There’s no quippy second title here or anything, this is just me rambling about identity I guess?

Where do I belong?

An obvious answer to that would be just “oh your family is Romanian, you speak Romanian, you grew up surrounded by Romanian traditions, even if you were born and raised elsewhere” or perhaps “you grew up in Australia so you’re Australian”. I don’t know that I feel “at home” necessarily with either Romanians or Australians (especially white anglo aussies) – I either need to hide my queerness and be the good Christian boy I’m supposed to be or throw away my national identity and accept the tenuous white privilege my skin gives me so long as I have a western name.

What the fuck, man.

Let me be a little cringe for a second here but in the spider movie that i’ve written about way too much there’s that scene where Miles’ mum has that heartfelt speech about belonging and whatnot. When I saw that I was like, dang, that’s something that my mum would say and idk the gears started spinning in my head. And what those gears said is “actually, there’s a decent chunk of commonality in the experiences of migrant families, regardless of where they come from, and especially if they try and maintain their language and culture in the new place”. What’s the deal with that?

The Ethnic™️ Experience

As I said, there seems to be shared experiences between all sorts of migrant familial experiences. The ones that come to mind and are partly reinforced by talking with other kids of migrant families are:

• Parents wanting you to do well in school because they Came Here For A Better Life
  • additionally, being particularly demanding on kids to do really well, doctor lawyer engineer etc (no this isn’t an Asian-only thing afaict)
• “Ethnic” names being a whole Thing the Westerners can’t seem to wrap their head around; ending up with “white” names you use to make it easier
• Being the Other if you stick by your culture (and no, I don’t mean stuff like, “oh i’m romanian orthodox so i will be anti-queer” because that’s silly.)
• Parents ending up liking one specific weird show that you don’t get because there’s way better stuff on TV but oh well that’s Just How They Are
• Queerphobia

For some people, the othering is not something they can escape – being the Other is inscribed on their skin. For others, like me as someone with heritage from a “white” non-western country, you can blend in by dropping off your accent, your name, your culture. Now I’m not going to say that it’s Oh So Hard for me, that I get to receive white privilege by doing so, because racism of any kind is fucking awful. No comparisons here, just drawing attention to the particular flavour of violence in my experiences as Sometimes The Right Kind of White But Not Always.

The Tenuous Case of White Privilege (as an Eastern European)

White privilege isn’t some magical, unknowable thing that all people who have below a certain level of melanin automatically get, it’s a societal force that is given and can be taken away if you do not wield it against the Other “correctly”. And really, whiteness as a construct is all about that force to be throw against the Other, the definition of Other being one that is ever-changing to be as beneficial as possible to those with power – sometimes Eastern Europeans are white and need to rally against the icky brown illegal immigrants, sometimes the Eastern Europeans are the icky illegal immigrants, sometimes Irish people aren’t white and sometimes they are (depends on how much Br*tish you have in you I guess). It’s a contradictory, self-serving mess because there is no such thing as a singular “white” culture.

And I stand on that precipice of whiteness. If I am willing to discard part of who I am, I get to have that power (or, at the very least, I get to not be Othered too hard). That this is a choice I’m even pushed into making is a violence in of itself. White privilege doesn’t really feel like such a privilege if I need to literally throw away who I am, who my parents are, my language and faith and favourite foods (that are too stinky, ewww) and my grandparents who are so proud of me for still being Romanian despite growing up here. What sick joke is that?

And yet I… kinda did.

In a way.

What is in a name?

Ultimately, I did shed my very Romanian name for a far less recognisably Romanian name, mostly because it was masculine, but there was definitely an element of feeling less confident in myself because of my hard-to-pronounce Romanian name. And I have had an easier time for it, no one’s asked where my name is from or had trouble pronouncing it (well, apart from the person who thought my name was Ryan??). I also suspect¹ that I’ve gotten more recognition in applications for internships by virtue of having this “whiter” name instead of an “ethnic” name. Or maybe I’m just more confident and put together when interviewing with a name I don’t hate. It’s probably both, sociology baby! But seriously, it’s very likely the one-two punch of less ethnic name and more self-confidence that’s doing it – foot in the door with the name, get through interview stages with the self-confidence game.

The End?

I don’t have some clean conclusion, if anything this is just a way for me to organise my thoughts and consider the privilege I have in even being able to “blend in” and what I give up to gain that. Do I fit in anywhere? I’m not sure, because everywhere is a tradeoff between the intersections that make up what makes me me. And maybe that’s my life, maybe that loneliness is just a feature, not a bug, of being a queer kid of migrant parents.