GENES THAT FIT: HOW I DISCOVERED MYSELF

By ANDRE GOH

In my late twenties, I realized I was more at ease with Indians and South Asians than with others. An instinctive affinity to all things South Asian surfaced when I was introduced to the members of Khush.

This feeling, best described as comfortable, of feeling at home amongst the members of Khush, was a revelation for me, and something I didn’t understand or have the words to describe.

I was born in Malaysia in the early 1960s and grew up with children from a variety of ethnicities and cultures. As a child, my best friend was a Malay boy, and the kids we always played with were from Eurasian, Indian, Chinese and European backgrounds. It never occurred to me that we were different, since we all looked different, ate different things, and had different traditions and religions. The differences we shared did not make any of us stand out. It just was. And there were no pranks or jokes because of a child’s ethnicity or food or culture. For me, I assumed the whole world was like this.

Then in 1980, I moved to Toronto as a 16-year-old. In the early 1980s, Toronto was a very unfriendly place for a racialized immigrant. It’s difficult to imagine today that Toronto and the surrounding municipalities of those decades gone by were not very welcoming or diverse places. I remember in high school, I was one of two Asian kids in a school that had almost a thousand kids. The kind of racism I experienced as a new teenage immigrant was harsh, direct and clear. I was taunted in school about my accent, my looks, my hair, my clothes, my food... my everything, really. It got to a point where I didn’t eat my lunch in the cafeteria, didn’t speak much, and tried to blend in with the walls as I walked the corridors. These were traumatizing experiences for a young man, especially when I did not have any previous experiences of being othered to compare to. Growing up in Malaysia, I was surrounded by neighbours, friends and classmates who were multiracial and it never occurred to me that being and looking different was unique enough to warrant negative attention.

So, coming to Toronto as a teenager and attending a high school in which almost all the other boys and girls were White, was new. While I was open to learning and understanding better these new faces, cultures, accents, and new ways of speaking, it was not reciprocated. The only other racialized kid, another East Asian guy who was born in Canada, told me the first time he saw me approaching him in the hallways, “Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me. You don’t exist.”

He said this as he held one hand up with his palm in my face. Those early experiences of racism made me very self-conscious. I felt that I was different, didn’t fit in, and was always seen as inferior. And it would take me almost a lifetime of relearning and accepting that being different was okay.

It was at that time that I was also beginning to come to terms with the fact that I found myself attracted to other guys. I didn’t have the words to describe who or what I was, but knew I found guys physically and sexually attractive. But the connections and reassurance I was seeking were not available to me in my high school. People avoided talking to me or engaging me in conversations. By default, I became a loner who yearned for human comfort but found none. This led me to venture out into the clandestine gay world.

In the early 80s, being gay in Toronto and in Canada was “wrong”, had no legal protection, and was not celebrated or included in families or communities. At least, none that I knew about. Toronto’s queer community was in its infancy and establishments and the police ensured this “lifestyle” was not tolerated or allowed to grow. But grow we did. In the darkness, and the quiet of the nights.

I learned very quickly that being a minority within a minority within a minority (immigrant, Asian and gay) meant I needed to understand and look out for subtle signs of safe spaces. And it was on one of those city exploration walks down Yonge Street that I saw a sign in glowing pink, Glad Day Bookstore.

I knew it was a calling card. Don’t know how and don’t know why I knew this, but my instincts told me this second floor space was what I was looking for. Fearful and with trembling hands, I walked up the stairs. As I entered this very tight-space bookstore, I was immediately greeted by a smiling man who seemed to know I required more than just a smile. He proceeded to show me around the bookstore, explained the themes of each shelf, and then drew my attention to the pile of magazines and flyers on the floor by the entrance. He said some were free, but the Body Politic magazine was $1. Or I could buy older issues for less.

For me, older or newer, it didn’t matter. I had never seen magazines that were by and for gays and lesbians. I was hooked. And through these magazines I learned about gay establishments, clubs and discos. I also learned about the issues, frustrations and limitations experienced by other gays and lesbians. But that’s another story in itself.

After learning more about the ‘secret’ queer life in Toronto, I decided it was time for me to meet others, and to venture into the night. And so, the first time I went to a gay club, the Manatee, I thought I was in paradise. To be surrounded by so many guys who knew what they wanted and were comfortable in their skins, was among the first joyous experience I had of being in Toronto. But the joy was short- lived. Even in this community I quickly began to experience being othered. Most White guys my age were not interested in or attracted to me. Some told me, “I don’t do Orientals,” and others said, “You’re not my kind”. Either way, I realized that even in this safe space, my face and my difference were unwelcome.

