SINGAPORE: A recent Instagram post from a woman who said that it took leaving Singapore for her to understand what being a minority feels like resonated with others, who have in turn posted about their take on the theme of belonging.
A Tamil Singaporean who now lives in Canada has had a completely different experience and wrote, “It took leaving Singapore for me to realise I’ll always be a minority wherever I go.”
Ms Rohini (@rohinislm) explained that her family has been Singaporean for three generations. For her, Singapore is a home she loves, and growing up as part of a minority caused no small degree of hurt.
“I was picked out for the colour of my skin. I heard the jokes about how dark I was. I had to work harder for the same opportunities, even as a kid. Certain beauty standards were the assumption. Certain rooms didn’t quite include me,” she wrote, adding that she has had to figure out how to fit in.
Becoming “the token brown friend in mostly-Chinese friend groups” meant shying away from her own culture and allowing her name to be mispronounced, because she felt that being too “ethnic” came at a cost.
She has since moved to Canada, which she loves as a second home, but there, she has had to contextualise and explain herself as a minority, in the sense that when people ask where she’s from and she answers that she’s from Singapore, they shoot back with “No, but where are you originally from?”
“That was the moment I realised: I’m going to have to explain myself, again and again,” she wrote, adding that people have told her to “go back to India” and have assumed that she moved to Canada for “a better passport,” which is ironic, since Singapore’s passport is one of the strongest in the world.
“It’s still wild how casually some people assume every brown person must be escaping somewhere worse, as if brown skin automatically equals a life worth fleeing,” she added.
She also wrote about being treated as suspicious just because of the colour of her skin.
“Your skin sometimes speaks for you before you do,” Ms Rohini noted.
She added that she will never get to walk into a country and feel at home, neither in Singapore nor Canada, nor even in India, as she would be considered an outsider even in Tamil Nadu, since she is so culturally different from the people living in the place her ancestors came from.
“That’s the struggle of being a diaspora minority,” Ms Rohini noted.
Where she has found community, however, is among diasporic Indians, whom she met coming from places as diverse as Fiji, Mauritius, and South Africa.
“Through our conversations, we realised we all knew what it was to have ancestors who carried a culture that rebuilt itself somewhere new,” she wrote.
And while she acknowledged that she will always be a minority no matter where she is, she has learned that “Belonging doesn’t always have to come from the people who look like you. Sometimes the deepest belonging is found across cultures – between people who share lived experiences.” /TISG
Read also: ‘Singapore isn’t just Chinese’: Singaporean Tamil woman speaks out after TikTok user says they didn’t know Indians lived in SG
