Yellow and Confused: Born in Taiwan, raised in South Africa and making sense of it all

‘Strangers pulling their eyes slant at me when they walked by. They’d pretend to be Chinese and make fake nasal-pitched noises that they thought passed for an Asian language.’ Ming-Cheau Lin’s family emigrated from Tainan, Taiwan, to South Africa when she was three years old. Growing up in the '90s, in the largely Afrikaans Bloemfontein, within a small East Asian community, she was always the outsider. Too ‘yellow’ for the whites, but ‘not Asian enough’ when she didn’t conform to the rules ...