Thinking back about my own experiences growing up in
The Netherlands. I always knew that I was different from the people around me and I understood they looked at me differently. For example, when I was in kindergarten,
I received an invitation to a classmate's birthday
party and upon receiving it he said: “I would like
to have a Chinese at my birthday party”.

Living in a Western environment with an Asian exterior I wasn’t entirely unaware of that fact, but I didn’t know how to describe it either. I felt at home, but at the same time I didn’t belong and sometimes that would be affirmed. Later in my teenage years I began to be more interested in my roots and began researching more about it, but what I
read was always written from a Western perspective.