Who am I?
A poem from when I was thirteen.
When I am in Japan
I am Indian
When I am in India
I am Japanese
Who am I?
This was a poem written during my time in India. I was thirteen and forced to write a poem for one of our English classes. This ended up being one of my writings that best expressed my insecure identity growing up between two cultures.
Looking back at this poem over a decade later, it still hits a chord. The reason being, I am constantly inventing and reinventing myself based on my lived experiences. In addition to navigating where my true self lies in the whole matrix of identities, I then have to communicate that with other people who have a limited understanding of the complexities of having an identity rooted in different backgrounds.
Take something as simple as my name. Hasumi Nemani Srividya Fujiwara. I love the fact that my name embodies two distinct parts of my life that create the baseline of my identity, and whenever I can, I try to use my entire name. Hasumi Fujiwara my Japanese side, and Srividya Nemani, my Indian side. I constantly choose the name that I use based on the person I am speaking with, to constantly lower the hurdle of their interaction with me.
For example, I use Hasumi Fujiwara for work. I work in an all-Japanese, extremely rural environment, where international exposure is minimal. There tends to be some distance/ condescension when the people I work with sense that I am anything but “Japanese”, or this sense of inquisitiveness that calls for basically my entire history from the time of my birth till my current waking steps. Depending on my emotional/ mental strength I can either welcome the inquisitiveness and the condescension as part of “this is a chance for them to see that even being ‘Japanese’ you can still be and have cultures”, or can show them how rude and impolite a Non-Japanese Japanese person can be.
In all honesty, it is exhausting trying to uphold this mantle using these terms to make the other person comfortable in interacting with you through the boxes that they know to use. It takes energy to put up those mantles, and the worst part is that you don't even realize how much energy it can take from you.
Going back to the poem, a decade later, I still struggle with the question. However, it has taken a different hue. I know who I am. I am an amalgamation of experiences that is learning how to be. What I struggle with is my relationship with the outside world that has not caught up to the complexities that live in my brain, and I am sure many people around the world who identify as third culture kids, mixed/ interracial, multicultural, or even global might understand.
I pose no solution or a closing idea… But I suppose all I wanted to do was share the timelessness of that poem, and how it can evolve with the growth of say a person like me, and I hope it resonates with people who have had similar questions as an undertone to their lives.
As a side note, I would like to give a shoutout to my brother. As part of the UBC global lounge last year, he organized a talk on mixed-race identities and reminded me of how personal, yet universal these individual experiences can be. And he continues to create spaces for discussions like these to come to light, and I am just so thankful to him for helping me connect with the discussions in my head, as well as giving me the confidence to write out a snippet of my experience here.
