“Where are you from?”
It’s a question I get asked on an almost weekly basis, but one I never know how to answer. I feel like my understated-yet-unmistakable Aussie accent should be an answer in itself, but somehow “I’m from Sydney, I’ve lived here my whole life” is never good enough. It’s the answer I usually give, though, simply because it’s true.
Some people leave it there with slightly puzzled expressions, not quite knowing how to phrase what they were really asking. Others push on, asking more pointed questions about my parents. I can see the relief on their faces when I eventually reveal that even though I was born in Australia and grew up in north-western Sydney, my parents are Sri Lankan. I can see the pigeonhole walls forming around me in their eyes.
When it comes to getting to know someone, I often subscribe to the Albus Dumbledore school of thought: it’s our choices that show who we truly are. Which, incidentally, also means I can choose to be a Ravenclaw even though I got Gryffindor all three times I took the Pottermore quiz.
It’s easy to fixate on figuring out who and what a person is when you first meet them. What do you do for work? Where do you live? What kind of car do you drive?
Personally, I’m more interested in who they want to be. The choices that led to them being where they are now. The choices they plan to make in the future to get where they want to go. I didn’t choose my ethnicity, my gender or my sexual orientation, even though they’re all a part of who I am. But they’re also not the whole story.
I decided who I was going to be in the summer of 2011. My parents had just sold our house in Sydney and were moving back to Sri Lanka permanently. I was twenty and had just applied to get into my dream degree: journalism at UTS. I had a choice—go with my parents to a country that wasn’t exactly journalist-friendly, to put it mildly, or stay in Sydney on my own and follow my dream.
I didn’t grow up with an extended family in Sydney, so going somewhere where I had real blood relatives, aunties and uncles that asked me about my studies and bought me presents was fun at first. It’s also the one place in the world where I never have to spell my last name when introducing myself. Back in Sydney I used to have to call nearly every adult I met who looked like me ‘Auntie’ or ‘Uncle’, and finding out we weren’t actually related confused the hell out of me as an eight-year old.
To some people, going to a foreign country might sound like the bigger adventure. And if I’d been going on my own it might have been. But to me, Sri Lanka was a hot, sticky, claustrophobic place where people spoke perfect English but couldn’t understand my Aussie accent, a place where I couldn’t leave the house on my own, couldn’t wear shorts on the street in 30-degree weather, didn’t even feel like I could eat without someone sending a detailed report on what I’d had for lunch back to my family. Warm but suffocating is Sri Lanka in a nutshell for me.
I spent the first two years of my life there being raised by my grandparents while my parents got set up in Sydney, but I barely remember it. They told me my first words were in Sinhalese, but today, I can’t do much more than pick up on general vibes in a conversation. I remember polished floors, mango trees and an Old English sheepdog who thought I was a puppy despite my lack of white fur.
I remember them reading to me, mostly fairy tales and Enid Blyton. Reading has always been like breathing to me. I’ve used it to rebel against what I’d been taught to believe, to broaden my horizons, to inspire me, and to generally escape my life. I Googled my surname one day and found writers, teachers, editors and journalists in my past. Turns out I’m not quite the black sheep I’d imagined myself to be.
I’ve been back to Sri Lanka several times since then, sometimes even by choice. The first thing that hits me when I walk through the sliding doors out of Colombo Bandaranaike Airport is the heat. It starts off as a gentle, pleasant warmth, a welcome change from twelve straight hours of dry skin and chapped lips in planes and airports. By the time I reach my parents’ house, I’m drenched in sweat and wishing I hadn’t taken those twelve straight hours of air conditioning for granted.
Back to 2011. My parents had just sold our house, and we were in Sri Lanka for the holidays.
It was January, and the plan had been for my dad and I to fly back to Sydney together, staying with a family friend until he helped me get set up on my own. But he decided he wanted to postpone his flight an extra week, he and my mum were encouraging me to do the same. It’s just a week, they said. Why go back to Sydney and spend money if you don’t have to?
I could see their point. But I also knew that they really didn’t want me to go at all. A week would turn into a month, then a year, then before I knew it I’d be stuck in a country where I didn’t speak the language and was completely dependent on my parents until… what? Until I picked up enough of the language and culture to get a job? Until I saved up enough money to move out? And how would that conversation go?
I stuck to my guns. I was leaving on the date printed on my plane ticket and that was that. Mum barely spoke to me for the last three days before I left. She doesn’t talk about that now; she just talks about how good it was that I stayed in Australia and got my degrees. But I remember. She would turn every conversation into a rant about how I was partying nonstop and wasting my life without family around; that my return to Australia was all just an excuse to go out and drink, and that one day I’d get raped and murdered. Admittedly, she wasn’t entirely wrong about some of my motives, but this was about more than just my right to drink cheap vodka raspberries and make out with boys wearing eyeliner.
I could never articulate to her what it was about, and I still can’t. No matter how great they tried to convince me it would be living in Sri Lanka, no matter how much they tried to scare me with stories of girls getting murdered for daring to be out at night, something in me was still saying… do it.
It went against all sensible advice, but that voice was clearer and firmer than I’d ever heard it before in my life. I had no way of knowing if the voice was right, or what would happen once I got on that plane. In a sense, it was the first time in my life I acted on nothing more than a gut feeling that this was right—that it would work out in the end despite all evidence to the contrary.
It did. I never looked back.
It’s true that the culture an individual grows up in has an impact on them. It’s also true that curiosity is normal when you meet someone new. I might have a complicated relationship with Sri Lanka, but it’s not a relationship I’m ashamed of.
Sri Lanka used to represent anything but freedom for me. I’ve learned to appreciate it more over the years as I’ve been able to travel further around the country. I’ve spent New Year’s Eve on a beach, watching people shoot fireworks into the sky right in front of me, as the palm trees in the distance glowed pink. I’ve seen monkeys, porcupines, snakes and elephants up close. I’ve even been carsick on the winding journey up the mountains through the tea plantations. But I don’t have friends there, or anyone outside my family to spend time with. It’s not a place I have ever felt free, and I’m not sure if I ever will.
Three years later I found myself in a kebab shop in Manly, killing time before I had to catch the last ferry back to the city. I was reviewing a local Shakespeare production for a community paper, and I had to get my copy in the next day. They weren’t paying me, but a byline and free tickets were enough back then.
“So, where are you from?” asked the man behind the counter, after hearing me order my pizza. Apparently my AC/DC shirt and Manic Panic hair still didn’t make me look assimilated enough.
There was only one other customer in the shop, a stringy-haired bogan of a man in trackies and a baseball cap. When he opened his mouth, I was expecting either racial abuse or sexual harassment.
“Straya, mate,” he drawled. “She’s ‘Strayan!”
I wasn’t naive enough to read too much into it. If anything, moments like that are the exception to the rule. But it was so unexpectedly perfect I couldn’t help bookmarking it in my memory.
“Yeah! I am!” I told the man cheerfully as he handed over my pizza. He didn’t question me. I grinned at the man in trackies on the way out, sinking my teeth into the reheated cheese as I walked back to the wharf.
About the author
A.M. Senaratna is a freelance writer born in Sydney, Australia, to Sri Lankan parents. She’s a news and politics junkie with a background in journalism, but she also enjoys exploring more personal topics like race, gender and relationships through creative non-fiction. Like Charlotte Bronte, she writes because she “cannot help it”.