I moved to New Zealand with my parents when I was six years old. Their stories were typical of the many Chinese families that formed a global diaspora at the turn of the 21st century. They left behind their family, friends and white-collar jobs to build their lives again in a new country. My mother continued her university education, my father took on a part-time job at a factory wiring circuit boards. I went to school, knowing no more English than how to ask for the toilet if I needed to, and I followed the other kids around the playground for a month before I could speak my first sentence.

Those early years must have been financially tough for my parents. To afford rent, we lived in South Auckland, notorious for gangs and drugs, but my family was oblivious of our surroundings and I remember that my parents were excited. They were from the generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution, which had ended abruptly, just in time for them to compete in the race for enrollment at the newly re-opened universities. Both got into an elite university in Beijing, their internal residence permits were reissued and they began the process of extracting their families out of their respective rural backwaters.

In contrast, moving to New Zealand was something they were doing for themselves — and for me. I shared their excitement since moving meant I would leave behind my bullying kindergarten teachers and severe school environment.

The only element that dampened my excitement was the addition of strange words to my vocabulary. Ching Chong was one of the first. I was indignant: "What kind of stupid sound is that? That's not how we talk!" My parents were insistent that I was to ignore such people and not stoop to their level; they promised me that I had a bright future in which these incidents would be laughable and irrelevant.

My parents’ motivation struck a chord with me. I was a proud kid and I set about making sure these insults couldn’t stick. Within my first year at school, I moved from the lowest reading group in my class to the highest. I became the model minority. My subconscious goal was to be good at everything that would earn me my peers respect so that I could no longer be mocked. I mostly succeeded in academics, public speaking and sports. The respect and support I received from my teachers and some classmates began to feel like acceptance.

By this time my family had moved to a smaller town where my mother had found a job. There were even fewer Chinese around than in our old neighbourhood, but by this time, we were no longer fresh off the boat. We had given up our Chinese passports and become naturalized citizens of New Zealand. A few years later, my parents bought their first house, I spoke with a thick Kiwi accent and on top of my school achievements, I had adopted enough of how to think and act like a New Zealander that my relations with my teachers and peers became comfortable. I was at the point where mockery of my origins was irrelevant, and I had the confidence that came with that. The same was not true for my parents.

One time my family and a few of our Chinese friends were in the corner of a park practicing Tai Chi when a few guys piled out of their car to flip us off at us and yell, “F--- you Chinese” and “Go back to your f---ing country.” I pulled on my cold and emotionless mask effortlessly, but my mother barely managed to pull my enraged father into our car. From there, he glared at the men and fired off a string of Chinese swear words splattered with a few in English.

I was shocked to see this kind of a reaction from my usually dignified father. I was outraged that his position in the society he loved could at times be so difficult to bear that anger and violence would momentarily become his only possible form of expression. I didn't understand at the time that his situation was much harder than mine. I wanted him to be calm, to be patient, to be good, like I had been. Naively, I wanted my parents to have what I had by the same means. I couldn't deal with the idea of other people potentially snickering at my parents' accents behind their backs. I wanted them to assimilate as seamlessly as was possible only for a child, because then nothing could make us uncomfortable.

By the time I was in high school, I had enough good friends that I could expect to be defended from any outright racist attacks in their presence. But by this time, I had also internalized shame about certain expressions of my Chinese culture that people had so casually thrown at me. I remember incidents from when I was younger, when people I respected such as friends' parents and my parents' friends — nice people who invited us to their homes and brought cakes and fruits to ours — would say to me, when my parents were out of earshot, that they found it extremely rude when their Indian colleagues spoke to one another in their own languages.

They always had the tact to insert a non-Chinese ethnicity, but the message was always the same, that not speaking English in a public place was rude. At home, I speak to my parents only in Chinese; my mother would patiently spend hours upon hours teaching me to read and write Chinese, an act which I deeply appreciated. But I hated speaking to my parents outside of our home. In front of friends and teachers it felt wrong to speak to them in English, but I was ashamed to use Chinese.

The keenness in observation and sensitivity to other people's judgement, which had enabled me to adapt to the culture of New Zealand as a kid, turned on me as a teenager and targeted my insecurities. I discovered a limit to how similar I could become to my friends when I began to care about whether I could be perceived as physically attractive. When I brought meat buns from home for lunch, some of my friends were visibly disturbed by the smell, or announced themselves that they were. Such incidents brought on pangs of confused shame. To me, those buns were one of the tastiest things in the world and a symbol of how hard my parents tried to make New Zealand our home. In China, those buns are bought raw or cooked for a few cents a piece, but in our small town, to eat them meant that my parents had to spend hours kneading the dough, raising it, chopping up vegetables into a mince, mixing it into the meat — the trick is to only mix in one direction — and wrapping the meat into the dough with an intricate twist on each bun. It was a physically exhausting process, and it took my parents several tries to get the rising of the dough right before the buns were edible.

These buns were a triumph, a testimony that my family could settle in any corner of the world and with humor, determination and hard work, make it feel like home. But I was in high school. I had not matured enough to become angry and stand up for myself. I did not know myself well enough to understand why I felt the pain of injustice. Instead, I took the path of least resistance. I thought slightly less of myself and continued doing the things I was good at. If someone had told me I was becoming ashamed of being Chinese, I would have gotten angry, but I would only bring sandwiches to school for lunch.

I only noticed it gradually, but the switch to NYU Abu Dhabi was beyond refreshing. I learned what microaggressions were, and why those nagging moments of shame that I'd brushed off disturbed me to the core. More importantly, I learned what the absence of microaggressions could feel like. My cultures, Chinese and New Zealander, became just two out of many, and suddenly, liberatingly, one was no longer dominant over the other. I became free to speak whatever I liked, whenever I liked, as long as the person I was speaking to understood. Out of my limited German, if there was even a word or phrase which I thought fit well, I could throw that in. My accent no longer needed to be displayed as a shield or emphasized to apologise for my genealogy when I tried to lay claim to my nationality.

Many of my friends here have only ethical or religious limits on what they eat and didn't mind me taking them to noodle bars where pieces of various animal organs floated in the broth. Even if they choose to not eat something, they attribute this to the scope of their personal taste or comfort zone rather than to the abnormality or insanity of me or my race. I became no longer terrified of admitting to having eaten dog.

Recently, when a friend confused something Chinese with Japanese and I jokingly called her racist, the profoundness of her apology surprised and touched me. Moments like these, and not my aimless efforts to earn respect, brought healing to the times I was called Ching Chong.

In a recent article in The Gazelle about national and ethnic cliques, there was a point arguing that we should revert to the common language of English so that everyone can join in on conversations. But I think the point to NYUAD is that we are exactly not an exclusively English-speaking campus. For me as a third culture kid, the lack of pressure to speak exclusively in English came as a winding revelation that helped me unravel countless knots in my identity.

Yes, there are ethnic cliques from which I have not had the chance to get to know a single person, and there have been times when I wished I could have been included in a conversation in another language. But I think for the most part, the structure of NYUAD means that these cliques are not impermeable. It's hard to come away after four years of rooming with and taking classes with people from different places without forming a single solid friendship outside of your native region or regions. When others practice their culture unapologetically in front of me, it makes me feel comfortable practicing my culture unapologetically in public. And at least for me, getting to this point was a long time coming.