In London, I was rarely just Evelyn. Before anyone learned my name, I was Chinese. Then a woman. Only occasionally myself.

That's the thing about labels: they arrive before you do. They shape expectations long before you've had the chance to define yourself. For much of my life, identity has been less about who I am and more about what others decide they see.

Growing Up in Categories

At school, my white classmates were free to be loud, shy, ambitious, or lazy without anyone suggesting their personalities reflected an entire community. For me, every action was filtered through a racial lens. If I was quiet, it was because "Chinese girls are meek." If I spoke up, I was "fiery for an Asian." My choices were never just mine; they became shorthand for a culture.

The lunchroom offered a daily reminder of that divide. White kids sat comfortably together, swapping stories about family holidays I had never taken or debating bands I hadn't heard of. The rest of us, the Black and minority ethnic kids, clustered into our own group. Friendship was survival. My closest friends understood the weight of being seen as a category first and a person second.

Gender added another script. As a girl, I was expected to be soft, deferential, and diligent. As a Chinese girl, doubly so. Teachers praised my discipline but missed the doodles of buildings that filled my notebooks, or the late-night essays I wrote after devouring novels. Imagination didn't fit the stereotype. They could picture me as tidy, obedient, and hardworking. They couldn't picture me as messy, creative, brilliant, but inconsistent.

And then there was neurodiversity. I didn't know the words then, but I was autistic and had ADHD. Where a white boy might be described as "quirky" or "gifted but scattered," I was labelled rude, restless, or careless. My bluntness, my impulsivity, and my habit of drifting into daydreams about architecture or literature weren't seen as quirks to be indulged. There were flaws to be corrected.

Commodifying Difference

As I grew older, the contradictions only sharpened. At university, I assumed my degree and skills would finally speak louder than stereotypes. Instead, I found my identity packaged as a commodity. Employers and institutions urged me to "lean into my background" to present my ethnicity as a professional advantage.

The irony? I didn't grow up in China, and my Mandarin is halting at best. Yet my face alone was treated as marketable value. Race, gender and neurodiversity are now assets on glossy inclusion brochures, celebrated in annual reports as evidence of diversity. What once excluded me in the classroom became a statistic for someone else's branding.

Of course, there is a danger in pretending this commodification is progress. Representation matters, but when difference is reduced to marketing, it flattens individuality. Institutions rarely ask what I actually bring: my ideas, skills, and passions. Instead, they showcase the categories I never chose.

And yet, those passions are real. I can spend hours in a gallery, tracing brushstrokes and imagining the world the artist inhabited. I find myself studying buildings for the stories they tell, looking past the architecture to see how they hold onto our culture and memory. I carry literature with me as both anchor and escape, filling notebooks with quotes, reflections, and sketches sparked by the novels I read.

These aren't footnotes to my identity; they are at the centre of who I am. And yet they often remain invisible, overshadowed by labels. People notice my race or gender long before they ask about the things I love.

Double Standards at Work

The workplace doesn't let those contradictions rest. When I hyperfocus, I'm called "intense." When I'm distracted, I'm "careless." The same behaviours in other colleagues are reframed as genius, even brilliance. Neurodiversity in me is seen as a fault; in them, it becomes an asset.

Socially, the intersections twist together in exhausting ways. I've experienced "yellow fever" — men fetishising me not as a person but as an idea, the submissive Asian woman of their imagination. My autism makes me blunt, my ADHD makes me impulsive; I do not play into that fantasy. The result is a double rejection: I fail to embody the stereotype, and my difference is treated not as individuality but as a deficiency.

The Messy Reality of Intersectionality

Intersectionality is often discussed in academic terms, as if it were a tidy diagram of overlapping circles. In reality, it is lived as a mess, contradiction, and compromise. Race, gender, and neurodiversity don't sit in neat boxes. They entwine, shaping every interaction: how others approach me, what they expect, and how much space I'm allowed to occupy.

I sometimes envy the default status of white men in professional spaces. No one asks them to perform their identity. Their individuality is taken for granted. Mine is constantly filtered through the categories others choose for me.

And yet, I refuse to be reduced. My individuality is not negotiable, even if it is often overlooked. My passions are more than hobbies. They shape how I work, think, and connect with others. They are evidence of complexity, of the refusal to fit neatly into a stereotype.

Identity may be layered like an onion, as people often say. But the mistake is assuming the outer layers are all there is. At the centre, beneath race, gender, and neurodiversity, is still me: Evelyn. Not a category, not a statistic, but a person with a voice, curiosity, and contradiction.

The hardest part isn't knowing that myself. It's asking others to see it too.