With race driving a wedge in the UK, will things get worse before they get better?

LONDON – On the day of the Tommy Robinson anti-immigrant march, flag-cosseted, bulky men crowded me into a corner of the platform at Tottenham Court Road station.

I inched away to catch the next train by the skin of my teeth. Friends who’d come into town for an East Asian writers’ festival reported similar incidents up and down the various Tube lines. British pals tried to reassure me: “They’re from the Midlands and the North. They don’t represent the UK…”

But 120,000 bodies represent something – especially when the last Gaza march, for comparison, was smaller.

A few days later, on a train line near Kew Gardens, a young man – greasy-maned in steampunk leather, accent posh and drawly (that is, not just your typical working-class white person often seen in anti-immigrant marches) – proclaimed to a carriage half full of people of colour on their way to work: “Standing proud with my flag. One of the best things in life is the ability to hate. Long live hatred.”

People side-eyed awkwardly. No one challenged him. British politesse? Or British fear? Where were all the upstanding allies who had proclaimed solidarity on Facebook posts?

All of this ran quite counter to the Singapore of the 1980s, where I grew up as a third-generation Chinese within the demographic majority. I never had to think about “fitting in”. (More on this later, including the what-ifs of not being in the ethnic majority of our island-state.)

The system ran on my sociocultural settings. When 75 per cent of the population share broad expectations of behaviour, school and work norms tend to drift towards them. I could take for granted that the world would understand me, or at least meet me halfway.

Then I moved overseas in the late 1990s and had to reorganise myself around a brand-new structure that is 80 per cent white. 

Sometimes hyper-visible, sometimes invisible

On scholarship at an elite university, I encountered personal racism for the first time – so quirkily delivered that I didn’t clock it as racism at all. 

You might have heard this story before: There were four women of Chinese diasporic heritage in my class; one was named Cindy. A few course mates decided to call all of us Cindy because “it’s easier”. I laughed it off and even joked that we should form a band.

The cognitive dissonance – the expectations mismatch between my skin colour and my actions and words – worked to my advantage.

I never became a pub-quiz savant, but I mastered other rites: dunking custard creams in tea; deploying a premature school mistress tone with bank tellers and that bored retail counter guy who refused a phone upgrade.

The “first language” of English let me slip into long-form essays better than many international peers of colour. I learnt to play the clever pet: precocious, hard-working, unthreatening – and rewarded.

A fully-funded PhD at the university of my dreams landed me in London’s crucible of multicultural student activism and the distinct trail of second-hand smoke from controlled substances (making me legally not so culpable as far as inhalation went).

At first, this bit of London felt like I had found “my people” – the ones with blue hair; the six-language polyglot who could be an imam-in-training or an MI5 secret agent initiate; even the fresh recruit types from Unilever’s corporate ladder.

This was the truly cosmopolitan city’s ideal, where everyone comes from somewhere else; where you can’t hold secret conversations in Mandarin in public because the hippie white dude or crusty professor nearby might answer you back – in better grammar.

It took four years to wake up to an open secret: There are rules for international students, and there are rules for local – British, European, white – employable people.

The university would never keep me: this odd woman who wasn’t private school educated, who didn’t jump through Oxbridge hoops, who could be celebrated as a clever pet but not quite imagined as a colleague. I watched, equally puzzled and not, as black and global majority friends stacked rejection letters from the very institution that had conferred their PhDs.

I did get a job – it helped that I came bearing a grant – though the hiring committee may not have quite known what they were signing up for. I was working on what would soon become a hot field for finance-flavoured reasons: Sinophone studies.

Seventeen years in, at the same university, I’ve made friends who are black, brown, yellow, and some (predominantly LGBTQ+ and class-marginalised) white, who have risen to allyship responsibilities.

Black and global majority friends who moved to universities in the Midlands joke that they were hired out of “fuzzy ignorance”: a vague top management sense of “needing to engage Asia” or “show diversity”.

“Which is also a good thing,” said one of these professor friends, now an activist in his own right. “I’m left alone to do my work because no one else is that interested.”

When my black friends said people crossed the street to avoid them, I joked that as a Singaporean with yellow skin I was invisible: bumped into, expected to make way. This is one of racialisation’s curious asymmetries – hyper-visibility in some contexts, invisibility in others.

