Why a sense of belonging is the key to happiness

Psychiatrist Holan Liang, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, provides a long-read on how she discovered for herself how important a sense of belonging is

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on The Guardian

“Oh, don’t put me through to the manager, I’ve spoken to him before. He’s a useless Chinaman and can’t speak a bloody word of English!”

It’s the early 90s, and I’m 17, working during the holidays as a receptionist at a small computer parts company in Watford. Knowing nothing then (and even now) about RAM, DRAM and VGA graphic cards, I had a low threshold for putting things through to the manager if sales staff weren’t around.

“OK,” I say, after a tentative pause, “but James is still on lunch break. I can leave him a message if you like?”

“Fine, I’ll wait for him to call, but can I take your name.”

“It’s Holan.”

“Helen?”

“No, Holan – H-O-L-A-N”

“What sort of ridiculous name is that?”

“It’s a Chinese name”

“Why have you got a Chinese name?”

“Because I’m Chinese,” I say. “I’m the manager’s daughter; this is my dad’s company.”

It wasn’t true that my father couldn’t speak English. The problem was that it took him longer to form a sentence in English as it was a second language, he had a Chinese accent and sometimes his grammar was incorrect as we had moved to the UK when he was 30, and I was three. The problem was that people didn’t have the patience to wait for a response from my father and took him for ‘useless’ despite his having a PhD in hydraulic engineering. I often wondered how ‘useless’ a British person might feel attempting to talk about graphic cards in Mandarin.

My father was never bitter about being underestimated, but he used his own experiences to guide me from a young age. “Holan, you are Chinese, and people will see you as a foreigner,” he told me. “What that means is that people may overlook you, but it’s OK because the British are fair and open-minded and, if you prove yourself, they’ll give you a chance. You just have to work twice as hard as your classmates to get ahead – then you’ll have an opportunity.”

I took on board the ‘working hard’ part of my father’s advice – this was clearly a given when you had designs on Doc Martens, Bros on vinyl and retro Levi’s 501s which your parents did not have the money or inclination to buy you. I set up a car washing business at 13, with a friend, and by 16 I was cornering the local babysitting market and working a Saturday job. 

But my eyes were steadfastly on the prize of a Cambridge medical degree as that meant ‘I’d prove myself and be given opportunity’. However, I never took seriously the ‘people will see you as a foreigner’ part; I saw this as applicable to my father and his generation of immigrants, but not to me. I spoke fluent English and I didn’t have a Chinese accent; I wore Gap and Topshop.

Of course, there were incidents in my childhood that every immigrant endures stoically – the ‘Go back to where you came froms’ and the ‘We don’t want your kind heres”’, but there was an overall feeling that, individual intolerance aside, it was as my father said; the British systems are fair and open-minded. The system took me into its grammar schools and universities and gave me an education as if I was one of their own and, since 11, when I got my blue hardback passport, as it was then, I felt British. I was British – wasn’t I?

A crucial human need

My desire to be British, and ‘fit in’ better than my parents did, stems from a fundamental human desire to belong. The feeling that we belong – to someone, somewhere – is so important to us as human beings that psychologist Abraham Maslow, in his ‘hierarchy of needs’, rated it the third-most crucial human need (after physiological needs, such as food, water and warmth, and physical safety). 

It’s a need that is found across all cultures. US psychology professors Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary recognised it as the driver for much of human behaviour, including love, friendship, power and achievement. Fitting into a larger group allows us to feel part of something bigger and more important than ourselves; belonging, then, is a sense that we have roots and a purpose, that we are a valued member of a family, group or society, that we make a contribution. 

In essence, belonging validates to us that we matter, which is why it is so central to human happiness. Conversely, without belonging, people can begin to feel worthless, shameful, lonely and resentful. All the negative emotions that drive poor mental health.

During my working life as a psychiatrist I noticed this thwarted desire for belonging in many of my patients with diminished mental health. Teenage girls starving themselves to fit in with popular culture, others putting themselves under immense pressure to achieve wholly unrealistic parental expectations. Women, former high-fliers turned desperate housewives, turning to opiates to get through the day where they ‘go through the motions’ to fit in as ‘the perfect mother and dutiful wife’. 

Some of these women cowered in darkened cupboards to escape the fists of their husbands by night. The men themselves crossed lines they never thought they could, in an attempt to feel a sense of belonging to the societal notion of ‘manliness’ – to be in control, to be strong, to be dominant; where these feelings are stripped in public life, they are redressed privately in their own homes.

My own mental health came undone many years later by an implication from my senior at work that I was not British. Of course, this event was merely a trigger – the straw that broke the camel’s back rather than the entirety of the burden – but, even so, it was like a lightning rod to the many hurtful events throughout a lifetime that challenged my sense of belonging.

A fine line

It led me to contemplate the fine line between belonging and not belonging, even in an advanced and liberal society like Britain’s. Almost four decades after my father gave me his words of wisdom, I am telling my own children, born and raised in London, versions of the same words. “You are mixed-race and, particularly if people see me as your mother, they will make assumptions about you.” Can it be right that, in certain situations, I contemplate hiding so that my children can ‘pass-off’ as white with their white father? Is it possible that the only change with the passage of decades is that what were once conscious thoughts and actions are now unconscious? That, for those of us with superfluous pigmentation, we still need to work ‘twice as hard’ to belong?

It can be easy to become bitter and resentful but, trust me as a psychiatrist, this does nothing but eat at your own mental health. I prefer to take my parents’ positive attitude and the advice I give young patients who describe playground bullying is to tell the teacher and find someone else to play with. My adult-life interpretation of ‘telling the teacher’ is to use my voice to bring attention to the problems I see. I write to highlight the systemic inequalities that continue to persist in society today that lead to the alienation of many people. Inequalities based on race, yes, but also on gender, disability, wealth and, of course, my area of expertise, mental health. This is, perhaps, the easy part.

The harder part is to foster our own environment in which to belong. It’s all too easy to remember the hurtful racism and discrimination my family faced when I was growing up, but I can also remember that, when my mother was desperately lonely as a young immigrant mother of three, there was an elderly lady called Ms Smith who befriended her and showed her British ways to help her fit in (this included an accidental intoxication with port as my mother never drank!) I remember my father’s colleague, Mr Evans, an Oxford graduate, who could look beyond my father’s broken English to see a life-long friend. I can think of people within my own systems that believed in, and supported, me when others wouldn’t.

At some point in our lives we will all feel we don’t belong – we are too fat, too thin, too dumb, too clever-by-half, too rich, too poor – but the reality is that there are people out there gunning for us whoever we are. For every person who wants to keep refugees out of the country, there’s a person willing to offer them a room in their home. For every government benefit cut, there are people setting up foodbanks. I choose to believe in the words of my father – ‘the British are fair and open-minded people’ – and I am proud to be one of them. 

Even if not all British systems wholly represent this yet, we will work to ensure that someday they will. I choose to believe that we all belong to humankind, and it is by showing humanity and kindness to ourselves and others that we can find our place to belong, and help others to find theirs.