Throughout the process of growing up, there were many times I felt the need to change my sense of identity. I strongly believe that my family and society at large play a major role in those changes. My racial identity in particular, was the most disturbing. I have to say that this racial identity problem affected me the most during my lower and middle school years. I have never had a permanent or complete sense of racial identity. .
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Although I grew up in a Chinese cultural family in Malaysia, I never knew much about the traditions. This was because my parents and I lived far away from my grandparents. The only thing I disliked the most was the conservative nature of my family. My relatives, especially my grandfather would always criticize me for possessing things that they had never seen before. There was once my grandfather noticed that I was playing with my "gameboy", he went and told my father not to spend on anything that would "spoil" me. I had always been getting at least one complaint on every visits to my grandparents. Most of the complaints were about my extravagant behavior. He would never understand the feeling of boredom. He never seemed to notice that I could not get along with my cousins and relatives. Its not because I was a snob. It was the language barrier. I could only speak and understand one language, English. Languages that are spoken within my family are Mandarin, and a dialect known as Hokkien. The reason why I didn't learn any of those languages was because my parents only used English as the main language at home. And I was sent to English medium schools. Furthermore, my parents were always busy and tired whenever I wanted them to teach me some Mandarin. My mother eventually realized that it was quite shameful for me to use her as a translator whenever my relatives and grandparents wanted to tell me something. So she taught me Mandarin for one whole year. Unfortunately I gave up because I couldn't speak no more than a couple of complete sentences after that whole year.
