Let me start by saying that in the UK when you need to fill in important forms, like registering for a GP you need to put your ethnicity in- you need to tick a box. Ever since I can remember there has never quite been a box for me, despite the fact that this list gets longer and longer. If I recall correctly there is ‘Asian’, and then ‘Mixed Asian + other’. But they don’t mean ‘Asian’ as in ‘East Asian’. In this context it’s always ‘South Asian’ because there is then sometimes a box for ‘Chinese’…and then there is the box I always end up ticking which is just ‘Mixed Other’. The title of this post is dedicated to those wonderful forms. I wish collectors of this data all the best in how to manage an ever diverse and complex world.

It It all started a few months ago whilst I was still back in Hong Kong. Netflix uploaded a documentary on the life of Naomi Osaka. I am not a big tennis fan by any stretch of the imagination. But people’s stories of sporting triumphs (and failures) do interest me. I had heard of her before but never really delved in to her history. It was not overt, but it was inherent in the story that her mixed race background (a Japanese mother and Haitian father) has had a major impact on her mindset. I was particularly struck by scenes of her visiting a Japanese restaurant in Japan, listening to the Japanese being spoken and yet not quite fitting in. Gazing. Silent. The same way I sometimes felt at that age back in the Philippines.

Naturally, I am making the assumption that all she was thinking about was her background. My mind then wanders in to thoughts about whether her mixed race background is somehow a big reason for her success. That’s because many people of mixed East Asian background are often brought up on this belief that being half Asian somehow makes you more beautiful, more intelligent…more gifted…more better…at everything really. It’s a myth clearly. But it’s a hard one to shake off.

Fast forward to the Olympics in Tokyo I started to see even more mixed race, East Asians in sport. More than I had seen before…or was it my imagination? Siobhan Haughey, half Irish, half Chinese swimming for Hong Kong and winning two silvers. And then we had Alex Yee (of mixed Chinese + European descent) wining silver for Britain in the triathlon. Maybe I was getting over excited. Maybe I was seeing more than there really was.

Upon my return to the UK, in week 2, probably the biggest sporting fuss of the year for Britain will go to the buzz around Emma Raducanu’s US Open Win. It was like I came full circle when I found out there was a tennis match one Saturday evening touted on the radio as being between ‘two outsider teenagers’ with a keen focus of course on the ‘Brit’ Emma. I loved watching the match. I was excited not just for Emma but for Leylah Fernandez. Being half Filipino on this one I was caught right in the middle. But strangely I felt a lot more at one with someone who had more of my blood than someone who just carried my flag. Why is that? I wonder.

Having said that. It still excited me to see them both. I was only hoping that the British media wouldn’t just focus on the typical ‘she’s one of our own-a Brit’. Summarised simply in my Linkedin post, I said: It wasn’t just a ‘British teen’. There were two mixed race girls on the court standing out as fantastic players and decent human beings to millions of people who have been under represented in sport and media forever. Growing up people like me always felt we never fitted in on one side/race or the other. Growing up in HK we did at least have a bubble of a population that was like us. But now we (and in particular half Asian people) are more visible and I’ve noticed it especially in sport recently. Proud for Britain -yes- but more interested in what this means for diversity, representation and intersectionality than it does for flying one of my flags.