UniQ: Old Country, New Country

Words by Alex Cherian, A.K.A. Goose (she/they)

---

My father was born in Malaysia, went to school in India, his first language was Malayalam, and his sisters live in Bahrain. My mother was born in Dunedin. When I was a kid, my classmates would joke that I was being kidnapped when my mother picked me up from school. They couldn’t make sense of a brown kid having a white mum with a Kiwi accent. If anything, my father was just as local as her. He’d been living in this country for around ten years by the time I was born. 

I’m a second-gen immigrant, raised speaking English, and didn’t even realise my father had a different mother tongue until he revealed he’d forgotten it. His family were fluent in English as well, and when he was younger, travelling Europe, he was quite good at French. But Malayalam (the language his mother taught him) was gone by the time I came into the world. He had left so much of the old culture behind, for most of my life I didn’t have an answer to “Where are your family from?”.

Until recently, I couldn’t understand the Māori concept of whakapapa because, looking back through my family’s roots, the trail ended with my few surviving relatives at the other end of the world. Because I went so long culturally adrift, being told I had a ‘white personality’, I gave up on tracing my roots and instead sought a new people to immerse myself in. 

So much of the rainbow community places an emphasis on belonging and welcoming. The annual Pride festivals were some of the first times I had truly felt part of a proud community with a long history and strong culture of its own. Queer culture embraced me, fought my anxieties to welcome me, and gave me a people I could call my own at last. Many POC do still experience a level of exclusion or racism among white queers, and I want to acknowledge this. 

Thanks to the queer community, I am able to reconnect with my ancestral heritage too, discovering the hidden histories of vibrant queer life across South Asia through the friends and resources I have found on my journey. I've never felt more at home on this Earth.