From There To Here
Sarah Arachchi · 63 min
A Sri Lankan-born paediatrician and memoirist unpacks a lifetime of being othered—by schoolyard taunts, the relentless 'where are you really from?' and a medical system that keeps mistaking her for the nurse—and shows how embracing a 'cross-cultural kid' identity transformed exclusion into empowerment.
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Sarah Arachchi grew up in Sri Lanka until age four, surrounded by family, temples, and the warmth she carried with her when her parents moved to Australia to escape civil unrest. What she didn't carry was a thick skin for what came next. At primary school in the 1990s, she was one of only three or four brown children in the entire school. Other kids excluded her from games because of her skin colour, called her names, and made sure she knew she didn't belong. She learned to speak back, to assert herself, but she never told a teacher or her parents. She kept it to herself and got on with the business of fitting in.
Decades later, Sarah is a paediatrician and author. She speaks like an Australian, thinks like an Australian, and holds an Australian passport. Yet strangers still ask her where she is really from, a question that stings because it implies she doesn't belong even now. As a doctor, she is mistaken for a nurse. As a woman, she watched colleagues move ahead while she turned down a job because she was pregnant and didn't want to burden the hospital. The sexism was quieter than the racism of her childhood, but no less real.
Writing her memoir gave Sarah something her schoolyard taunts never did: a voice. Not the thick accent she developed to blend in, but her authentic voice. Through that act of claiming her story, she learned to call people out on injustice, to advocate for herself and others, and to embrace what she calls her cross-cultural identity. She is not fully one thing or the other. She is both, and that is her strength.
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