was the norm among the earlier folk. He spent most of his boarding school years communicating in the native tongue (Bahasa Sarawak) with the bumi-s (natives/indigenous people of our land).
My parents had the inkling that it would be too much to ask for me and my siblings to cope learning multiple languages at equal pacing and to be equally great at all of them. They were firm believers that it was better to be fluent in one language than to be only adequate in all of them. And so, they made the uneasy choice to raise their children by taking them to the English corner of the public library to take home storybooks, subscribing to Astro cable TV which was the only source of most American and British TV back then, enrolling us in phonics lessons while we were kindergarteners and sending us to intensive English tuition lessons when we were as young as 7-years-old. We ended up compromising in a lot of language learning in which we had to learn 3 different languages in school: Bahasa Malaysia, English and Mandarin (our town also commonly communicated in Foochow, another Chinese dialect equivalent to Cantonese for the Cantonese). There was a lot of different language exposures, too much in fact. Writing this, I happen to realize that my mom was only ‘okay’ at English so she had to compromise the most so that our family could communicate better; so that we could communicate with our dad who knew little of his own mother tongue due to his circumstances.
For better or for worse, my older brother, younger sister and I endured a similar line of events involving us grappling with and questioning our own identity. Akin to the double consciousness concept, we switched back and forth between trying to be as ‘Chinese’ as our peers from our social circles and displaying our ‘English’-driven personality which was largely influenced by the Internet and Cartoon Network. While I am sure that there are many people who come from a similar background as us and have spent Fridays and weekends watching 0730 p.m. Disney movies when they were young, the people I attract usually stay relatively close and tight to their traditional upbringing. Most of them who happened to be Chinese tend to be less exposed to the things we were fond of. That made fitting in and getting along with others generally a lot harder for me.
From day one, I was surrounded by people who looked like me and ate the same food as us. We went to the same school, prayed at the same church convention and played at the same park. But right off the bat, something was off about me when I observed others. I first noticed when the English teacher would pick a random student and told them to read a paragraph aloud in class, but it was not too long until people soon discover the same about me when my turn came to read out loud. People tend to say that me and my brother have a particular accent when we speak regardless of the language. Some described it as ‘American’. Even when we converse in Mandarin, people commented that we sound like a Caucasian’s poor attempt at speaking Mandarin. Others called it ‘fake’ or ‘unnatural’. Needless to say, all these remarks were hurtful. Neither me nor my brother were mimicking the people from the States or made the intentional decision to sound the way we are now. Another weird thing is that I don’t sound anything like my siblings even though people grouped us according to the way we sound to them. We all have distinct accents although we grew up under the same roof and slept next to each other for so long. I also have the unconscious habit of shifting accents when I talk to different people and my brother does that too which was born out of trying not to upset the other conversating party or made them feel uneasy. We were very conscious of our voice and how it projected.
But it was definitely the people who saw me and my family as some wealthy and prestigious household that made me rethink of what I show and resemble of my blood and race. I often thought to myself that I was a terrible, misleading representation of the color and town name I wear because I was not like my friends and their friends and so on. Just a few weeks ago, I was on a video-call with a friend of mine and he asked me about my sister. I asked why because he has not met my sister and we rarely talked about our families. He said he was talking about me with someone else from his campus and that someone happened to be the same age as my sister and they used to study together back in school. That someone also had the impression that my sister was stuck-up because whenever she opened her mouth, English words would come out instead of Mandarin.
We unknowingly leave these impressions on so many people but we never wanted to. People attached nasty labels on us from the mere fact alone that we speak English or that we speak English better than we could converse in Mandarin: prestigious, snob, arrogant and above-people. Is it because we sounded too similar to our past British colonizers? Did we remind them of the European whites who were the authoritative figures long ago? Why did others think we were superior or tried to triumph over them in some imaginary social status? For us, a lot of our expressions were interpreted as flamboyant. We were tagged as performative and that everything we do was elaborate, more than necessary. We responded by suppressing and hiding a lot of our creativity from the outside world to refrain from being called anymore of those mean words and descriptions.
Speech is not just a chain of words in an order. It has inflections, intonations, tempo, rhythm and melody. Not many people have the time to practice being good at speaking but I had more than enough chances to brush up through public speaking lessons/contests. Nevertheless, my stage presence cannot be my actual human presence. Still, I bring animation into the way I talk and through my body language too. My town’s people associated me and my siblings as ‘colorful’ and that remark gets thrown at us mostly behind our backs often with hints of disgust and annoyance. We tend to talk like how we would want to sing, with an automatic focus to pitch manipulating and control in pausing. In American and Britain English, there are a lot of pitch accents but these do not actually have any bearing on how the language actually sounds or should sound; In Mandarin, there are very little accents so if you were to speak Mandarin like you were to speak English, it would sound completely off even if all of the grammar and sentence structures were correct. Every country’s interpretation of the English language is distinguished. Although the bulk of the vocabulary is the same, the way it sounds can vary a lot from region to region as the local influence sips into the world’s only lingua franca: turning English into Malaysian-English or Man-glish. In other words, like musical instruments, our timbre was different and we were bullied for it.
