You are the first daughter of two Sri Lankan parents that are new to the country. You are brought up to learn two separate languages. Your beliefs are alien to the world around you and you’re left to navigate your family through this environment. That’s my reality.

On the 5th of May 2007, my parents had their first child: me. I was not only my mum and dads first born, I was also the first child in my entire family to be born in a country other than Sri Lanka. This meant that for the next 15 years I would become our family’s sole teacher of the things around us. For a long time now, I haven’t just learned how to speak English or simpler things like writing emails for myself, but also for my parents. Let’s remember my parents only came to this country the year before I was born, so they taught me what they knew, and that was their native language: Sinhala. From the early stages of life my mum and dad only spoke to me in their native tongue. This meant that they weren’t getting many opportunities to learn English. Instead, that job was left to me. For my whole life I have been the primary source of my parents’ English-speaking skills. This meant that if I learned something new so did my parents, and if they didn’t understand or know something I felt like I always needed to have an answer prepared for them. Now don’t get me wrong, growing up with two languages is one of the things I like most about my life but it wasn’t an easy thing, always having to translate to make things easier for my parents and constantly being asked to speak in my second language. This way of life came with its ups and downs.

When I was younger, I wasn’t like who I am now. I wouldn’t really talk or embrace my ethnicity much. Whenever someone in my class would ask a question about my personal life, for instance what language I spoke or what food I ate, I never really knew how to reply. Since I didn’t willingly talk about myself, it always difficult for me to answer with confidence and without embarrassment. I think maybe due to the fact I was one of the few people of colour, even then the only person with a south Asian background, I felt as though I had a responsibility to teach these kids what was correct and this slowly turned into me having this pressure of needing to know as much as I can at such a young age. Kids being young and childish, they were all curious, which isn’t a bad thing in retrospect – they were just learning – but growing up I always dreaded someone asking me a new question. I vividly remember when I was in primary school, my mum would always give me a packed lunch but it wasn’t like a normal one with sandwiches or pasta, it usually was something different like rice and some type of Sri Lankan curry. Every day at lunch the cafeteria would fill up with the smell of my lunch and my classmates always tried to figure out where it came from. I always was nervous to open my lunch, and face what I thought were my friends’ opinions of me, never knowing if what they really thought was that I was unusual and weird. I think at that point in my life, deep down, I was secretly embarrassed about where I came from but why that was, I simply don’t know. Maybe it was the fact I grew up in a different way whereas everyone else around me seemed to share a universal experience of a childhood, or maybe it was the fact that from an early age I wasn’t exposed to much of my culture due to the fact I was born in a different country as my parents.

You would think that there was a reason behind my paranoia, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I will never understand why or where my ideas about other people’s perspectives came from, since I couldn’t have been more wrong. These people who I now call friends surprised me when they showered me with nothing but kindness and acceptance, since I was convinced I was always going to be one of the ‘weird ones’.  Maybe seeing how society and the world around me, online and offline, treated people like me was the root of it all, or maybe it was the fact I had a built-in mindset of it being ‘me against the world’. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I was the judgmental one, in my opinions of others. My friends never made it hard for me to have a relationship with them; of course they had questions and were curious but they went about it in an open and friendly way that I’m grateful for. They were always easygoing and taught me things that I hadn’t learned yet, they were patient with me and most importantly kind to me. They are the reason that I am now able to talk more openly about my ethnicity. At first it was hard and I just wanted to get the questioning out the way, but slowly but surely, I became more comfortable with talking about myself. In way it made me feel better since not only were they getting to know me as a person but they were learning about my culture and Sri Lanka and my religion, all in which was new to them.

It did take me a while to accept my roots and realise that I will never be able to fully relate to a stereotypical Scottish person but that’s fine. Being brown doesn’t come so easily, and some people do voice their offensive opinions and misconceptions but at the end of the day, life comes with its ups and downs. My down was the racism I had to endure. Racism is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly and as a child it was hard and confusing to experience this. I say confusing because at a young age you are confused about why some people call you names or make fun of you, because all you are doing is growing up like everyone else. Even now that I have grown older I do experience the odd racist ‘joke’, but that doesn’t change my opinion of myself and my culture; even that time when my family were getting harassed by some of the kids in the neighbourhood, and I stepped outside to ask them to stop and the first thing they said was ‘Go back to your own country’. This is one of the least racist things I have endured but it taught me that being someone like me, a south Asian, living in a predominantly white country is always going to be hard. These people clearly didn’t know I have just as much of a right to live here as they do because all they did was judge based on my skin colour. Situations like this remind me that no matter what there will always be somebody looking for the bad in you and that all I need to do is learn to tune them out and embrace who I am.

Growing up with different cultural events and experiencing all sorts of remarkable food is one of the more special things about being Sri Lankan. I will forever love continuing to learn about the place where my parents grew up and connecting to my cultural roots. Although being brought up a completely different culture is quite extraordinary, I love it: being part of something like this is extremely special and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Now that I am older I realise that my parents were learning, just like me, how to navigate through this new world and I think that is why my childhood was unique: we were all learning new things at the same time. For as long as I can remember my parents always told me they wanted the best for me but to stay true to who I am, and who I am is Sri Lankan. And I’m proud of it.