Sometimes efforts at decolonization come off as exotifying or romanticizing the homeland, or reducing it to particular unrepresentative facets. For instance, South Asia often just gets reduced to a particular cultural area of India that’s Hindu-centric and I think also limited to a particular caste. I once pointed out to a friend — a very well-respected QWOC writer and activist who is part South Asian — that while she meant well when she talked about how our South Asian ancestors would practice yoga every morning and thus we have a deeper connection to yoga than other cultures, it was also erasing South Asian Muslims, Christians, and other faith groups who have been around for centuries and who wouldn’t have yoga as their daily practice because it’s a Hindu thing. (Meanwhile people are shocked when they find out that my first time trying out yoga was at college in Australia because they offered free classes.)

Then there’s the fawning over traditional outfits, the racebends that always go back to a historical version of a particular culture (rather than anything contemporary), the constant efforts to “reclaim the bindi” and “we’re beautiful in our culture!”. Over here barely any fashion store in Malaysia carries my size (inflated from M in the West to XXL at least because I am busty), I get parsed as a man walking around my parents’ Bangladesh because I’m wearing a shirt/tunic & jeans rather than a salwhar khameez, people accost me with skin-lightening products all the time, and bindis have become so commercialized that people here aren’t that worried about appropriation. I am more likely to see someone that looks like me being represented as beautiful in the West than I ever would over here. Hell, I had a TV presenting gig in Australia — that would have never happened here in Malaysia, I’m too “dark-skinned” for TV, even though those were my words that their light-skinned VJs were reading off the teleprompter when I worked at a major music TV channel in KL some time ago.

Sometimes this shows up when my decolonial activist friends come to the homelands to visit or to move permanently. Maybe they’re planning to do so, especially when their current town has become too expensive and isolating. They speak about the homeland in such loving dulcet tones, marveling at how easy the food nourishes their soul, how everyone looks just like them, how they feel at peace because they are back to where their ancestors were. They’re home.

And here I am, guaranteed indigestion when I eat anything in Dhaka and too scared to venture alone into Malaysian restaurants that serve pork because while I don’t care the authorities do and they may give me a hard time for not eating according to my Identity Card. My first “where are you from?” and “what are you?” and “go back to your country!” were not in Brisbane or the Bay Area but in Johor Bahru. I only became a citizen of my birth country on my 26th birthday; all this while I’d been carrying the passport of a country I was supposed to represent and whose assumptions determined everything about the way I was treated, but which I barely knew.

Must be nice to find home. Home’s a place that I have never known. I’d gladly swap places with them, take up their spot in San Francisco or Toronto or wherever, being able to eat whatever I want wherever I want, talk about who I am more than what I am. Their home felt more like home to me than mine ever did.