Asian Girls Are Going Places

In my early twenties, I decided I wanted to travel by myself for the first time with intentions to ‘find myself’ (cue eye roll), both as a young woman in the world and as someone who was born in and raised in a country that wasn’t my ancestral homeland.

Both sides of my family are from the Guangdong province in Southern China and have since migrated all over the world. My parents moved to Australia from Hong Kong, so I regard it as my other home. I still remember the moment being an Asian person in an Asian country clicked for me: I was twelve years old and standing in the middle of a bustling intersection in Mong Kok and was so relieved to be invisible for the first time in my life. (Well, as long as I kept my mouth shut and didn’t butcher Cantonese with my Australian accent!) 

And so I had the idea that I might move to Hong Kong – to become closer to the Chinese parts of myself, to get to know my extended family, and to finally become fluent in Cantonese. I’d travelled to Hong Kong numerous times with my immediate family, and was always known as the ‘baby’, constantly having anecdotes of things I did as a child (‘You loved to eat this particular brand of seaweed crackers!’; ‘Remember that time you got lost at the Big Buddha and almost gave your mother a heart attack?’) thrust upon me by my extended family. Now they were going to get to know me as a grown woman. I spent my time there eating yum cha with my aunt, playing badminton with my uncle and getting to know his new wife, helping with furniture shopping, babysitting the younger generations, and spending weekends drinking milk teas and going shopping with my cousins. But it didn’t take long before I started to yearn for my other home, the one in which I’d grown up. I was at the mercy of that constant state of displacement experienced by diaspora kids.