"Do I count?"

When I was the International Students’ Officer of my college, I spoke with a fresher (first-year university student) who had recently experienced a nasty encounter where they were verbally abused in town by a resident. For most of us, being a fresher is full of ‘first-times.’ The first time living away from parents; the first time dining at formal hall; the first time sitting in a supervision. For that particular fresher, it was their first time living abroad, their first time hearing those racist slurs, and then discovering with alarm what they meant. And then possibly for the first time, becoming painfully conscious of their race. When I urged them to reach out to groups that specifically support BME students (black and minority ethnic- alternatively known as ‘people of colour’), they asked me, “Do we count as BME?”

This feeling of being abruptly reminded of the tangibility of your own race resonated with me, bringing me back to a vivid encounter I had as a fresher. I was minding my own business after a lecture when a man across the street yelled “ni hao” at me. He clearly assumed that any random East Asian person you see on the street would automatically be Chinese. The fact that I am Chinese is irrelevant — what if the girl he shouted at happened to be Japanese or Korean? From his laughter as I walked away, it was clear that his remarks were not made to make me feel at home by using my language. Instead, it was a way to mark me as foreign.

My university experience has been intertwined with a complex personal process of evaluating and re-evaluating my own identity. During freshers’ week, when people would ask me where I was from, I would always take a breath before replying. As a Hong Konger who grew up in Mainland China and was schooled in Britain, the answer isn’t straightforward because I see myself as situated at the crossroads of different and often conflicting identities.

This has meant that I’ve often found it more difficult than expected when searching for a true sense of belonging. To embody various identities is to feel scrutinised by all of them at once. Did my peers from Hong Kong also see me as a Hong Konger, or did they look down on me because I wasn’t raised or schooled there? Did my British friends see me as an insider, despite the occasional offhand remark or question which would (however unintentionally) flag my status as a foreigner? And, as someone who is East Asian, an ethnic group which is relatively well-represented in higher education, did I deserve to be counted as BME?

To me, going to university represented entering a world of autonomy, where I was free to make my own choices. It would not only be a place where I could enjoy a night out with friends without having to negotiate a curfew with my mum, and then frantically pray that my Asian Flush would fade away by the time I was back; but also, a place where I could become my own person.

But I soon found out that it would not be as simple and straightforward as that. Who I was as a person was as much about how others saw me as it was about the choices I made for myself. Acceptance by those who shared ownership of the identities I claimed for myself became another worry in itself.

East Asians are a minority, but they aren’t exactly a minority that suffers from a lack of representation at the University of Cambridge. Arriving here as a fresher, this ambiguity immediately caught my attention. On paper, we don’t seem to be disadvantaged or face the same sort of entrenched structural discrimination that affects many other students of colour. Amongst Home applicants in the 2018 admissions cycle, for example, Chinese applicants had the highest rate of success (25%), followed closely by white (24.7%), and then Indian applicants (23%). Evidence like this caused me to doubt whether I had a legitimate claim to being BME, which accounted for minority groups who experience marginalisation.

At university, I became familiarised with the term “model minority,” which points to Asian Americans as an example of a minority ethnic group in the United States who have ‘succeeded.’ Stereotypes of Asian Americans as obsessed with education and family were historically and “typically offered in contrast to the perceived achievements of other racial groups,” and to denigrate other communities of colour, especially Black Americans. The impression of meritocracy merely concealed the realities of deep-rooted inequality. Learning about this made me think about how communities of colour are too often pitted against each other, and certain minority groups are made complicit in the discrimination of others.

There’s also the comparative privilege East Asians have over South and Southeast Asians because of their paler skin. Pale skin not only connotes whiteness, but is also a marker of class (because tanned skin was typically thought to be the result of having to work outside) and thus doubly desirable. All of this left me wrestling with the question of whether I even ‘qualified’ as BME, as I had obviously not experienced the same levels of marginalisation as other students of colour, or share similar lived experiences with them. I worried that I would be taking up space that did not necessarily belong to me.

One of the most impactful student newspaper articles I had read as a fresher was tan ning-sang’s reflection on her experiences studying in California and then Cambridge. Her description of the cognitive dissonance experienced by many international students of East Asian heritage resonated with me — it was difficult for us to identify as BME, precisely because we were the majority in society back home. She suggested that we possessed the “privilege of being between”: the ability to “easily slide between spaces of dominance and resistance without consequence and at our personal convenience.” Thinking critically about my positionality as someone who occupied this ‘between’ space helped to clarify how I saw myself in relation to the label of ‘BME.’

It is of course unsettling to have your selfhood cast into doubt whenever you have to grapple with questions like whether you really do count as BME. But we emerge from this with insights that consolidate our identity, however complicated, and make us more critically self-aware of our place both here and in the wider world. And so, these are important questions we must ask ourselves.