Kaycee Gu

She/her

Founder of BAQC ESEA

|@kcxgu|@baqc_esea|

October seems to have a special meaning for me. The birthday of everyone I’ve ever seriously dated is in October; the house that I bought completed in October; and, at the point of origin, the little 9-year-old me left China for the UK in October 2003.

October 2003 was such a seismic shift in my life that it’s hard to imagine how my life would have played out had my mother not brought me to the UK. I remember her asking me if I wanted to come with her to England but, even then, I knew it was a question that’s not really a question. If I had been honest, the answer would have been "no". I had no desire to leave my whole world to travel into the void known as England.

At that time, there was no internet to show me what England was like. I only knew that people abandoned their families to go there, work hard, make money, and supposedly have a better life. Once they get there, they would disintegrate into a monthly voice over the telephone line, a name on an international package and gossip on other people’s tongues. “People” was my mother. I didn’t want to become her. I wanted to stay as flesh and blood, play with my friends, spend time with my grandma, and grow up to be like my cousin. But, of course, when you are asked a non-question, you get a non-choice. Off I go.

On an ordinary Thursday, I got on my first ever long-haul flight to London. On the plane, as the flight attendants passed our food to us, my mother told me I’d have to learn English. I nodded, “好 (okay)“. Then, as she taught me how to spread butter on a plain white bread roll, I thought: 不用吧，骗我的吧，世界上几十亿中国人，他们多多少少会说点汉语吧。没事儿 (surely not, she must be messing around. There are billions of Chinese people in the world, surely they know how to speak Chinese. It’s fine).

Once we arrived in London, her new, English husband picked us up from the airport and drove us to their home in a cul-de-sac in Luton, Bedfordshire. Everything was lovely but everything was so different. The air smelled different, the roads were missing two lanes at all times, there were no shops around for miles, hardly any high rises, so many more trees, so quiet, so lonely.

On Monday morning, my mother walked me to school. It was so small. Coming from a junior school that had two buildings, each three-storeys tall, with a huge playground in between, I thought this little primary school made of bungalows and huts was super cute. It didn’t take long to get to class but when I did, I froze. Everyone looked so different to me with their blonde hair, blue eyes and white skin. One minute they were talking to each other, the next they were all staring at me. Like a fawn in headlights, I just stood there, eyes wide open, unable to move, nowhere to hide. Strings of what was gibberish to my ears later, I followed the international gesture to sit down. My mouth was dry, vision blurred, but my thoughts were startlingly clear: my mother was right, I had to learn English.

Unleashed onto the colourful little playground, I saw one boy and one girl that were Chinese-looking. I ran up to them to introduce myself to my new friends but they just stared blankly at me as I talked and then ran away. Later I found out that although they were of Chinese ethnicity, they were never taught to speak Chinese.

Maybe it was during these months of my life that shaped my dislike of doing things alone. For at least three months, no words parted from my lips at school, no one sat with me as I had lunch and no one wanted to play with me. I knew that the only solution was to learn English faster so that’s what I did. All of my time after school was dedicated to learning English, copying the Oxford English dictionary and rehearsing sentences.

Around three months later, I began to have light conversations with people and started to make friends. Looking back, I was incredibly lucky to have teachers and support teachers helping me at school and classmates that were friendly and tried to help me whenever they could, with or without me knowing.

But now that I could understand what people were saying, I began to hear the racial slurs too, from teenagers and adults alike. They thought shouting “ching chang chong”, “chink”, “chinky”, “go back home” at me was funny.

I didn't understand the humour. I was 10 years old.

With the racial slurs, my internalised racism began to insidiously slip in. I thought that maybe if I was more like the English folks around me, these comments would go away so I worked tirelessly to perfect my British accent and started eating sandwiches for lunch instead of Chinese food. Then I went on to actively ditch all my knowledge of the Chinese language and refused to learn about Chinese history and culture. Much later, in my late teenage years, I started to use skin whitening cream, light coloured foundations, and heavy eyeliners. Thankfully the emo and goth look was in fashion back then.

And, of course, to the big, scary question of “Where are you from?”, I angrily answered “Here, Luton”.

Not only did myself have such a strong opinion as to where I’m from. Other people did too. Growing up, despite telling people that I was Chinese, there were plenty of people that disagreed and insisted that I was actually Korean, or Japanese, or maybe I was mixed race. They seemed to know where I was going too. They were absolutely certain that Oxford and Cambridge would be fighting over me because Chinese people are really clever (plot spoiler: they didn't).

In parallel with my internalised racism, I was beginning to find that I had feelings for women. My sexual awakening started when I was about 13 years old with the film Saving Face. This was the age of Limewire, Pirate Bay and illegally downloading and sharing films. My mother had received a CD with a bunch of films on it from her friend, one of which was Saving Face.

I watched it and kept watching it, over and over and over again. For the longest time, I didn’t know why I liked it so much. I didn’t have the vocabulary for how I was feeling, in neither Chinese nor English. So I searched online and educated myself. Aha, I was gay. But once I learned the term “gay”, I also became aware of its negative connotations. “Ew, that’s so gay”, “同性恋是一种病 (being gay is an illness)”, etc. Tumblr also suggested that “coming out” could be dangerous, especially with Asian families who held traditional values. I thought about my family. They were not extremely traditional but they weren’t exactly spearheading liberal values either and since I had no one else to turn to about this, I batted my feelings into a black hole and worked on my internalised racism instead.

It was only in my early 20s that I started to embrace the mix of my Chinese heritage, my British upbringing, and my sexuality. I taught myself Chinese again and started to learn more about Chinese culture and history. I accepted that I was gay and was terrified of “coming out” to my mum (but eventually I did). I deeply understood that British queer East and Southeast Asians (ESEAs) face a particular set of challenges with respect to their heritage and sexuality.

Fast forward to today, we are still not seeing queer ESEAs being adequately represented in mainstream media. We are still faced with the trepidation and doubt of “coming out” to our families. We are, undoubtedly, a part of British society yet when we see displays of queer history, we rarely see people that look like us and often walk away with the sense that it’s their history, not ours.

That’s why I wanted to start this initiative. I want to:

• Build a wider community, offering a space online and offline to discover, support and promote each other.
• Be more present so that we can have a better, more comprehensive representation of the British East and Southeast Asian Queer Community.
• Produce an archive of British East and Southeast Asian queer history, starting from now.