When I was in my second year of university, a stranger approached a friend and me on the streets of Melbourne, asking to photograph us for his website about interracial couples.
A little taken aback, we told him we weren't together but had friends that might fit the bill. He went on to explain that many of his friends were Asian men who thought Anglo-Australian women just weren't interested in dating them.
His website was his way of showing this wasn't true. After a fittingly awkward goodbye, I never saw that man or, concerningly, his website again, but the unusual encounter stayed with me. It was the first time someone had given voice to an insecurity I held but had never felt comfortable communicating.
Get our newsletter for the best of ABC Life each week. My first relationship was with a Western girl when I was growing up in Perth, and I never felt like my race was a factor in how it started or ended. I was generally drawn to Western girls because I felt we shared the same values. At the time, I rarely felt that assumptions were made about me based on my ethnicity, but things changed when I moved to Melbourne for university.
In a new city, stripped of the context of my hometown, I felt judged for the first time, like I was subtly but surely boxed into an "Asian" category. So, I consciously tried to be a boy from WA, to avoid being mistaken for an international student. Since then, my experience as a person of colour in Australia has been defined the question: "Is this happening because of who I am, or because of what people think I am?
