Living on the Fringes – in more ways than one – Yik Hui ( Taken from, ‘Radical Records: 30 years of Lesbian and Gay History 1957-1987’, edited by Bob Cant and Susan Hemmings, Routledge, 1988)

How do I begin describing myself so that anyone could understand where my politics were coming from? My experience in England has led me to the conclusion that most people are unable to see me whole. That is -if you're a lesbian you're white, and if you're Chinese you're exotic, passive, inscrutable, and the whole pack of racist stereotypes which I'm sure you could fill a page with without any help from me. As a result, I have spent many early years in this country perfecting what I call my chameleon act: fitting into whatever environment I found myself in; making myself, my Chinese self, invisible in order to avoid hostility. However, I had already begun the process, long before coming over, of minimizing and dismissing my cultural identity.

   I am a product of the British legacy of colonialism: the reason why I ended up here, why I stayed, and why I still have one foot out the door. Both sides of my family left rural south China for Malaya to get away from the grinding poverty, encouraged by the British to fill their need for cheap labour in their colonies. My paternal grandfather started his working life as a water carrier -selling water house to house; by the time I arrived my father's family had 'made it'. On my mother's side, my grandfather and his family emigrated when he was offered a job as interpreter in the law courts.  My mother had a Chinese education, returning to China for part of it. She saw at first hand the imperialist arrogance of the British in her mother country, aptly illustrated by the signs in the parks which baldly stated 'no dogs or Chinese allowed'. She was involved in some of the student protests against them during that period; but at the end of the day she still felt that an English education was a necessary tool for survival for her children. As immigrants in a British colony, the way to get on was through an English education. The price they paid was my cultural heritage. At school we were taught an obscenely distorted history of my people, as well as that of all the other exploited colonies. The recurring message drummed into our young minds was of the 'civilizing influence' of the British Empire and the superiority in values, behaviour and culture of the British. Never mind the exploitation and atrocities wreaked on whole countries in order that the British could plunder and fill their coffers from our raw materials and the sweat of our cheap labour.

   The British also used the well-worn principle of divide and rule to run the country -keeping the Chinese and Indian settlers in Malaya from joining the Civil Service and administration which ran the country while nurturing the traditional ruling class to one day take over. Consequently, both the Indians and Chinese were confirmed in their immigrant status, discouraged from having a stake in our adopted country. Among my contemporaries at home - mostly middle c1ass but not all- three quarters of them have emigrated: to Australia, Canada, USA and Britain. And as race relations worsen at home (the roots of which British colonialism planted) the drift away continues.

   With this background of 'westernisation' it was considered natural to come over to England to complete my education. It was therefore a shock to face such hostile and patronising attitudes when I arrived. I had been fed on a diet of Enid Blyton and her boarding school series, so I was eager - even excited - to be joining one when I came over to take my ' A ' levels in the late sixties: I was not at all prepared for the harsh realities of English middle-class racism. I was bewildered and numbed by it.

   My only support at the time came from a Nigerian girl and a Ugandan Asian girl who were also in my class and shared my deep sense of alienation from our environment.  We all had a similar colonial background and were desperate to 'fit in' and be accepted -so we never talked of racism directly. We had all been brought up to invest our hopes and future in the 'western way of life' and were learning to develop thick skins against the blatant institutionalized and individual racism we faced every day. The only outlet through which we dared to express our distress was sharing our fantasies of burning down our school!

   It took me a long time even to begin to look at what I was going through. In the intervening years I allowed myself to be gradually undermined and finally succeeded in losing most outward traces of my cultural identity. I lost my accent very quickly and my style of speech which betrayed a cross- fertilization of three cultures -Chinese, Malay and Indian. I learnt to sit formally at table and to eat three inedible courses of stodge with an incomprehensible array of surplus cutlery; to whisper when I spoke as I was considered 'too loud'; and to stop gesturing with my hands or to touch in conversation, as people inevitably shrank away from me. I did draw the line at giving up the spices I cooked with even though for years I continued to receive remarks about my stinking of garlic, yuk, with monotonous regularity. By and large, though, I attempted to imitate the ways of the English.

