I WAS BORN on the Gold Coast in 1995 to a Chinese mother and Punjabi father. They migrated from Malaysia in the late ’80s. In our family of three, I had little concept of where one cultural tradition ended and the other began. My parents raised me in a blended culture of their own design, rejecting the separatism they’d experienced growing up.

My mother, who was raised in a Buddhist family, became Sikh when she married my father. In 2005, my parents founded the Gold Coast’s first Sikh temple service. The gurdwara ran on the first Sunday of each month, out of two hired rooms at the Robina public library. Their project was unorthodox. The gurdwaras we’d visited in Malaysia, as well as the temple we sometimes drove to in the Brisbane suburb of Eight Mile Plains, were all, in the first instance, architecturally identifiable sites of worship. In the Robina gurdwara, the hall where we served langar after the prayers was the same hall where, aged four, I’d performed my first and last ballet recital, dressed as a frog in a green lycra suit with two styrofoam balls affixed to my head for eyes.