I belong to one of the youngest races in south-east Asia. While a lot of people like to talk about the Greek or Roman civilisations, of English battles, of Germanic tribes, the rest of the world seems blind to the fact that the age of races is not the exclusive purview of Western Europe. Just as there were civilisations in Europe for centuries, there were also civilisations in Asia, Africa and the Americas older than that again. I think we forget that. While we concede that China had an empire going back millennia, how many know about the Cambodian Khmer? Or the Thai kingdoms? The fact that Vietnam had already been enslaved by China for one thousand years before they finally achieved independence in 938 CE? Or that Indian astronomy was at the forefront of the world, rivalling the Maya, even as far back as 300 BC?

As an Asian mixed-breed, I’ll be honest and say it’s frustrating to read Western histories while so much of other world histories are ignored. History did not begin two hundred, or two thousand years ago, and it did not only begin in Western Europe and its colonies. Even the Slavs have this same grumble with Western civilisation, and their case is as justified as anybody else’s, with a long and glorious history relegated, not just to the back pages, but to utter extinction. As if the great empire spanning Poland and Lithuania, the bloodthirsty warriors who defeated both the Turks AND the Crusaders, the intrigue with the notorious Italian court as dynastic marriages were consummated, and the first instances of elected monarchy in Europe, did not exist. It galls them, as similar cultural myopia galls us of browner hue.

For those people to whom such things are important, if I really wanted to devote inordinate amounts of time to it, I’m sure I could reasonably easily trace my ancestry back to 1511 plus nine months. 1511, because that’s when the first Portuguese fleet sailed into Malacca and, after vanquishing the reigning Sultan, declared the port to be under Portuguese rule. (The nine months I’ll leave to your imagination.) Like the English did with Australia, and the Americans did in North America, we see another example of tabula rasa, essentially extinguishing the heritage and technology of existing civilisations and imprinting one of its own. And it’s very difficult to avoid the conclusion that, if you can’t trace your roots to Western Europe, you’re worth nothing.

So, as the youngest race in the region, the Portuguese Eurasians are already almost 600 years old. And, you know, we do feel young. In south-east Asia, we rub shoulders mostly with Malays, Chinese and Indians, all of whom had empires, kingdoms and sultanates stretching back, verily, unto the mists of time. It’s the same if you include the Burmese, Thais, Vietnamese and Cambodians. We are the young kids on the block, the rebellious ones, the race that the others view with faint disapproval because they see us as too impetuous, our members too anarchic and (yep) too immoral. We are young in south-east Asia. And we are 600 years old. For me, personally, it helps put history — and current world politics — into perspective a bit.