…

And then, yesterday, I got this WhatsApp from my mom:

Just to put this in perspective, my mother (a US and HK citizen, previously also a British subject and British passport holder) is advising me to enter the US – the country of my birth and first citizenship – on a British passport … because she’s worried I’ll be sent to an El Salvadoran prison. Or worse.

My mother knows that I have committed no crime. She knows that I’m an immigration lawyer, qualified to practice in both the US and the UK.

She worries, that would make no difference.

…

Initially, I brushed pass this exchange as a bit of folly – silly older person panic, too much MSNBC.

It is also “illegal” for a US citizen to enter or leave the country unless they are bearing a valid US passport. I have always thought this was a particularly stupid rule – and anyone who is a dual citizen and travels between their countries of citizenship will understand why.

Our family histories, hidden in plain sight

Even so, these messages made me think a bit harder about my mother. She was born in Macau, where her parents fled to seek safety during the WWII Japanese military occupation of Hong Kong.

And I thought about her husband, whose Jewish parents fled to the US from Eastern Europe, escaping the early days of the Hungarian Holocaust.

Both were born to families who fled their homes to escape war or persecution. At the time they were born, their parents were struggling to build a new life, in a new place, while their homelands of nationality were occupied under martial law.

It made me wonder what their parents were like. Their parents knew what it was like to live with freedom and privilege and to see that swept away in days, perhaps hours. They must have known profound fear.

I remember my grandmother as a distant, formidable and terrifying figure, and a total queen at the mahjong table – but was she also grieving, traumatised?

My mother has never really spoken to me about this. And I’m certain that my mother, at least, doesn’t identify as a “refugee”.

…

A mother’s wisdom

And yet. Something about my mother’s lived experience – a memory, an instinct – drove her to give me this advice: keep your options open; travel on your safest passport.

And this made me revisit some other wisdom from the olds

• Get a good education. They can take everything from you, but they can’t take your education.
• Look after your family. You don’t have to like them, but it is your duty to look after each other.
• Look after your health. Without your health, you have nothing.

I’m sure I bridled and fought against each of these lessons over the years. But this morning, with the sun on my face, and both history and future in mind, they seem wise and true.

Almost, urgent.

…

Here’s where I’ve ended today: maybe it’s time to teach the kids how to play mahjong.

Maybe we watch the film Crazy Rich Asians while we’re at it.

Maybe the olds were wiser than I thought they were.

…

And while we’re there, leaving you with this other wisdom from the olds:

Every day is a new day, and the sun always shines again

Thanks for reading The Long View again this week! I would love to hear your reflections, either on the challenge of living across a border from family and loved ones – or on a moment when you realised that your “olds” were wiser and stronger than you thought they could be.

First published on LinkedIn on 11 April 2025:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crossing-borders-safety-mothers-love-jen-ang-mwawe

All kinds of books: fiction, nonfiction, poetry – but especially, banned books.

There are a few reasons for this:

For the love of books

First of all, I love books – and some of you may know or remember that my mother was a college librarian and my father was (for a time) a history lecturer at the same small farming college. This meant that I spent a lot of time in the library as a child – reading, playing, drawing, messing about, and often, falling asleep between stacks of books.

My parents also did not restrict the scope of my reading, in any way – an approach that I now realise was controversial, and one I have maintained in raising my own children. An introverted only child, I read precociously, and voraciously.

It’s true that I read some books that I never should have read, at the age I first encountered them. But it’s also true that reading opened up entirely new worlds to me – other histories, perspectives and experiences that I could never (and can never) make myself, but that fundamentally changed how I saw the world around me, and my place in this world.

Reading is good for you…

The research is not conclusive as to whether reading makes you a better person, but there is solid evidence that reading can not only increase your empathy and make you more altruistic, but can also help you better communicate with others, and navigate tricky social situations in real life.

Also, for me, reading is fun.

I know that not everyone feels this way, and some people really struggle with reading – and that’s okay. When I say “reading” and “books” here, I also mean listening to and watching literary works.

I think the key thing is the immersive experience of throwing yourself into someone else’s imaginary world, emerging into the light, many hours later, astonished, satisfied and …slightly different to who you were before you started.

Dangerous ideas: why we should pay attention when ideas are banned

This week, I taught a class for the University of Glasgow’s Lawyering for Social Justice Clinic on critical theory, including critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an approach to examining law and society from the perspective that racism in society is not just the result of individual bias, but that it is systemic – embedding in law, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce inequality.

