Stephanie Sam is a British-born communications strategist of Vietnamese-Chinese diaspora heritage who has spent the past decade in China working at the crossroads of UK, EU and US-China relations.
“You could do with some international exposure. China, maybe,” a law firm partner said as we stood over the water cooler. His offhand comment was so blasé. I wasn’t sure what unsettled me more – the comment or my reaction to it.
Was it xenophobia or the inertia of assumption? He was perfectly pleasant, encouraging even, but beneath the civility was an implication I couldn’t ignore. I had never set foot in Asia, yet suddenly, it felt as though my credibility required a pilgrimage.
I wrestled with a familiar refrain: go back to where you came from. It threaded through my thoughts, persistent and uninvited. So I booked the flight. Three months at a law firm in China, I reasoned. International exposure. Professional development. Tick the box. Return to London.
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A decade (and five cities) later, I am still in Shanghai, a city that has reinvented itself several times over in that time. The future I thought I was preparing for – stable and linear, shaped by hyper-independent eldest immigrant daughter syndrome – has dissipated along the way.
In the United Kingdom, I was a statistic no one read aloud. Less than 1 per cent of the population identified as Chinese. My British Vietnamese-Cantonese-Hakka third-generation diaspora heritage cast me as a minority of a minority.
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Growing up, China existed mostly as a cautionary tale told by older generations who had left Asia in the 1970s and never even been to the mainland. Back then, Hong Kong felt like the height of modernity and the mainland was still spoken about as something distant and chaotic – poor, dirty, the kind of place you escaped from rather than returned to. Moving to China complicated those inherited preconceptions.