Katie Goh: “You can't live through other people's eyes”
The author on the myth of authenticity, language barriers and the variousness of mixed identity
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week’s guest is author Katie Goh, who is of mixed Chinese Malaysian and white Irish heritage. The author of Foreign Fruit, Katie’s memoir explores the history of the orange as a means to understanding the world and her place in it. The hybrid fruit is full of metaphors, dreams, mythologies and superstitions, containing layers of meaning and multiple identities, just like mixed people. It’s a book that will open your mind, so get a taste and read Katie’s story here now.
How do you describe your background?
In the context of the forms you have to fill out, my option is not there. My dad is Chinese Malaysian, my mom is white Irish. I call myself Irish a lot of the time because I was born in Ireland. If I was to describe my entire background and heritage, I would say Chinese-Malaysian-Irish.
Most of my family are still in Malaysia, with my great grandfather and grandmother emigrating from China. My dad came by himself to the North of Ireland when he was a teenager to study during The Troubles. My mum is from Donegal in the northwest of Ireland, the most beautiful part of Ireland I have to say. She came to the North of Ireland when she was studying. My parents met in the hospital, where she was a nurse and my dad was a doctor.
Can you pinpoint the differences between being Malaysian Chinese and mainland Chinese?
China is pushed into this place of being very monocultural. Everyone has to speak Mandarin, there's this idea of it as one united country, whereas Malaysia is so multicultural. There’s the Malay people, Chinese Malaysians, Indian Malaysians… With my family being there for one or two generations, they’ve taken on a lot of different cultural influences, like Indian influences in food and what they celebrate.
Because you grew up in a white-majority area, you technically made up 0% of the population when the figures were rounded.
Northern Ireland was 99% white when I was growing up, but Dad had a lot of really good friends who were Malaysian, so we could come together and celebrate things like Chinese New Year. When I was at home, I could be fully Chinese-Malaysian-Irish, but at school or with my friends, they didn't really get it.
If someone at school said they were getting a “ch*nky” for dinner, someone would say “you can’t say that, Katie’s half-Chinese.” The first person would say “oh, I didn’t realise,” which made me feel weird as well, belonging to an extent but always being on the outside.
On top of that, I was bisexual and didn’t know what that was. It was also very Protestant and loyalist at the time I grew up, and that wasn't my family's background. There were a lot of shades to this feeling of not really belonging. It was like Severance. As I got older, I was trying to bring these two sides of myself together, my innie and my outie.
It feels like there's been a shift, that you now feel confident to inhabit yourself fully. Is that something that's happened over time?
I feel more comfortable with being uncomfortable. Growing up, I didn’t learn to speak Malay or a dialect of Chinese or Irish. We only learned English. I felt very disconnected from all sides of my heritage. If you don’t speak a language, that can be very alienating. All my family will speak in their Longyan dialect to each other, I don’t understand.
My grandmother learned English when she came to Malaysia as a young woman, but she doesn't speak it fluently. I always felt sad that I couldn’t have a conversation with her. There was a barrier between us.
For a long time, I felt a lot of shame and like I wasn't enough for either side. Now, I feel more comfortable being a product of my upbringing. I can always change – I started going to Mandarin classes and learning more about the history of Malaysia. I’m trying to learn more Irish as well and more Irish history, which is also a history of people who were oppressed.
Now, I can say when I don’t know something. I've embraced being mixed, whereas as a kid, I didn't really know mixed was an identity in itself. I felt like I had to be one or the other.
I’m also more curious about being mixed. A lot of mixed people go on that journey. For so much of our teenage years, we’re just trying to survive. If you’re mixed, queer, trans, from a minority background… you just need to get through. At university, or afterwards, you feel like you can figure things out.
You’ve now been to China and Malaysia, which felt like an important trip. What was it like to realise that it might not give you what you thought it was going to?
I thought I’d find this sudden connection to where I come from. I built it up as this fantasy place. When I went to my ancestral village, where my grandfather’s family came from, it was just a place, people wearing jeans and living their lives in a normal village, not Hakka buildings.