I studied the law in the 1990s at Georgetown University, taught by people like David Cole, Lisa Heinzerling and Gary Peller, through the lenses of critical race theory, as well as feminist theory. Queer theory was not taught when I went to law school, but it, too, is an allied form of critical analysis.

I find the idea that law and society are interlinked to be both self-evidently true, and also kind of uplifting – because it suggests that what has been made, can be un-made and re-made by us all.

The opposite view (that there is no link between institutions and social values) feels both unrealistic and depressing. This view suggests that we experience racism in society because individual people are racist and will forever be, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. I prefer not to live in that world.

Sometimes, I rehearse ideas – running through lectures before I deliver them with family or friends, basically whoever doesn’t get out of the way fast enough

This week, I did a run through with middle daughter (now a teenager) whilst she cooked dinner.

When I finished, I added, “Now if I had been your teacher, and we lived in one of 12 states in the United States, what I have just taught you could result in me being disciplined, maybe fired, and in our entire school being defunded.”

Say what?

It’s true: teaching critical race theory in public K-12 (primary and secondary education) is banned in a number of US states, most recently in the state of Louisiana.

This phenomenon goes hand in hand with a 200% rise in book bans in the US in 2023-24, according to PEN America, “including titles on sexuality, substance abuse, depression and other issues students face in an age of accelerating technologies, climate change, toxic politics and fears about the future.”

With the recent election of Trump to succeed Biden to the US presidency, together with a powerful and growing grassroots campaign to ban a wide range of books in schools and public libraries, it is likely that we will see an increase in banning books and ideas – for the next generation of American children, and maybe also, here in the UK.

Why we should all read banned books

Just to be clear: not all banned books are worth reading.

Some banned books are actually pretty hard going, or badly written, and if you think about it, setting your mind to reading only books banned by people who hate being confronted with different and controversial views is equivalent to taking restaurant recommendations from a frenemy: unclear whether the recommendation will be on point, but definite that they don’t have your best interests at heart!

Having said that, there are an extraordinary number of brilliant and thoughtful books that have been (and are being) banned, and they deserve our attention, especially now.

A story shared, never dies.

There is something disturbing about an attempt to narrow our worldviews by restricting our access to ideas, and the best way to combat that is to keep reading, talking about and sharing those ideas with others.

This year, for middle child’s birthday (who is also a precocious and voracious reader) I’ve bought a series of 24 used classic banned books, and individually wrapped them in brown paper, with a summary highlighting a snippet of plot or content. She can choose to open the all at once, or unwrap one at at time – and it’s okay to share this wee secret with you, because she does not read The Long View

So…

I hope I have made the case for picking up, reading and gifting banned books this holiday break.

If you are looking for a list of great recommendations, here is a short, accessible list from Penguin Random House as well as this longer read in Teen Vogue from independent bookshop owners in the US.

Remember our public libraries! And please, if you do buy books this year, also consider book swaps, buying used books or supporting a great, independent local bookshop like Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh or Housman’s in London.

Here’s a list of Independent Radical Booksellers in the UK – and I would be so pleased if readers would share their favourite controversial reads, the best local bookshops – or just your aspirational to-read list for the holidays … book club is in session!

First published on LinkedIn on 13 December 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-we-should-all-read-banned-books-jen-ang-gapbe

What exactly is Thanksgiving?

You can skip this part if you already know, but here’s a brief rundown: American thanksgiving is a celebration that takes place on the fourth Thursday in November and is a federal holiday, which means that most people get this day off work.

In the US, traditionally, people travel home for Thanksgiving dinner and take Friday off work, so they can stay through the weekend. That makes for a very busy week of travel, but also means that the holiday can have a strong cultural significance for some families, and communities – being a secular holiday that everyone can celebrate at the same time – and a more inclusive alternative to Christmas (which not everybody celebrates) for gathering with family and friends.

The Thanksgiving Story: Disney Version

As a child, I was taught the Thanksgiving story in nursery and primary school, sat listening as I made turkey decorations out of handprints on paper plates, and daydreamed of roast sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and Libby’s pumpkin pie.