Having found a space where I could be myself, but not my whole self, was not enough. I yearned for the companionship of others like me. So the next step in my coming out or coming to terms with myself was to find a place where I could be with others who looked like me, and maybe understood some of the challenges and social constraints I felt. Then, I found this home away from home – Gay Asians of Toronto. It was a social support group for gay East Asian men. GAT was amazing because most of the members were also immigrants. Mostly from Hong Kong, but some were from the Philippines, Vietnam and the Caribbean. The group members supported each other, created social avenues where we could be ourselves and be silly. This was my next joyous experience.

Over the next couple of years, GAT became a magnet for immigrants and second-generation individuals whose primary mother tongue was Cantonese. This is a Chinese dialect that I did not speak. I may have understood a little, but not enough to hold a conversation. Within a short time, all our social events defaulted into Cantonese and the few of us who did not speak the dialect or language, were left behind. I felt excluded. Again. The experience was not very different from those I experienced from the mainstream gay community. Part of, but not really a part of!

I remember sharing this feelings with another gay Tamil friend from Malaysia, and he told me about Khush, a South Asian group for gay men and lesbians. And so I joined him for a Khush meeting. You know how some memories are seared vividly clear into the crevices of your brain? Well, this was one of them. I recall with such clarity the first time when I walked into the home of a Khush member and saw this sea of gay and lesbian South Asians mingling with ease. Almost immediately I was greeted warmly and openly by several people and made to feel welcome. While GAT gave me comfort, Khush was like the home, a real home, that I was missing. Almost everyone conversed in English as the default language, and people were open to anyone who wasn’t from the subcontinent. This was a feeling greater than a joy – a sort of elation. Khush for me, was a place where I could bring my whole self and knew I belonged. Still, while no one said I looked different, I felt different. At home but not like being at home. As someone who looks East Asian, there was very little about me that was South Asian. Except for the foods I grew up with, my extent of growing up with things South Asian was limited. Something was missing. The experiences of being othered in high school, in the wider Toronto gay community, of knowing I looked different, and the subtle yearning and wishing I looked more White and less like me, made me wonder if my life would have been so much more enjoyable and inclusive if I looked ...well, not like me.

Self-hatred and self-censorship ruled my young adult life to the point where I desperately wanted to be someone or something else. To look different and to be different. My background was not so straightforward and so I always wondered about who I was and why some things made more sense to me.

My roots, as it were, are that my father is Chinese. His father migrated out of China during the Boxer rebellion. My paternal grandmother is second-generation Chinese from Singapore. My mother is Eurasian. What parts of Europe and Asia made up my mother’s ancestry was always a mystery. The assumptions and discussions circulating amongst relatives was that my maternal grandmother had French Canadian, Dutch, and maybe other European roots, while my maternal grandfather was hardly discussed, except that maybe he was Malay, Chinese, Javanese, and/or Burmese. The odd thing about discussions of my maternal ancestry was that my relatives always emphasized our European roots, but most of us did not look European. Most of us looked very Asian, including my mother and her siblings (granted they looked mixed, but still very Asian). Except maybe for my eldest uncle, who had Caucasian features, light green eyes, and very fair skin and hair. A few of my cousins have lighter skin tones, but most of us have very Asian tones of light to dark. And so this unknown and guessing of my roots and why we talked about our European roots so often, always intrigued me.

It also made me wonder if maybe there was a way for me to confirm these European roots, then maybe I could claim a space within the dominant group and not feel like an outsider. Or explain why I felt an affinity to South Asians. Looking very East Asian, and not speaking the languages or feeling like I belonged with the many other queer East Asians was such a barrier to being myself and accepting my whole self. This longing to belong, and need to confirm that I am not just a foreign-looking guy, but someone who can claim some kind of ancestry and lineage that made sense, was like a grain of sand that with time, slowly dug its way into the heart of my being.

Then, about fifteen years ago, I was watching a PBS documentary on ancestry and origins of various people who thought they knew their ancestry and heritage, but found out that it was more complex and more diverse. After watching this, I decided this would be the way for me to confirm my ancestry and learn about my own origins. For example, do I really have European ancestry? Why am I so attached and attracted to all things South Asian? Be it clothes, food, people, histories and identities, I felt more attuned to South Asians than I did to East Asians. So almost immediately after watching that documentary, I sent my saliva samples to 23andMe for analysis.

Two weeks after submitting my DNA, I got my results online. And I was in for a shocker!

