Postby TriP » July 14th, 2016, 9:21 pm
People of Trinidad and Tobago ~ Elysée Gilbert
Because both my parents are mixed, I’m like a diluted Chinese person. My dad is mixed, but my mom is even more mixed. Daddy’s dad is straight from China and his mom is Trinidad Chinese. And on my mom’s side, her mother is Indian—when she was growing up they used to dry cocoa and coffee seeds and stuff in Tabaquite, so Mom has the real Indian on her side. Her dad came from Hong Kong around the 1940s when there was civil unrest in China. So when he came down here, he brought both his mom and sister down as well.
All my grandparents are dead now. Both my grandfathers died when I was maybe two years old, so I don’t really remember them. Growing up, my grannies were alive but they were already living in Trinidad so long that they had been heavily influenced a lot of by Trinidad culture. So Mom and Dad didn’t have the strong Chinese values that my grandparents would have had in their time.
I identify as a normal human living in Trinidad. No honestly! When I was growing up in kindergarten, I was one of the few Asian people in primary school. I had one Asian friend and she migrated back to Venezuela, so I was the only Asian person in my group of friends. In secondary school it was the same thing, and only in university my eyes were opened to see like ‘Oh okay, this is how society treats somebody who looks like me.’ Even when I used to do Promotions, I was like the “Chinee Girl” in the group. But because of the people I limed with, I never really felt all that different because I was always surrounded by people who were mixed. So I thought ‘Hey, this is just how everybody is. Everybody treats everybody the same way.’ I was living in a little bubble so I just see myself as like… normal
The only thing that I would say stood out to me when I was growing up was that people would say ‘Ey, Chinee’ when I was walking down the road. But when I was in school or ballet class, people never really made me feel any sort of way by how I looked. If anything, people would say ‘Oh well look at this little quiet Chinese girl’ because all I really used to do was ballet. I played Carnival too, and that’s a whole set of mixed people by itself, so I never really felt different there.
So when I started Aquaholics [Dragonboat Club] that was the first real Chinese thing that I was a part of because my family was never really a part of any Chinese society or a Chinese group before. So when I joined, at seventeen or eighteen, I was now coming out of secondary school and my eyes were kind of opening to how people treat other types of people outside. What people say and stuff like that. I would say I was really sheltered from all of that. I wasn’t exposed to it. And being surrounded by other Chinese people made me realise how much I didn’t know anything about Chinese culture and Chinese traditions. Even a simple thing like Dim Sum… like, I know what different Dim Sum items were, but we never really went to have Dim Sum; and that’s a very Asian thing. So my other Chinese friends, they were real deep into Chinese culture and they saw that as the norm. To me, everything like that was new.”
-
Attachments
-
