Nicola Dinan: “Racial identity is so contingent on time and place”
The author on the dynamism of whiteness, food as a balm and observation
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to author Nicola Dinan, who is of mixed Malaysian-Chinese and white British heritage. Nicola’s debut novel, Bellies, is out on Thursday and follows the relationship between Ming and Tom. At first your typical boy meets boy love story, Ming announces her intention to transition and suddenly their mapped-out futures take different turns. You won’t want to put this book down, but I urge you to for the next few minutes to read Nicola’s own story.
Can you tell me about your family background?
I usually refer to myself as mixed-race. I'm half-white British and half-Malaysian Chinese. The ways I’ve described myself have definitely changed with time.
You’ve spent time in both London and Malaysia – did living in each of those places affect you?
Racial identity and how we understand our race relative to others is so contingent on time and place. I was born in Hong Kong before my parents retired in Malaysia. In those places, my experience was closer to being treated like a white person. Moving back to the UK, it put a lot of perspective on my own sense of whiteness – I was suddenly treated as an Asian person. It’s not as if my sense of self was more white or Asian in each place – although I will say being in the UK and experiencing homesickness, I felt close to my Asian side in a way that I don’t necessarily feel as close to my white side.
What I think mixed-white people offer an interesting perspective on is that dynamism of whiteness and prejudice. Something that Bellies tried to examine with Ming, who is half Malaysian-Chinese and half white British, is this sense of contingency she experiences around her racial identity depending on where she is. The farther away she is from home, the greater the longing to be identified with her Asian side, even though she feels more Asian when she’s in the UK. She's very aware of the role of whiteness and privilege, particularly class privilege, that she has.
Growing up in Malaysia and then Hong Kong, your Asian culture was all around you. Did you bring that back to the UK?
Definitely. There’s been a greater yearning to be closer to home. For me it's not just feeling close to my culture, it’s a literal manifestation of homesickness from being away from the countries I grew up in. A fantastic balm for that homesickness is food. Quite shamefully the only language I speak fluently is English, so the most effective form of love and communication has always been food.
My amma, my maternal grandmother, and I didn’t share a common language, but we’d spend every Chinese New Year at her house and she would share food with us – it was the simplest way she could communicate her love for me and my sisters. I try to cook Malaysian and Chinese food as much as I can, and go to Chinese and Malaysian restaurants in London.
I also found that the things I’m wearing are embracing my Chinese and South East Asian heritage. More and more I’m looking abroad for clothes by Southeast Asian designers rather than buying from stores in the UK. It makes me feel closer to home.
Did you ever speak to your family about being mixed?
I haven’t had those conversations. We have discussions about race, which me and my sisters and mum tend to come to as Asian people, appreciating that I have had a very different experience to my mum. We still come offering our perspectives as ethnic minorities in the UK and still ethnic minorities in Malaysia because only 30% of Malaysia’s population is Chinese.
In conversations or conflicts growing up, we were either white or Chinese. We were “my Chinese children'' or “behaving like white children.” It always felt like there was a conversation on these individual parts rather than the whole.
Do you think there’s a stereotype that people perceive of mixed people?
The stereotype of mixed-race writers is that everyone’s going to write a spoken word poem about being caught between two worlds or dreaming of the mango tree. There’s a really good essay by Andrea Long Chu about the mixed-Asian novel, and she touches on how a lot of literature by Asian people tries to connect with this sense of division within oneself. It’s not a stereotype in a negative way.
In future, I want more nuance in how we begin to talk about that dynamism of how whiteness shifts through space and time. Ming is a trans woman of colour, she has the triple jackpot in the oppression Olympics. But at the end of the day, she appreciates how much class has nullified so much of that disadvantage of her. We need to take the conversation beyond the lens of identity only, and look at material conditions which affect how you’re treated.
There’s a sense of specialisation around mixed-race people too, that we’re more beautiful. It was taken as a given, there was no unpacking of the colonial beauty standards which fed into that idea about presenting in a more palatable form to the white mind. I'd like to unpack that. People are still saying things without really understanding the historical roots of why they say it. In some ways, mixed-race people are a useful experiment in how racism operates so insidiously. The Western-centric lens through which we view things can be so reductive in terms of understanding the specifics of cultural identities.
What’s the best thing about being mixed for you?
Something that really informed my work is this position of being on the outside of things, feeling a bit distant from the cultures in which you inhabit. Feeling like I don’t totally belong in Hong Kong and Malaysia, although I do feel like I belong in London and it’s probably the one place I’ve lived where no one seems really arsed where I’m from.
I grew up abroad with a slightly different perspective than the average British person. What that lends itself to is something that's quite observational, which I might not be able to observe as well if I wasn’t mixed.
Can you sum up your mixed experience in a word?
Observation, I’m forever observing.
Pre-order Bellies here. Next week, I’ll be taking a summer break before we’re back with actor and audiobook narrator Natalie Simpson. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox when we’re back.
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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.