D: I guess I’m curious, sort of, [about] this internalized racism. How does that affect how you see yourself? Do you view yourself as beautiful, or desirable?

G: I think there’s this weird dynamic between the two: of feeling beautiful and feeling not good enough. I guess, the insecurity of being unattractive comes from— oh, no, I would say that evidence of me feeling insecure would be the way I used to dye my hair, which was always to be lighter, like balayage, like caramel brown. I had false eyelashes, like eyelash extensions, to make my eyes look bigger. Like I always tanned, you know? I always went to tan. I was like, ‘I don’t like white skin’, to look too Chinese or Hong Kong(er). It makes me look too Asian.  And I’ve always done my hair curly. And I would still, to this day, do my hair curly — but for a different reason, I would say. I’d say when I was younger… I got a perm when I was 12 in Hong Kong. It was a curly perm, and it was wavy. And I know for a fact that it was so I didn’t look like the other straight-haired Asian girls. I wanted to stand out, I wanted to people to know that I was from Australia. I didn’t want people to think that I was from Hong Kong. I wanted people to know that I was the gwei lo, the gwei mui. And — like you know, going to Hong Kong, it’s like, I felt like people were looking at me all the time. So it was either that they were looking at me all the time because they knew I was different, or they thought I was better looking. Or I was thought worthy to be stared at. Because you wouldn’t like stare at the ‘every other person’. I thought, ‘Yeah you’re staring at me because you think I’m different, and you think I’m not like the others.’ And I think my definition of beauty really came from looking different. But there’s that dynamic; looking different from Caucasian people is what made me ugly but looking different from Chinese — sorry, the traditional Asian person — made me beautiful.