The pot for when the day is too much: a clear chicken and ginger broth from my South African Chinese kitchen.

There is a strange way people talk about “the diaspora”, as if it is a glitch in the system. As if the natural state of a people is to stay exactly where they started, speaking the same language, eating the same food, living next to the same river, forever. If that were true, I would not exist. I am South African‑born Chinese, third generation. My face looks like it belongs somewhere else. My accent belongs here. My family history belongs to both and to neither. I am the resu

When culture and tradition fall away, we like to imagine we become freer, lighter, more “ourselves”. But what actually happens in the quiet is more complicated. This essay looks at what is lost, what is quietly smuggled into the future, and what we become when we no longer have a script to follow. There is a certain pride now in saying, “I am not really into tradition.” It sounds modern, independent, self‑made. We imagine ourselves as clean slates, choosing everything from sc

On Saturday 6 August 2017, Patric Tariq Mellet was interviewed on the Overnight Live Show by Linzi Bourhill on Cape Talk Radio. If you are a regular follower you will know that my Chinese South African heritage is always topical and extremely important to me. I recently wrote about the local community efforts to eliminate hate speech that has become rife on social media. Here is the link to that article again in case you would like to read it later : South African Chinese tak

We issue this statement following the publication of various xenophobic comments by our fellow South Africans on the Facebook page of the Karoo Donkey Sanctuary, the Facebook page of the television programme, Carte Blanche, and our own TCA Facebook group. – TCA Times Media, 8 February 2017 The comments were posted following the annual Chinese New Year celebration held in Johannesburg on 28 January 2017 and the broadcast of a television programme by Carte Blanche on animal abu

I have something to get off my chest and it’s been bugging me for a couple of days now. Really grinding me. Oh my word – a racist! Why is it that people are surprised that Racism exists, still exists? Of course it exists. It’s a physical recognition of biomorphic physical differences. Look around, it’s a competition out there – for survival. The problem is when survival is misconstrued as dominance. Transforming the future Is the current generation hedging their bets that the