   However -although these contortions saved me from the worse excesses of daily racism, my face kept giving me away. I was endlessly patronized on my 'amazingly good English' at dinner parties and told in buses and in the streets to 'go back where you came from, chink'. In my early years here, I had a small group of friends from home who were also studying or nursing. They buttressed me to some degree from the isolation I felt. But, one by one they left, for home or elsewhere. I stayed.

   I came across feminist politics while I was at college in London in the mid-seventies. I was mostly bored by the degree course I was doing and spent more and more of my time skiving off to extra-mural classes in Women's Studies which were just beginning to happen, and devouring feminist books. Out of one of my women's courses I attended, a consciousness-raising group was formed. There were about six of us and we were eager to talk about -for the first time -the reality of our lives as women. It sounds passé now, but it was breaking new ground for all of us; putting into words the taboos in our lives -sex, sexuality, relating to men -and the bonus, our new found enjoyment of each other's company without men.

   I was still at the time in a relationship with a man I had lived with for four years and was emotionally dependent on, in more ways than one given my immigrant status in this country. But we were moving in different directions and it had been clear for some while that we stayed together out of habit. As I explored more of the inadequacies of my relationship with him through my group, and made friends independently from him, he began to feel more and more threatened by my increasing feminism. The inevitable happened. But it was not painless: he had been, after all, my main emotional support through my middle years in this country , however flawed. But I was now finding a whole new community I felt more comfortable with.

   Going to my first feminist conference in the late seventies: the thrill of seeing so many women together, and, even more so, seeing so many lesbians openly showing their affections for each other. The atmosphere was electric, it all seemed so natural, effortless: the joyous relating, the sensuality, the emotional sparks flying everywhere and the encouragement to participate in workshops...so different from the male structures of chairman, standing orders and platform speeches. It felt coming home, in a way.

   I had never been politically active before in any organized way. With my friends from home we had discussed Third World politics and our growing awareness of exploitation globally. At college I had been thoroughly disgusted with the male egos that dominated the left-wing student politics. I had peripherally helped out at anti-apartheid offices, even gone on CND Easter Marches when I first came over, but it was always on the sidelines. Their structures and attitudes alienated me from participating more fully.

   The Women's Movement changed all that. For the next few years I threw myself into a whirlwind of activities - involving myself in a Women's Aid refuge, women's centres, campaigns, demonstrations and conferences. I felt part of a movement. At first it all seemed so simple: the discussions, the unfolding of new ideas, the boundless energy we seemed to generate in each other, the solidarity we felt in working towards tearing down patriarchal structures and attitudes. In those early days it seemed the sky was the limit! We were naive, the cracks began to show. The political infighting between radical, revolutionary, socialist, separatist -women tearing each other apart at conferences and in our magazines and newsletters. Much later issues of race and class began to be addressed more seriously, after years of being ignored or side-stepped.

   I mostly stood on the sidelines, watching the heavy- weights raging at each other. My own political education! recognition was rooted in the more down-to-earth practical realities of the day-to-day running of a refuge for women who had suffered domestic violence. It was there my consciousness of class, race and sexuality grew, as heated arguments took place, in weekly collective meetings between the residents of the refuge, workers and support group. We challenged and supported each other through the stresses of daily living, where women, who were at a particularly vulnerable point in their lives, had to make hard choices about their future and gain the strength to struggle through and survive.

   But I was still invisible as a Chinese woman. Something was still missing. The feminist and, increasingly, the lesbian community had become my haven in this country. It was hard to acknowledge their continuing denial of my Chinese identity. Their understanding of racism was that was about Afro-Caribbean people and maybe people from the Indian sub-continent. I didn't feature on the agenda. I remember many occasions when friends would reassure me that I was like them, there weren't any differences. I had become totally invisible. I was accepted -but only on their terms. Around that time I wrote a piece in a journal which I co-wrote with a friend. It was in 1980, and I would like to share some of it with you. It is revealing in how clear I was and yet I managed to stop short of naming it as racism.