This was the breakdown of my DNA results:

50 % Han Chinese (and the genes were from about 75-100 years ago)

12 % Northern European (from 16th century)

8-9 % South East Asian (from 17th century)

6-7 % Indigenous South East Asian (from 17th century)

1 % Black (unknown)

22 % Southern Indian Continent (from 19th century)

What???

The last 22 per cent of my DNA took me completely by surprise as I had never heard any mention of our Indian or South Asian heritage. And while our traditional meals consisted of a variety of curries, it was never explained why these food traditions were passed down from generation to generation, except that it was grandma’s Eurasian roots.

Well, now I knew the reason. And it explained so much. And gave me a sense of identity that I felt was always missing. I remember how happy I was to get these results, and to know that what drew me to all things South Asian was an identity that was missing for most of my life. People talk about that ‘Aha!’ moment. Well for me, it was more like, ‘Ah!’ moment. I felt so much joy and the self-doubt and self-tormenting began to unravel.

After getting my DNA results, I told my brother about it. He said he wasn’t surprised, accepted it and that was the end of it. He said it made sense. It was a little bit anticlimactic for me since it was like a revelation to me. But such is life.

Next was to tell my mother and father. My mother did not believe she had South Asian roots and did not believe it was true. She said she would have known if she was. Her argument was that she, her mother and her sisters all had fair skin (forgetting that her brothers came in all shades). She was also forgetting that many South Asians have fair skin as well. My father was silent on the topic. I think it made him wonder about how this impacted him, us, and the extended family. It wasn’t a topic of discussion he was open to. And finally, I told my older stepsister, who smiled and said, “Of course we have Indian blood,” but never expanded on it. Funny how the reactions I got from my family were so all over the place!

And then, it was time to share this with the extended family. My Aunties, my mother’s sisters, were skeptical of the results, and wondered if maybe my DNA got mixed up with someone else’s. I was quite taken aback by the strong denial from that generation. On the other hand, my cousins embraced it and said it made total sense.

Unfortunately by the time I did my DNA test, grandma was no longer with us, she’d passed away a few years before that. When she was alive, and when I or someone else asked about her background, she was either silent or vague about her ancestry. She never talked much about it, and never spoke of her parents or relations. The few relations who tried to trace our roots, always encountered roadblocks and dead ends. The unknown variables of grandma and her relations were lost to us when she died. And that was the same for grandpa as well. Only a few remaining photographs were the remnants of our past.

For me, once I learned about my DNA results, it was easy to embrace my Indian ancestry. I now understood my happiness and ease when I first met the Khush community. I now also appreciated more why I was drawn to South Asian cultures, novels by South Asian writers, and the intricate interconnecting histories of South Asia. And my love, and my family’s love, of curries. I felt like a part of me, a significant part of me, that was dormant, had surfaced. While I may not look South Asian, my roots are firmly planted there. My loves, desires and wishes all flow toward South Asia and the people. And it totally made sense to me.

And to further ‘seal the deal’, several years after I did my DNA test, my brother, his family and I were invited to a traditional Christmas dinner at the home of some Goan friends. When my brother and I saw the lavish Goan spread on the dining table, we looked at each other and said, “We’re Goans!” These were almost the same dishes and foods that we also grew up with. While the names were different, the ingredients, taste and look of the dishes were identical. These included:

The Goan fish curry (growing up, we called it grandma’s fish curry).

Pork vindaloo (same name)

Chicken xacuti (chicken curry)

 Sorpotal (same name)

Prawn pulao (prawn rice)

Tendli pickle (gourd pickle)

 Mandeli fry (ikan bilis chilli fry)

 Mince potato chops (lamb cutlets)

Sorak curry (coconut curry)

 Ambotik (hot and sour fish curry)

So now I had an identity that linked me to a place in a land that I always felt was apart of me and rich in architecture, cuisine and history.

I am home.

Today, I find myself drawn to things Chinese and Indian. I can’t choose which culture I am more akin to, and feel very much a part of both. My decision and choice to embrace two significant parts of my ancestry is an identity that brings me comfort and joy. I love being Chinese and East Asian. And I also love being Indian and South Asian. I love the foods, the cultures and the traditions of both. As someone who grew up understanding and practising Chinese and Eurasian traditions, I find myself now learning and embracing Indian and South Asian traditions.

I may not look South Asian, and I may not speak any South Asian dialect or language, but it is part of who I am, and part of my DNA! I finally found a place that I can call home, and it is comfortable and familiar.

These are the roots that bind me. These are the genes that fit.