Right from the day I was born, my life has been shrouded in contradictions. I was born during the Summer of 1975 in Watford, United Kingdom. At the time of my birth, my parents were Malaysian citizens with my father in the process of studying for his Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering. It was because of this, I automatically inherited my parents' citizenship, even though I would discover later in life that I would never live in that country.  

Even before my birth, my parents had made a conscious decision to marry under dubious circumstances. Most offspring of Asian families organised elaborate wedding ceremonies to celebrate the unity of a compatible couple. Genetically, there was nothing shameful about my parents' heritage. They had both been born in Malaysia (hence their citizenship and rightly so) to Chinese parents so the racial mix between them was perfectly acceptable. However, they chose to become husband and wife in the privacy of a registry office. I had never quite understood the reason for this until recently. It had always been a speculation that most of my extended family resided in Malaysia and my parents had decided that inviting them to a wedding in the UK would be too complicated. This didn’t just apply to financial restrictions but traveling halfway across the globe would be been far too time consuming. However, I stumbled across a legal document on the day of their marriage that became evident to me that they were hiding a secret from the rest of the family - my conception. The marriage certificate had been dated in February 1975, indicating that my mother had been at least 3 months pregnant with me when she married my father. While this may not seem like a big deal to some, my parents had always warned me about having sex before marriage. Now I know why.

Another telling sign of secrecy was the day of my birth. In early 2000s, I visited and stayed with my cousin in Malaysia for a two-week holiday. Her mother, my father’s elder sister, recounted the day she had evidently visited my father on my birthdate. She had arrived at my parents' apartment just as my father was leaving to visit my mother in hospital. According to my aunt, my father made no mention of my birth or the fact that he was living with my mother. In fact, my father had stood in the doorway of the apartment and wouldn’t let her in. When I confronted my father about the events years later, he denied the events told by my aunt but he refused to offer any explanation to them. For a long time, I doubted my aunt's version of events despite her showing me her passport which proved that she had arrived at Heathrow Airport on the day of my birth. However, I have now come realise that - given the circumstances of my birth - my aunt's version of events might have had some substance.

Despite this, my childhood was pleasant enough. For the first three years of my life, my parents frequently travelled between Watford and London which were approximately 60 kilometres apart. In that time, I vaguely recalled being showered with various gifts from a retail store in London known as Boots. It was here that my parents bought my very first and possibly the only remaining toy from my childhood - a stuffed panda - when I was six months old. This panda (which for reasons unknown even to me was given the name Ben) has travelled with me to Singapore, Australia and even when I finally moved out of home in late 2012. You could say he is possibly one of most travelled pandas in this lifetime! Ben is currently sitting on a shelf with about 10 other various stuffed toys.

Such was my attachment to Ben, I have a vague memory of falling down the carpeted stairs of our two-storey residence when I was about 2 years of age. I had been upstairs with my mother helping her pack for a day's outing. For a reason that has escaped my memory, she had asked me to head downstairs to tell my father something. As you'd expect from an excited 2 year old about to go out for the day, I ran down the stairs and tripped, tumbling face-first onto the landing and cutting my upper lip in the process. The rest of the day was a blur but I do remember being in a hospital bed with Ben by my side.  With that, I believe I can fairly safely assume that the day's outing had been postponed until another day. In my earlier years, I had little understanding of my hospital stay - particularly for a minor cut. However, now with my former occupation as a specialist nurse, I can accurately conclude my stay would have been purely for observational purposes.

My memories of the first 5 years of my childhood are somewhat vague with only a few albums of photographs to jog them. One photograph showed me in my father’s graduation gown at University of Loughborough where I was about the age of 6. This was taken a few months after my sister’s birth. Other memories include being hit from behind with a snowball during a snow fight, feeding a fenced horse on the way to kindergarten and riding a donkey at a fair.

My childhood in the UK was pleasant enough but that seemed to change once we migrated. Kindergarten for me was enjoyable. I socialised with Westerners with no noticeable problems as they treated me as one of their own. I suspect this primarily would have been due to our young age. Children seemed to care less about where people are from and what their origins are. I am of the strong belief that racial intolerance stems from parental teaching. My parents seemed less concerned about discipline in those days, quite possibly because I was still learning the ways of the world. In their eyes, it would have been hard enough for an Asian child to grow up in a Western society. I suspect they didn’t want to impose their Asian ideals onto me at that age just yet. Another suspicion regarding their relax stance was they themselves would have been fish out of water. Their methods of discipline would have been seen as abuse of a young child as Westerners have a very different way of treating their children especially when they themselves were halfway across the world from their own homeland. However, that all changed when we returned to Asia.