Poh Ling Yeow

Yeah, I did.

I was nine on the dot when we were on the plane to fly, to migrate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So my birthday is the anniversary of our migration.

What was that like at that age as well?

That's so young.

Yeah, it is.

But I have this, like, I tell this story quite often where I've always felt a little bit like I've been beamed in from somewhere else.

And even when I was in Malaysia, which is, you know, the place of my birth, I've never felt...

Like it's where I belonged.

And when my parents told us that we were migrating to Australia, I had this immediate, it's one of like a handful of moments in my life where I felt very sure that

that life is about to change and it meant something.

It meant like a massive shift.

And my thought at nine or at eight was, oh, life is going to make sense.

Life is about to make sense.

It was like a knowing, these moments that I always talk about,

like yeah it's only happened a handful of moments in my life it's not an inkling it's a knowing like I knew that I would find my place there and when I arrived I just felt completely at home but within that I still find ways to feel out of place but in terms of in a general way I felt like

This is where I belong more than the place of my birth.

But everything that I felt that made me feel like an outsider was kind of self-imposed.

It wasn't because of my environment or racism or anything like that.