We are told that in the 1600s, the Pilgrims (Puritanical Christians fleeing religious persecution) came from England, by way of The Netherlands, and settled in what is now New England. They were ill equipped for the weather, and also had no idea how to farm the soil.

Half of the 105 people who arrived in the autumn, died during the first winter. They were saved by a tribe of Native Americans who had observed them from afar, eventually took pity on them, shared clothing and food, taught them to farm, hunt and safely navigate the landscape.

To thank the Native Americans (who we were told to call “Indians” at the time), the Pilgrims held a feast and invited the tribe to celebrate a successful harvest and the survival of the colony with them. This was such a success, it became an annual tradition – of “thanks giving” to the people who saved their lives, and the colony.

Lovely, heartwarming and simple… but is it true?

Sort of.

Actually, not really.

The “Real” Turkey: English Identity, Slavery and Counternarrative

Most of us now realise that the “real” Thanksgiving story is a lot darker, but also takes in a bigger slice of history – and is a lot more human, and interesting.

It’s true that the Pilgrims were fleeing persecution in England, because they were religious separatists in the early 1600s, at a time when it was illegal to form any church outside of the Church of England.

They fled to Amsterdam in 1608, and mostly settled near Leiden over the following year. Leiden is apparently known as the City of Refugees, and a fun fact according to the city’s official website is that today, 3 out of 4 “Leidenaars” are descended from refugees. The Pilgrims lived free from persecution in Leiden but apparently (and I do find this difficult to understand) experienced their children growing up speaking Dutch as a loss of English identity and somehow felt it would be better to travel to the New World to found a colony there.

Some Pilgrims left Leiden in 1620, famously joining others on a ship called the Mayflower, which later landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Today, in the US the Mayflower Society is an organisation compromised only of direct lineal descendants of those who originally sailed on the Mayflower, which is quite something to own up to, given what I’ve just told you (and am about to tell you) about those people.

It’s true that half of those who landed on the Mayflower, perished through the first winter, and their lives were saved by the kindness of strangers – Native Americans who had observed their arrival but kept a distance for a good few months.

But who were these kind people?

Most modern histories refer to a pivotal figure: Tisquantum (or “Squanto“), a Patuxet from the Wampanoag confederation, raised around the area known as Plymouth, where the Pilgrims landed.

Squanto spoke English because he had, in 1610 or 1611, been kidnapped and forced into slavery by an English captain (either Thomas Hunt, John Smith or George Weymouth – possibly, all of them). The only account all the histories give for this, is greed. Either the English wanted to “show Indians” to their financial backers, or they wanted to sell slaves as as commodities to increase their financial return, or both.

Squanto and a number of other Native American slaves were thrown into a ship’s hold, taken to Europe and sold as slaves in Malaga, Spain. Squanto either escaped or was later sold to Master John Slaney in Cornhill, London, who became Master of the London & Bristol Company (known as the “Newfoundland Company“) and put him on a ship back to the New World, to serve as translator and negotiator in the interests of that company.

According to legend, another Native American sent for Squanto after the tribe made contact with the Pilgrims, because they knew that he was fluent in English and would be able to serve as an intermediary for the two communities.

…

If you are now curious about alternative history and counternarratives, I highly recommend checking out this from the National Museum of the American Indian: Rethinking Thanksgiving Celebrations: Native Perspectives on Thanksgiving

…

Bringing It Home: the kindness of strangers

Something I like about digging a little deeper into our common histories is that is is messy, but it is also more human.

We see and feel the fear, uncertainty and questionable decisions that people make when they are stressed and under pressure. We also see historians (and others) struggle to ascribe human motivations to the actions of people, after they have acted.

Did Squanto act out of kindness and generosity, exercising near superhuman ability to forgive English people for what they did to him?

Or did Squanto “betray his people,” for greed or out of a sense of self-preservation?

Did he even have a sense of “my people” – after everything he had endured, and all he had seen of the world?

We can’t know, but for me, the messy story is a better place to start from. And it’s the messy story I want to reflect on today, and how I will talk about Thanksgiving to my own children, and maybe to their children, in years to come.

So today, I’m giving thanks for:

the kindness of strangers

messy history

the human capacity to forge friendships, to endure, to take action to change their circumstances, and to tell and retell their stories, forever

Thanks for reading again this week and would love to hear about your own relationship to messy history, or the kindness of strangers, or maybe just the things you’re grateful for today. (This is also a Thanksgiving tradition, and a good one!)