We learned all this by observing and listening to a lot of people on TV and the Internet who all sounded different from each other as Americans from each state had their own vocal peculiarities as well. Some of the best articulate people were the ones who were on the screen: voice actors for cartoons, Youtubers who did great video essays, and of course, Hollywood actors. We draw a lot of influence from them as we spend so much time spectating and admiring them from behind a monitor screen. However, most of our friends did not share similar interests as us so their rhythms and inflections of speech and just the overall tone was very much different. Somehow, we get labeled as the oddity because we were a minority in number.
We are a linguistic species — we turn to language to express whatever we are thinking and it is usually there for us instantly. ~Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia
Reconciling
Being characterized as ‘different’ by your peers is probably one of adolescent’s most menacing threats to confidence in identity. The teenage retaliation was to always attempt to fit in with everyone else as much as possible to avoid the risk of being shunned even more. However, we also desperately wanted to share the joy that could only come from some fluency in English which led us to appreciate and know of some relatively obscure interests or to share new-age values that could bear the same name but with different overtones. Thus, we battle this silent but self-incriminating dispute that was roaring from within. We enjoyed English a lot and have never regretted it being almost our primary language, but we cannot help but grieve at the moments where we could not be as approachable and relatable to the people around us, especially during our rebellious years when we craved the most for social attention and acceptance. Needless to say, the teenage years were the cruelest.
However, double consciousness was never a fight to begin with even though the two conflicting sides are described to be ‘fighting’. A war typically results in a victor once it finishes. The truth in double consciousness is that it is essentially reconciliation in progress so there will never be a winner. Or to put it in another way, both sides will win. Our self-conflict arises because we search for our identity in how we think others perceive us. We measure our self-worth by judging it through the lens of other people that we ironically created ourselves. When we fail to live up to that arbitrary expectation we made, we instinctively developed a feeling of remorse towards our individuality. Hence, a lot of the fighting is aggravated through internalization of the already harmful external stimuli which invites and develops self-inferiority.
Once we start thinking along the lines of ‘it does not matter much what other people think of me’ and we start considering more about how we see ourselves from our own frame, the inner conflict subsides and becomes susceptible to be remedied. With gaining self-consciousness which usually comes from the transition to adulting as one goes through their undergraduate years, one will try to merge the two sides rather than to let them compete against one another. I find that both sides are important and fundamental to the elements that made me ‘me’. The impulse to ask why I do not belong transforms into stages of understanding, negotiation and acceptance.
“He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.” ~ W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk
Afterthoughts
As I grow older, I become prouder and am thankful for the image I now take with me. Getting to the stage I am at now tailed much reflection, a lot of dark thinking which costed much mental health. Fortunately, I was able to meet many kind people who were more than accepting to me and my character. No, truthfully it cannot be luck. It was not luck that I met these nice people for kind people are everywhere. The catch is that the same prejudicial and biased world I took the time to describe above, is also the same one nice people reside in. Human beings can be as harsh as they are kind.
Whenever I return home from studies during semester breaks, I am reminded of how I was miscommunicated and given the stares through the way I moved and voiced my thoughts. If I were to give my own analogy, I would say the steps I take are smaller and lighter than everyone else and sometimes I find myself unable to keep up with their pace and I ended up beating myself up for it. Dissatisfaction with oneself can only come from one’s self so I try to not internalize a lot of the outside world’s response towards me which could intensify the depression and self-belittlement within me.
Today, I interpret these reminders differently. Dr. Karim Bettache, senior lecturer in psychology asserts that we, Malaysians are indoctrinated from being imprisoned in a mental system as an effect of colonization, failing to find beauty in oneself and others for superficial reasons.
“They (Malaysians) are copying the abuse of their formal abuser and they do not realize the pain they inflict on other human beings… born with a certain skin color.” ~ Dr Karim Bettache on COLORISM: EXPLORING RACISM’S EQUALLY-ROTTEN BROTHER, a BFM 89.9 podcast episode
What I have been through cannot be a journey unique to me. I am sure people regardless of race and are raised with English education or grew up in the Internet which is largely in English, in a country where English will always be second in status have gone through their own fair share of self-doubt and too have look down on themselves for it. What is more concerning and demanding of attention is that certain groups of people are bashed and had received far worse receptions than me and you purely based on looks and the stereotypes they didn’t even agree to shoulder. I am privileged in a sense that I do not get to experience a lot of that specific kind of discrimination which comes from appearances or skin color alone, not like a lot of my darker skin friends. The effects of post-colonization have been so ingrained in us that the impacts almost feel natural in that we do not have the urge to challenge whether these are deserving or inhumane. Instead, we keep quiet and tell ourselves that that is how the world works. Injustice is in our blood and only when it boils, we start to sweat.
I urge readers who have made it this far down to read more on racism whether it be academic or personal stories of the oppressed worldwide. When Malaysia gets called a ‘melting pot’, it means the people who lived there regardless of race, religion, height, weight and beliefs are all but one. Each person’s individuality has ‘melted’ in this one big cauldron that is the nationalistic behavior and devotion to one’s place of upbringing. That cannot be accurate because a person’s love for the place they grew up in can be born, amplified, and supplemented together with a person’s originality and uniqueness. We cannot celebrate diversity if all of us are categorized as the same because there would be no diversity in the first place.
The first step is always awareness and the next step is generally the toughest among Malaysians: learning. The good news is that the people who have confronted double consciousness throughout their lives are one among the many groups that can teach and offer you valuable insight.
