While the rest of the world argues over whether Olympic freeskier Eileen Gu is American or Chinese, I'd like to offer her another term: People of the Global Majority (PGM).
Let me back up. Born in the U.S. to a Chinese mother and a white father, Gu often refers to herself as "a mixed kid" which, as a fellow mixed kid, I get.
Mixed? Biracial? Eurasian? Take your pick
For my part I've always identified as "mixed-race" over, say, "biracial" or "Eurasian." The former seems too limiting and the latter reminds me of Orwell's 1984.
But last week, for the first time in my life, I came across the term "People of the Global Majority," as in "Black, Brown, Indigenous and People of the Global Majority" and that spoke to me. In fact, I was wholly unprepared for the emotions that followed.
There was a moment of recognition, that yes — we the "minority" or the "marginalized" were actually the majority. It feels empowering in a way that terms like Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) or Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) fail to capture.
And it made me sad.
Gu has said, "There's no part of me that would ever hide my identity. It makes me unique and allows me to be more open to learning about new cultures."
While that may be true for her, it’s taken me years to reach that level of acceptance with myself. To be honest, I’m still unpacking.
White in Hong Kong, Chinese in England, but still just me
Growing up in colonial Hong Kong, whiteness was seen as aspirational, and as a child, I emphasized that aspect of my identity. Like Gu, my parents separated when I was young. My white dad went back to England and my Chinese mum raised me by herself, sending me to a missionary-run school to learn English.
When Gu says, "I'm American when I'm in the U.S. and Chinese when I'm in China," I'm happy for her.
My experience, and that of many other PGM, has been the opposite. I was never more aware of my whiteness than when living in post-handover Hong Kong and one of my cousins asked, "Why are you still here?" Or when strangers spoke to me in English, assuming I didn’t understand Cantonese.
Once, two servers in a Chinese restaurant started gossiping about our table — I can't remember what they said, only that it felt dismissive. When they brought our dishes over, I said in loud, Hong Kong-accented Cantonese, "I can understand Chinese, you know." In hindsight, I was being bratty.
The point is, I never felt Chinese in Hong Kong. Sometimes this worked in my favour. In non-touristy areas, shop assistants marvelled at my fluency and gave me better service. Still, you always feel like a foreigner when something as mundane as eating durian causes locals around you to comment. "A white person eating that?" Yeah, and I don't even find it stinky.
As a childhood treat, Mum would fry bread and cover it with strawberry jam. It made me feel very English to be eating toast. It wasn't until we moved to England that I realized English people did not make their toast by frying bread in a wok.
By then, I'd learned to downplay my Chinese heritage. I was overly proud of my English surname and never used my Chinese name. I avoided words I couldn't pronounce, like "crisps."
At first, Mum insisted I keep up my reading and writing, but copying out passages of the Bible in Chinese is not what an eight-year-old wants to do. Soon I stopped speaking Cantonese altogether. When I was sick, I asked for dippy eggs and soldiers when what I wanted was char siu and rice.
Far from feeling English in England, I realized I didn't fit in here either. In high school, my schoolmates called me Cho Chang, the name of a popular Asian character in the Harry Potter series. (You can see why I don't like Harry Potter.)
When the minority is actually the majority
Pop culture positions whiteness as the norm. The majority. Even up until a few years ago I thought mixed-race meant white mixed with another, as if multiracial existence were drops of colour you could add to white paint. The whiteness is a given, but you could get lighter shades of red and of blue. Turns out you can leave white out of it altogether.
This is why hearing the term PGM loosened something in me, a defensiveness I didn't even know I had. It reminds us of what we were all along, before we learned to define the world in relation to whiteness.
As the writer Daniel Lim wrote, "The term 'people of the global majority' make non-white people's identities independent of whiteness. It is a term that not only decenters whiteness but renders it irrelevant."
It's taken me a long, long time to process how words can impact one's racial identity. When Gu recalls how upsetting it was to be labelled a "hunxue'er" (literally meaning, a mixed-blood child) by a taxi driver in Beijing, I know the feeling — that strange combination of being othered while also being made to feel special.
"Looking back it was super lighthearted and most of it was probably a compliment, but he was saying I looked different or whatever," Gu told South China Morning Post. "I got so mad I cried and told my mum to 'xia che' [get out the car], that we needed to leave because this guy was being so disrespectful. My mum and the taxi driver were both just laughing."
An aside: although certainly the least of J.K. Rowling's sins, I still flinch whenever Harry Potter fans say "half-bloods" — no doubt a hangover from my years of being called a mixed-blood child.
Reclaiming identity on my own terms
The truth is, People of the Global Majority is a mouthful, and it's hard to use even when abbreviated to PGM. I don't really expect anyone to introduce themselves using that as an identifier, but nobody calls themselves BAME either. These are terms used for groups of people, and by necessity, they flatten our differences. They don't account for the fact that a Black person moves through the world differently than an Indigenous, Asian or mixed-race person.
When we're talking about lived experiences, there is a need to be specific. As a mixed-race woman, my sense of relief in the term PGM comes from the fact that I've spent my life answering questions like, "Is it your dad that's white?"
PGM shifted my mindset. What would it be like to stop defining myself in fractions — half this, half that — and instead, be a whole "something?" Maybe PGM isn't the ideal term, but it's on the right track. It gives me a sense of kinship that's hard to find when no one in your extended family looks like you, apart from your siblings.
For a moment, I feel a part of something bigger. No longer an outsider. It's like I've stopped trying out for the popular team and, somehow, wound up on the winning team instead. After all, there's safety — and comfort — in numbers.