It was really good for me to break that bubble and stop exoticising and romanticising people. When I was there, I was a stranger. They’d say ‘you come from Europe, you're not even Asian.’ I get that, I did come from Europe. It can feel very alienating, and when I go back to Malaysia and my family calls me white it feels quite strange because I know that when I'm back in the UK, I'm Asian.
I feel more comfortable embracing that sense of strangeness in myself. There's a very particular colonial history in Malaysia, so I am just white to those people. When I was younger, I’d feel a bit offended or sad. But now, it’s fine. At the end of the day, you can't live through other people's eyes. You can’t live by just your exterior skin, that can't be just how you feel your full self.
What’s the best thing about being mixed for you?
Being mixed, and queer as well, you can hold many different things at once. I am holding my things, and then I speak to you and you're holding so many other things. I'm so curious about all these parts of your identity; how did your parents meet? How did your family get from one place to the other?
It has made me feel like you can be a whole person, but also have things that feel like they contradict or don't go together so well. With Foreign Fruit, so much of it is about the orange, a hybrid fruit. Something you think is a pure thing is actually a hybrid and can change over time, its meaning too. That is very much a metaphor for being mixed-race.
I was also struck by the line you wrote about how being mixed is “loaded with accusations of inauthenticity.”
There are things you hear as a mixed person that feel like a particular type of racism that people who are monoracial don’t get. People talk about you in such weird ways. Getting my COVID vaccine, the guy basically told me I wasn’t Scottish. When I told him where I was from, he said “that’s a lovely mixture,” the way you talk about wine. People also talk about me in halves – why do you feel like you can talk about me as percentages or fractions, like you’re baking a cake?
I was talking about Chinese Malaysian stuff recently, and this really nice Chinese guy said “but you're not actually Chinese or Malaysian.” It’s a Pandora’s box of issues. In the book, I ask what authenticity even is when it comes to race or culture. It's a very slippery slope that leads to ideas of racial purity.
You can also pay respect to tradition in your own way. That’s the thing about traditions, they’re meant to change. I don‘t think this idea of authenticity is a good way of judging someone's sense of self. It’s easy to get caught up in, ‘if I can’t speak the language I can’t really be that thing.’ It would be a shame to not try to embrace parts of your culture more, but it doesn't mean that you're inauthentic.
Being inauthentic can be a great thing in itself. Why would you not want to take a little bit of that, a little bit of something else, and make something new?
Are there parallels between your mixed and queer identities?
It’s very particular. You might not feel comfortable coming out to every side of your family. I am not out with my Malaysian family, but if they asked me, I’d tell them. There is this sense of having to curtail that part of yourself whenever you're with parts of your family. Malaysia has laws that prevent homosexuality, but they were occupied by the British and these laws are hangovers from Empire.
There’s a very bisexual thing of ‘I'm not straight enough, I'm not gay enough.’ It also means you look at people differently, seeing them as whole people rather than gender or race.
How would you sum up your mixed identity in one word?
Variousness. That word is so open, you can move around it a lot. It’s a very big word, you can take it in as many directions as you want.
The term mixed-race holds so much. That feels very joyous, there's so much opportunity. That's how I want to be in the world. I don't want to feel boxed in or labelled. I want to feel like I can be curious and explore.
Get your copy of Foreign Fruit at Bookshop.org or Amazon.co.uk now. Next week, I’ll be speaking to Sunstruck author William Rayfet Hunter. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox on Monday. Shop Mixed Messages tote bags and bookmarks on Etsy now!
Enjoy Mixed Messages? Support me on Ko-Fi! Your donations, which can start from £3, help me pay for the transcription software needed to keep this newsletter weekly, as well as special treats for subscribers. I also earn a small amount of commission (at no extra cost to you) on any purchases made through my Bookshop.org and Amazon affiliate links, where you can shop books, music and more by mixed creators.
Mixed Messages is a weekly exploration of the mixed-race experience, from me, Isabella Silvers. My mom is Punjabi (by way of East Africa) and my dad is white British, but finding my place between these two cultures hasn’t always been easy. That’s why I started Mixed Messages, where each week I’ll speak to a prominent mixed voice to delve into what it really feels like to be mixed.