And finally, here’s a Thanksgiving treat for you, the unstoppable lyricism of Bob Dylan presenting an alternative version of the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower

First published on LinkedIn on 29 November 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/giving-thanks-kindness-strangers-jen-ang-e34ke/

Aside from how much fun it is to visit a new place, I love recognising things that feel familiar, and learning about new ways of living, working and creating.

Some things about Slovenia – the architecture, the beautiful, safe and inviting public spaces, and definitely how functional the heating and hot water systems seem to be – remind me very much of the two years I spent as a child living in (unapologetically Communist) China during the late 1980s.

But there are new things here, too. New food to try, sights to see – and of course, a whole history to learn from people who have had very different experiences of living, to me.

On my journeys, I came across this faded sticker, “Push to Reset the World” and it stopped me in my tracks.

This is a very good piece of sticker art, because after looking up the artist @SpaceUtopian – it turns out this was exactly what they were trying to achieve:

Space Utopian Art tries to trigger the soul who comes across this sticker by planting a seed for small conscientious shifts.

So let’s take up that invitation, together.

…

If you could hit the reset button, and make the world over, could you do a better job than where we are now?

This is a Long View kind of question, because we are often so caught up in our day-to-day battles, that we don’t look up and ask the big questions, like: what does good living in a great society look like?

Sometimes, we avoid asking those questions because they are too painful. We feel too alone and powerless in our space to make changes happen to get to the better place.

We may even acknowledge that change comes so slowly that we are unlikely to see “great” happen in our lifetimes.

And I have often said that when injustice in the wider world feels too overwhelming, in order to carry on, it may be necessary to stay local, and focus on the small wins.

But today, let’s consider the possibility that we are more likely to achieve goals that we can clearly picture and articulate.

For individuals, we call this “visualisation” and I’m sure there is still some debate about whether this actually works, although personally, I’m a fan.

For activists, being about to effectively communicate your vision of better to others is essential for the success of your movement.

Does your thinking lean towards: utopia or dystopia?

I have always liked both utopian and dystopian literature – I see them as the two sides of the same coin, actually. And it must be that I enjoy the thought experiment of taking an idea and exploring the biggest, most extreme version of that idea.

In school, I read extracts from Plato’s The Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.

…But what really captured my imagination were boldly dystopian works like George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and now, many years later, Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games.

(Right now, I’m working through Hugh Howley’s Silo series, but don’t spoil it for me, because I’m still only on the first book, Wool.)

Either way, utopian and dystopian books, movies and visuals are, to my mind, activist works of art or intellect. Only people interested in the impact of systemic ideology on human lives would think to show you the consequences of those ideas, writ large.

So, are you gonna do it? Dream big and push that button?

I hope this has been a welcome break, and maybe got you inspired to dream big today…

Because – and this may be easier for me to see, than for you – you are right now living in someone else’s vision for how you live your life.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to think that the first step towards changing that, is just setting aside a little time for dreaming up your own vision, for you?

First published on LinkedIn on 22 November 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/push-reset-world-power-dreaming-jen-ang-oijke/

This month is about East and South East Asian (ESEA) Heritage Month and picking through stories from my own and collective history, I have two stories that just might be worth passing on.

Story Time: The History of the Mooncake

I have a surplus of mooncakes because the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival fell on 17th September this year, and it is one of two Chinese festivals (the other being the Lunar New Year) that I always celebrate here in the UK.

The Moon Festival is a harvest-type festival, it is marked by the appearance of the full moon in on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month of the year and typically, families share a celebratory meal that includes mooncakes.

These are vaguely linked to a fable about a legendary archer and his wife, Chang-e, who took a magic potion and became goddess of the moon. Want visual context? Watch the 30-second Disney version here in the trailer for their 2020 film Over the Moon

The mooncake also has a brilliant subversive history. For a period of time, China was ruled by a Mongol dynasty (called the Yuan dynasty) and legend tells us that a successful rebellion was incited by Ming revolutionaries who placed subversive messages inside mooncakes distributed widely to Chinese families but not their Mongol rulers. When families cut into the cakes on the evening of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, they read the messages, took up arms and successfully overthrew the ruling dynasty.

All good and fine, but why do I have a surplus of mooncakes?

