“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 SA when she was three years old.
Growing up in the 1990s in a small East Asian community in the largely Afrikaans Bloemfontein, she was always the outsider: too “yellow” for the whites, but “not Asian enough” when she didn’t conform to the rules of her first-generation Asian elders.
Taiwanese or South African, good girl or rebel, creative or a disappointment?
Lin, widely known for her passion for Taiwanese home cooking and her popular cookbook, Just Add Rice, shares her personal journey as she tries to understand and rise above the hurdles she has experienced.
Yellow and Confused provides a colourful and engaging look at an authentic and uniquely South African life.
Ming-Cheau Lin was born in Taiwan and is the author of Just Add Rice (2018). She grew up in Bloemfontein, is a freelance copywriter and runs a food blog, butterfingers.co.za, as a platform to share insights into Taiwanese culture through recipes and stories. She has a BA in creative brand communications, specialising in copywriting.
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Article provided by Kwela, an imprint of NB Publishers