Coming out as a person

I suppose I have been thinking rather a lot lately about my reluctance to stick a label on myself politically -as a lesbian. What really am I? Am I simply a lesbian? Why do I baulk at it? Because I feel strongly that I am much more than that...perhaps many more nameless things, but valuable to me nonetheless. And I insist on their recognition.  I refuse to be fragmented, yet I feel so. I don't feel whole, and labels just make it so much more difficult for me to understand myself.

   Sure, being a lesbian is intricately woven into the web of my identity. But so is that part of me that feels alien in this country, lonely behind my wall of defences, inarticulate in my deepest pain. These are also part of my inner core.

   So when women talk of coming out as a lesbian, I want to ask -can I come as a person first? If I cannot come out soon - much of me will die, and only I will know enough to mourn its passing.

   You may ask -but why didn't you say? We would have wanted to know. But would you really? You made assumptions which made those parts of me invisible, that shamed it into retreat, that said, 'You're really like us. We don't see any difference.'

   But I am you know -I am alien, other, under this facade. I have learnt over the years to talk your way, behave your way, and even to think and feel your way. Speechless – in order to be acceptable. To hack to death all that didn't fit in. It hurts me now to realize how much I numbed myself from the searing pains of those years. And now, so many scars have grown over where it hurts that I'm not sure I'm clear anymore about what I've lost.

   The part of me that is a lesbian has always had a lot of support and nurturing from friends around. It was recognized as valid. My other self – my Chinese self -has not had such understanding. That part of me feels negative and trodden over, wiped out. I want to reclaim it -so I can stop being a casualty of this war that has no name.

   It was another two years before I was able to break through the painful years of silence and begin the fragile tentative process of making myself whole again. It was the emergence of the Chinese Lesbian Group which allowed me to start this process of healing and accepting myself.

   Three of us met at the Lesbian Sex and Sexual Practice Conference in London in 1983. Although it felt like a miraculous coincidence for us at the time, it was more that we were all ready to grapple with this issue in our lives. The rest of the conference was humming with the anticipated controversy over sado-masochism, and with the anger of women with disabilities over non-accessibility to the venue and to the discussion papers. Meanwhile a momentous event took  place in the lobby. Three of us exchanged telephone numbers and the Chinese Lesbian Group was formed.

   Two of us had already previously met, but we were nervous and shy and wary of each other. Making overtures towards another which mirrored our own disquieting and long-buried Chinese identity was both a fearful and exciting prospect, and neither of us quite got up the nerve to take the initiative. However, with three of us we felt we could start a group! The early days of the group were both strange and oddly familiar. Sharing our experiences allowed parts of ourselves to surface which were both painful and joyous. It felt fragile at first, but it was as if I had finally come up for air after nearly drowning in a pool of lies. There were occasions when we would get hysterical with delight at uncovering yet another layer of our much maligned identity, and find the words to talk about it.

   We also discovered the richness and variety of our backgrounds and a growing understanding of our shared roots. All of us are living in a diaspora twice removed –that is, our ancestors were already immigrants when we were born, and we, or our families, have repeated it again, going this time to the country of our past colonial masters.  Between us, our ancestors have travelled through three continents for us to arrive here. This group is my family in this country now, it is my anchor in an insecure world and it has expanded and grown in confidence.

   With our increasing clarity of the racism we faced daily, we made tentative overtures to involve ourselves in Black women's activities. The response to us was and still is ambivalent. On an individual level I have been supported and validated by many lesbians of Afro-Caribbean and Indian sub-continent descent. However, as a political issue, it has so far not been properly thrashed out. Are Chinese people included in the political term 'Black'?  Are Chinese people's experiences of racism different from but similar to what is experienced by those from other backgrounds? Over the last few years I have actively participated in various Black women's activities. But I still have twinges of uncertainty about my place within the wider Black women’s struggle.  There are differing levels of acceptance at different occasions. However I do feel optimistic that our growing understanding of our diverse cultures and histories, which exposes the myths and stereotypes we have been force-fed by the British for too many generations, will forge an increasingly powerful alliance in our struggle against racism in this country.

   Equally, the lesbian and gay movement needs to make far more serious and energetic efforts to rid itself of racist assumptions in its political agenda. The recent political activities of Haringey Black Action has succeed in raising the profile of Black lesbians and gay men. We can no longer accept marginalization. We are here to stay.