Two reasons: (1) I love mooncakes, but none of my family here shares this passion. They consist of a sweet pastry outer shell with a dense, sweet bean paste inside – so far so good. But the deluxe versions also feature a cooked, salted duck egg at the centre. Personally, I think this is the best part, but for most people with Western palates, this is really just a step too far.

And (2) following Brexit, Asian foodstuffs have become more expensive and harder to buy in Scotland. Last year, there was a run on mooncakes, with price gouging in the last few days and a single mooncake going for eyewatering prices of £8-12 each.

So this year, I have simply bought far too many. More than anyone in my family will ever eat. Which suits me fine, because it just means – more mooncakes for me.

Story Time II: The Curious History of Opium, Rhubarb and Me

Last week, in London, studying the history of colonialism with colleagues and walking the City of London, we started to speak about the Opium Wars, which were a series of wars between China, the British Empire and France in the mid-19th Century. My own father was a historian of modern Chinese history, and when we lived in China, he made a point of taking me to museums in southern China and talking me through the exhibits.

He told me that the British Empire, facing a trade deficit in China and wanting very much to find items to trade with the Chinese for tea, silk and porcelain were looking for a product that the Chinese wanted to consume. They eventually settled on opium, cultivated and exported from India – a substance which is of course highly addictive, as well as harmful, and resulted in a permanent reversal of the balance of trade, in favour of the British Empire.

If you would like to read more, here is a version of this history from the British national archives which is quite light on taking responsibility, and which justifies Britain waging a war in order to legalise the opium trade as a reasonable defense of a global interest in free and unregulated markets. (If you live in the UK, by the way, this is definitely what your kids are learning in school.)

So Hong Kong, where my mother was born and raised, became a British colony and free trading port, ceded by China to the British following its total defeat in the Opium Wars.

My grandfather, his father and his brothers, originally farmers and small shopkeepers from Southern China, emigrated to the US in the early part of the 20th century. They opened Chinese restaurants and laundromats on the East Coast of the US, eventually however, sending my great-grandfather back to China in his later years, because it had become too expensive to support his lifelong opium habit in the US – it could more easily be serviced in China.

For both my parents, then, our family’s history of nationality, identity and migration – are linked in different ways to the British Empire’s decision, at one point in the distant past, to start trading opium from India for tea in China.

So what about the rhubarb? Hopefully having given you quite a serious schooling on opium, I can now lighten the mood.

My father also taught me that Chinese rhubarb, for a long time, was a highly sought after ingredient for Western medicines, as the root has purgative properties, and was traded on the Silk Route via Russia and also Turkey in medieval times, fetching higher prices than precious cinnamon and saffron. When Britain opened sea trade routes to China, they also traded for rhubarb, which held its price – sometimes trading at 3x the value of opium – for a long time because it could not be cultivated successfully in Europe.

There was a period, though, during or between the Opium Wars, when the Chinese proposed a blockade of rhubarb exports to Britain. The Chinese believed, in short, that if they withheld rhubarb for long enough, British people might actually build up enough internal wind to risk…exploding. Or to at least experience extreme discomfort.

They were, as we now know, mistaken. And eventually, strains of rhubarb were successfully developed to withstand cultivation here in the UK, where it now grows hardy and strong, almost weed-like, in most conditions – consigning this tactical miscalculation by the Chinese to little more than a wry footnote in history.

The stories we tell, and how we tell them

This week, I had wondered about whether to share how we celebrate traditions in Chinese culture, and why it might be worth doing so.

I’ve landed somewhere else … in telling you a story that matters, but also in pointing out the many ways a story can be told and retold: by the victor, by the defeated, by their descendents. I’d like to share these stories with my children, who hold both Chinese and British heritage, and ask them what sense they make of such things.

Like the mooncakes, I’ll expect them to know about their history, personal and collective, but will leave them to decide how to hold that history, and how and where they pass it on.

I guess I’ll finish by also reflecting that I had started with the idea of making visible our connections because I hope that I’ve demonstrated also that “other people’s” history, if you look even just a bit beyond the obvious is also your history… or maybe, all of our history.

That could be liberating if we think about it that way. It is at least the way I would like to think about it.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend, and thanks for joining me again at The Long View. I would love to hear reflections, on these stories or on how you hold traditions and pass on personal and collective histories in your families and to your friends.

