Michelle Rennex grew up getting looks from people she didn’t understand. At first it was from strangers in the street and then, after she had started primary school, it was from other children’s parents.
“I knew I looked different, but when I was younger, I didn’t quite exactly know what it was,” she told SBS Filipino.
“Whenever you say, ‘I’m half-Filipino’, you would get this reaction of: ‘Oh’. And it was just in the tone that they said it that really reflected that there was something different [about you]."
Michelle's mother is Filipino and her father is Caucasian: a family dynamic that, in Australia, tends to come with racist assumptions about the nature of her parents’ relationship.
In early 2017, Michelle wrote about her experience of growing up with this prejudice in Buzzfeed Australia. The article, entitled , began with: "When your mother is Asian and your father isn’t, it’s automatically assumed that you’re the daughter of a gold-digger".
“I just hoped by writing this, people could get a little bit of an insight into what it’s actually like when you say these words that you think have no meaning.... and you laugh it off like it’s a joke, but to the child in that relationship, it really makes them think," she told SBS Filipino.
Her personal essay was shared widely and Michelle was inundated with messages. Many came from people from mixed-race families to share similar experiences. While many of the others completely surprised her.
"I had people message me for months after I wrote this, even today they still message me and they say, 'Thank you so much for writing that, I thought I was alone,'" she said.
"The ones that got me the most were the ones who messaged me and apologised. They're like, 'I'm so sorry if I ever said that to you in the past, I didn't mean it."
The positive social impact from Michelle's story went even further though. She was contacted by some friends and acquaintances who she hadn't known as a child who had reached out to the people they had subjected to the racist presumptions she had also received.
"For me, that was the main goal of this [writing the article].... It really showed me that people can change."
Beyond this, the other important effect from her article came from a source much closer to home.
"It's a very Filipino thing to not show praise for your child [to their] face, but behind their back you really talk about them with such praise. So for me, hearing my mum talk to people and be so proud about what I had written really touched my heart," Michelle said.
"I cried because it made me think I had done something [really worthwhile] for my parents."
