Cultural Whitening: Colonisation of my mind and identity

It is quiet an achievement for a tribal girl from a distant colonial outpost to make new friends in a new country where no one has heard of Borneo except for the mystical ‘wild man from Borneo’ or the Orang Utan. Well that was what I thought when my classmates and local folks started complimenting me on how good my English was. Little did I understand that it was in fact another stage in the process of my cultural whitening.

You see that process actually started with my religious conversion at the hands of white missionaries whom we were told, have made enormous sacrifices to come to Borneo just to save us from hell. The deal was black and white: give up your primitive pagan beliefs, your tribal language, your cultural practices in exchange for a puritanical Christian life that will ensure your passage to heaven one day.

We got to learn the same hymns that were sung in every church in English speaking countries each Sunday. We learnt of the glorious empire and sang ‘God Save the Queen’ every day at the school assembly. After a while, a deep sense of shame started to seep through our existence after being regularly reminded that we were primitive, ignorant and backward. One day we can be like the white missionaries if we studied hard, spoke only in English, read the Bible and prayed three times a day.

To survive in my new country, I was determined to blend in and be accepted as a normal person. I thought I could easily achieve that by having only white friends for they would be my ticket into this forbidden world. My second conversion was well and truly underway once I rejected my Asian friends in favour of only spending time with my white friends.

I worshipped the way they spoke, dressed, danced and drank. My happiness depended on whether I got invited to one of their house parties on the weekend. At these parties, I was considered an exotic object of curiosity when all I craved was to be like them and be treated as one of them. In the supermarkets however, I was an object of derision for looking and sounding Asian.

I was consumed by conflict that my new identity generated. I surrounded myself in this new world with new friends who did not understand my lived experience of being torn between two worlds. My coping mechanism was to internalise the racism I felt into a morbid sense of shame. I began to hate the way I look and sounded no matter how hard I tried to be like my white friends.

With the rejection of who I was, I no longer knew who I have become. What started with the deliberate colonisation of my mind in the jungles of Borneo has become full blown cultural whitening. I started to desperately seek a way out of the miserable fake existence which I thought was would guarantee my survival in an alien culture.