First published on LinkedIn on 27 September 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/making-visible-our-connections-past-each-other-jen-ang-ng2ze/

Something shifts inside me when I fly back to the US – the country of my birth, and first nationality. Despite having lived there for a minority of years, and not at all for over two decades, something loosens in my chest when I arrive.

I feel more comfortable, more confident and more like I belong.

I feel like I take up space less apologetically, and if something happens, that I have more of a call on government, the public, the police who are supposed to protect me – than I do elsewhere.

I feel that way despite not actually knowing as much about how things work in the US as I do in the UK, where I have raised my family and learned my profession.

I feel like I matter more here in the US. But why?

What makes us belong?

Have you ever stopped to think about your own nationality and the reasons why you belong in the place where you live?

If you are a migrant, whether recent or distant, or if you have suffered racial or cultural discrimination in your home, you might have asked yourself this, and you might even have an answer. Migrants and racialised people are accustomed to being told to “go back home” and if you think you are home, that is cause for reflection.

But my experience lecturing on the subject of migration and nationality for many, many years is that most people who are from groups that are racially and culturally dominant in their home area, cannot answer this question.

They enjoy a kind of privileged belonging that is most often invisible to them, until their assumptions are challenged – for example, when that sense of belonging is denied, or when someone they know is denied that privilege.

Nationality and belonging

Most people have at least one nationality, meaning they are recognised as a citizen of at least one sovereign state (or nation), although some people are born, or become, stateless.

Each country has sovereign control over the rules that they apply in order to determine citizenship of their state, and by and large, no state has the right to tell other states how these rules should work.

The (very silly) example I give here: if Scotland were a sovereign nation and the government were to determine that anyone can be a Scottish citizen if they drink a can of Irn-Bru and declare their allegiance to the hairy haggis, then this is a legitimate form of nationality law and Scotland is entitled to confer citizenship according to these rules.

More seriously, there are a few common ways in which countries normally confer nationality and they are:

• Jus soli – a right by birth on the soil: for example, I am an American citizen because I was born in the United States
• Jus sanguinis – a right by blood (or descent): for example, my children are American citizens because they are descended from me, and American citizen – despite the fact that they were not born in the US and might never travel there
• Jus matrimonii – a right by marriage: this one is uncommon in modern times, but in some places, a woman would automatically lose her nationality of birth and gain the nationality of her husband, on marriage
• Naturalisation – a privilege (not a right) conferred by states in certain circumstances, which permits people to apply for citizenship if they meet certain rules. For example, I am a naturalised British citizen.

Who decides? And what does that mean for the rest of us?

However – and this is really important – there is no fixed list of routes to nationality, and countries change these rules all the time. The decision to rule in, and rule out, citizenship for people with a connection to a country is very much a political decision, influenced by history, economics, cultural values and so on.

In a democracy, we decide. And yet most people remain unaware of the immigration and nationality rules of their country, and what that means for the people living around them, and their communities.

For example, in the UK, the government has stripped Shemima Begum, a British-born person, of her citizenship and despite the recent change in political leadership shows no signs of reversing that decision, even in the face of compelling evidence that she has been a victim of grooming and child trafficking.

Closer to home (for me), I have written previously about my own journey as a migrant to the UK, including the painful reality that despite being “good migrant,” I am not able to apply for my aging mother to live with us in the UK – despite the fact that she was once a British citizen herself, having been born in Macau (a Portuguese colony) and raised in Hong Kong (a British colony).

Her citizenship was stripped by a political act, the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts 1962 and 1968 – these acts were passed to prevent migration of black and brown people from the former colonies in Asia and Africa, following decolonisation in the 1960s.

Home is a feeling: belonging

Over the years, people have asked me “where is home?” and they mean very different things by that question, when they ask it.

Because I am a racialised person, people who do not know me well usually want to know what Asian country my ancestors might be from. I’m still a bit sensitive about being asked this, but I’m getting over it.

People who know me better, or who have had an opportunity to take in my accent – which is a sort of transatlantic Scottish/American twang – might recognise that I sit between countries, and nationalities, and could be asking a deeply coded question about belonging.

I usually say: home is where you feel you belong. Home is the people I love. Home can be more than one place.

Reflecting on what I’ve written above, the truth is that I don’t have a definitive answer myself. Just a hope that by educating each other, and talking about the harm that barriers, borders and exclusion cause people – we can do better.

