Being an "Other" in Asia

I tend to float through life very much as an outsider no matter where I am, I never fully belong to a place and that in itself is my identity. It took me my first year at university in Toronto to figure out that in many ways my experiences did not fit neatly into the TCK experience or the South Asian immigrant experience, but instead they straddle the two. Growing up as an expatriate in Bangkok within a family considered privileged and an international school considered fancy, my life here was a night-day comparison to the South Asians I met at Scarborough Campus whose new-immigrant tales of assimilation versus self-preservation I could relate to only to a certain level.

I almost fell off my chair when I came across a blog post written by Preya that I wish I had written, if only for the title itself! In her post “Expats, Orientalism and Questions of Identity”, she highlights how Said’s conceptions of the “Other” become convoluted when you grow up as an Asian expat in another Asian country and then move to the West!

“But for expats there is a privilege in being another kind of "Other." And so my experience is a strange inversion of what it should be. Here, in my grad school class for instance, they look to me, a "minority," (although I am just as much my white mother as I am my Indian father, I suppose) for an experience of being oppressed. They talk of their "white middle class guilt." And this just deepens my guilt. Not only have I benefited from being part of an elite minority, I can't even empathize with my fellow "people of color." For my early arrival into a country I would call home for the next 12 years did not make me anymore Vietnamese.”

Being South Asian in Southeast Asia is a unique experience on its own as perspectives of nationality and identity in Asia are very different than in the West. As an Indian expat in Thailand, I am still an Asian within Asia. Certainly, one could explore what it means to be Asian and derive commonalities from a shared cultural history of religion and art. But, contemporary Asia is not like Europe, the borders are very much alive and strong. So this dichotomy (one of many in my life!) of being Asian and also an outsider within Asia, I think, is unique to Asian expats and not a general TCK phenomenon.