I am not a person who has ever been very comfortable in my own skin. Identity has always been a source of great struggle for me. The different facets of being Malaysian, being Chinese, being Oriental....they've always 'bothered' me. Of course, there are so many other sub-cultures...growing up in a Northern Malaysian Chinese culture, "Keat Hwa" school culture, volleyball team culture, orchestra culture etc. Then, there is Christianity and the all the millions of subcultures around the faith. Thinking about them makes me grow dizzy. I'd rather not.
There's a lot of tension or be in a melting pot of cultures. What makes it worse: my tendency to really want EVERYBODY to like me. People pleaser. I try to be everything and I try to be cool. And usually, it doesn't work.
I meant to post about this ages ago, but I was too lazy to unravel all these complicated thoughts.
Watching this video today made the tangle of thoughts about identity resurface again. The singer featured in the video is Sandee Chan, a very interesting singer-songwriter/producer in Taiwan. She's part of the 'intellectual' artistes, the 'cool' ones who might not necessary reach international stardom, but hold a very respected place in the industry here because of their profound themes disguised in commercial packages, their satirical lyrics, and their generally superior competency in music. etc. I wish I could be like them, but they are also generally not A-list stars because they don't have mass appeal, so do I really WANT to be like them? And to be them, one needs a fairly quirky, out-of-the-box brain, and a strong command of your language [Mandarin in this case] , neither of which I possess.
A little torn. Don't quite know who to be, or who I'm comfortable to be, or who I really am musically. Or in normal life even. Who am I besides a child of God?
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