If, in a democracy, we decide, then perhaps there is a piece of work for us to do: rethinking our nationality rules so they truly reflect that kind of belonging that we feel people in our communities deserve.

Need some inspiration?

Jackie Kay was the Makar (national poet) of Scotland from 2016 to 2021.

Read Threshold a wonderful poem about belonging and Scottishness, which reminds us:

Our strength is our difference. Dinny fear it. Dinny caw canny.

You can also listen to her read it here.

First published on LinkedIn on 9 August 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/migration-belonging-finding-home-jen-ang-ho18e/

Anti-miscegenation laws are laws that ban marriages between people of different races.

The personal, and the political

Four years ago, in June 2020, I was working from home, at my kitchen table, whilst “home schooling” my two daughters through the first Covid lockdown. In a rare attempt to deliver some form of education to my 11-year-old, I spoke to her about the unimaginable bravery of Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate into an all-white school.

I then went on to tell her that segregationist laws had had an impact on our family, too. For example, anti-miscegenation laws were only outlawed a couple of years before her grandma and grandpa were married – and whilst now, most of the relationships and marriages in our family are interracial, this would have prohibited – potentially a criminal offence – without the Loving case.

Even when her (white) father and I married in the State of Virginia in 1999, we were still legally required to declare our race on the marriage certificate. This requirement was only banned by a court, following a successful legal challenge brought by three couples in 2019.

“But,” my daughter said, “I don’t understand. How do those laws affect us? We’re white.”

Now, my daughter is my biological daughter, which is to say – although her father is white, she looks (at least in a Western cultural context) like me: Asian (or East Asian, depending on where you are reading this).

“But sweetie,” I replied, “That’s nice that you feel white, but that is not how other people see you.”

This was an interesting moment, as a parent.

Does it matter if she doesn’t notice? Should we prepare our children for the world as we know it, or the future world that they will build with others?

Law and the categorisation of people

There is something about law (again, at least in the Western tradition) that proceeds from the categorisation of people. Our diverse and layered identities are carefully peeled back for inspection and regulation.

For example, I will identify myself as: female, between 40-59, neurotypical, Scottish Chinese. If I have to, I will use other categories too: employed, divorced, migrant, homeowner.

Our legal personas are a pale reflection of our true selves. If I ever get to design my own Govt ID card, I would want it to look like this:

(Love this? Make your own trading cards at VisualThinkery https://remixer.visualthinkery.com/a/toptrump)

Thinking critically: whose data, and why?

Many people feel quite alienated from the legal categories used to describe them, and suspicious of giving information about themselves when asked.

That is for good and sensible reasons – for example, my reluctance to give my race on my marriage certificate was (rightly) linked to the ambivalence that I felt about complying with a system of statistical control that had been invented by a white supremacist.

But I am not wholly against legal categorisation. The problem is not the collection of data itself – the key questions are: whose data are you collecting, and why – for what purpose?

In many cases, I think governments should be doing more to collect data about our intersecting identities, for example, in order to better understand the impact of their policies and to fund services that specifically target groups of people who are furthest from justice, and equality.

For example, the National Advisory Council for Women and Girls in Scotland have repeatedly called for more intersectional data to be collected on women and girls’ lives to understand the everyday impact of Scottish Government policies for women and girls.

When important parts of our identity are not accounted for, they are not seen – and gaps in being seen for people with marginalised identities also mean gaps in access to services and support.

That’s why we should keep thinking critically about whose data we collect, and why. And we should welcome positive steps like the decision in the 2022 Scottish Census to include optional questions on sexual orientation and trans status for the first time.

Love is love

Anti-miscegenation laws are not the only example of efforts to control and prohibit relationships between people, solely on the basis that they do not conform to a desired mainstream norm.

And equality has come late for some people – the right for same-sex couples to marry in the United States was not secured until only a decade ago, in the US Supreme Court case of Obergefell v Hodges in 2015. There are good reasons to fear this right could be overturned in the next decade.

Solidarity means making space to ensure our diverse identities are recognised (and celebrated), whilst resisting the control of people through categorisation, where such control is unnecessary or actively harmful.

In short, we should have a say in whose data, and for what purposes.

The last word: Mildred Loving

In June 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving, Mildred Loving issued the following statement:

“My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry….

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

First published on LinkedIn on 14 June 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/equality-marriage-love-loving-jen-ang-z90ge/