In a Very Chinese Time of My Life
Everyone is now Chinese, according to this week’s Internet trends.
Except, I have always been Chinese and it certainly hasn’t been very trendy throughout much of my life.
The trend seems to consist of white and non-Chinese people sharing them eating East Asian food or discovering that we Chinese people love to only drink hot water, and captioning their videos with ‘you catch me in a very Chinese time of my life’. Of course, the trend has already been satirised by Chinese creators and, isn’t it fun to finally be chosen as one of the popular East Asian crowd at last ? 😉
It’s taken me a while to get it together, in terms of my personal identity as a British-born Chinese woman. Unlike in the US and Canada, where I’m told Chinese people flock together, we have a scattered diaspora in the UK. And, in my humble hometown, I am genuinely vaguely related to all of the fellow British-born Chinese people here. I started sharing my experiences in a little more depth some nine or 10 years ago, and it’s been truly life-changing to find that I had a pocket full of fellow British-born Chinese readers here all along! Since the British National Overseas programme with Hong Kong launched, there are a few people Chinese people here now, but the point I’m making is that it took me a while to reckon with who I was in a predominantly white place. All of a sudden, it’s more than acceptable to do things Chinese people do.
Just not to actually be Chinese, you know?
Because I just am Chinese, it was difficult to pick out parts of my life that are… Chinese? Hey, I’m just out here living my life. So, I’ve sort of made this a list of things I’ve found most random throughout my life, when unleashed into a wider, more diverse (ah, the irony) community.
Shoes off, slippers on
I remember my first day at primary school, clear as day. We filed into the classroom after queuing up beside the wall at the door, and then I went to take my shoes off.
“No, no, you keep your shoes on here,” the teaching assistant told me.
Confused, I followed the other children in to the classroom, where took our coats off and placed them on a hook labelled with our names. Coats off. Shoes… on?
Chinese households are unanimously shoes-off households. Shoes are caked with dirt and bacteria – who wants to tread that into the carpeted house?! (Dog owners, I’m sure you all agree!) We are also big on keeping feet warm, though, because feet are the foundation of the body and warm feet = better circulation according to the Traditional Chinese Medicine ‘rules’ we are grew up with. So, you’ll find most Chinese people wear socks all round the year, and always wear slippers inside the house. Oh, and they’re a must in hotels too. Of course.
Cooked breakfasts, always
In Year Two, also at primary school, we were set a comprehension writing task.
Write and draw about your breakfast at the weekend.
I handed in my exercise book… and the teacher asked me to please draw breakfast and ‘have you understood what I’m saying properly? Did you eat cereal? Or toast?’
I’d written about the char siu (roast pork) bao that we’d had, alongside steamed dumplings and macaroni in soup. Of course, it sounded as though I’d misunderstood my teacher and written about my dinner, for us Chinese people treat breakfast as the most important meal. We eat warm, cooked, nourishing food to fire up our digestion – no yoghurt bowls, smoothies or fruit salads here!
Hot water and food over cold
On the note of warm, cooked food, we also mostly hydrate with hot water. Growing up, we never seemed to own drinking glasses at home. We drank everything out of mugs and only now in adulthood do I realise that’s because we always drank hot drinks, i.e. they can’t be put in a glass. We even had a hot water machine that I’d be permanently embarrassed about after going for tea (dinner?!) at a school friend’s house, and finding their family home to be about 150% different from our home.
Weekly herbal bone broth
The first time I ordered a tomato soup from a café, I remember being pleasantly confused when I presented with a thick cream of tomato soup (a la Heinz), instead of the tomato soups that I grew up drinking at home. An easy mistake of course. In fact, a Bri’ish tomato soup is one of my favourite dishes now! But ‘tomato soup’ will almost always be a Cantonese tomato-based beef soup (羅宋湯) to me. We grew up with weekly or twice-weekly herbal-based bone broth soups, consumed after dinner. Of course, bone broth is the flavour of the moment these days!
‘Not too sweet’
Finally, you know you’re Chinese when you exclaim ‘It’s good, not too sweet!’ after trying any dessert or drink. We love a milder sweetness, because it taps into TCM principles. How to impress somebody Chinese? Halve the sweetness!
Writing this piece has made me smile, chuckle and frown in equal measure. Am I glad that Chinesemaxxing is in? No. But I am glad that, just maybe, a spotlight shone on our heritage quirks and traits might just help to ease some of the anti-Asian hate.