Changing vibes and times

Over time, both London and I changed. I dyed my hair purple to signal, publicly, that I wasn’t the goody two shoes model minority. It bought me an extra 30cm of radial space on the Tube.

I picked up a new accent – don’t tsk tsk me, it’s a generic Netflix-enabled American – because I refused to be neatly categorised in a country where your local accent tethers you to an excruciating class hierarchy.

I am ambivalent about fitting in now, where 20 years ago I had been actively trying to blend in. Talking to colleagues and students today, I code-switch often enough to generationally inappropriate Singlish that makes the odd student from Pasir Ris roll their eyes.

London in the 2020s is roughly half white, half not. Chinese-speaking students make up a huge slice of Britain’s campuses – sometimes around a fifth, depending on who’s counting and whether short-term students get counted at all.

You’d think this would make Britain more cosmopolitan and tolerant. After all, you can’t court the immigrant or tourist pound – designer outlet shopping at Bicester Village, bespoke degrees in small-town British unis – without learning to accommodate the people spending it.

Embracing diversity and immigrants also yields benefits at the other end of the economic spectrum. Enter cheap foreign labour: Polish vegetable pickers in Britain surely can’t be “stealing domestic jobs” if British lads themselves won’t take them? 

But no. Realities have become grossly distorted, thanks to bad-faith misinformation campaigns exacerbated by unhelpful social media algorithms and far-right politicians blaming class-borne economic problems on race and foreigners.

At least for many Asians, especially after Covid-19’s first headlines ran out of Wuhan, free-floating anxiety has found familiar perches in xenophobia, conspiracy and Brexit wistfulness. Here in London, majority-minority dynamics have started tipping into a not-so-sweet spot where just enough majority folk are feeling unsettled by a rapidly diversifying not-quite-minority.

Even as progressive voices are staking space, Reform party pushback and misplaced anger have never been more voracious. Its leader Nigel Farage wants to deport me a good 15 years after I obtained my indefinite leave to remain. Suddenly, fascist shouters are chanting slurs at our doorsteps.

London not immune

On the day of the Tommy Robinson protests, a colleague with a mixed-race son experienced racial aggression on a train. “It’s getting harder,” she said. “What if one of them pulls a knife? People feel emboldened. I used to speak up. Now I keep my head down, just in case.”

Another colleague – British, white and queer – overheard an Islamophobic conversation on a bus – delivered at stage volume to ensure “accidental” eavesdropping. “He wanted to be heard,” said my friend. The pattern of racist drive-bys on public transport feels like a trend.

The day after, a sport utility vehicle roared past me on the A30 highway, windows wound down to a giggling chorus of young people: “Ching-chong hee-haw!” I waved a third finger and filed a report with the local police. No action taken, of course, but it felt important to lodge the statistics.

Some friends are shocked that such incidents happen.

To be fair, I haven’t had more in London since the three mentioned. Singaporean friends in the Midlands, though, report otherwise.

We commiserate by triangulation: “At least it’s not the US, where people carry guns.”

Someone points out the US President just posted a scatological meme about protesters in October that has been celebrated around the world. You pick your poison.

How do I make sense of it all?

I pray for a shift from these right-left-right whiplashes and the temptation to hate on hate, towards something quieter but sturdier by Britain’s next general election cycle. Buyer’s remorse works in mysterious ways… maybe?

Some days I think about finding a new job, moving back to Singapore, and cocooning in air-conditioned relative security amid delicately calibrated multicultural balance as a member of the majority.

Then I interrogate that fantasy: What would my world look like – inside and outside Singapore – if I was not the majority? Who would I be, without the lazy comforts of assumed belonging?

Being a minority in Britain has given me a new kind of empathy for folks who are racially marginalised across the world to different extents and in different ways, including those in my own ancestral land.

Does Singapore necessarily appear easier to negotiate, culturally and politically, only to someone who is from the dominant racial group? What would the responsibilities of allyship and community building be for someone who occupied space within the largest ethnic demographic? What kinds of privilege would I have to give up, wherever I choose to live?

Still in London for now, I’m watching carefully, as every new political development reaps fresh waves of uncertainty. Maybe it will get better after it gets worse.