My childhood favourites were not the potato-based dishes or hearty stews of my parents' upbringing, but the food of my neighbourhood. Anglicised Chinese dishes cooked by Korean immigrants who barely spoke a word of English, or homemade curries at friends’ houses, prepared lovingly by parents faithfully recreating recipes from thousands of miles away.

 

Beyond food, I struggle to picture many communities where one could go straight from a taekwondo class to a fencing class in the same building, or to see groups of girls outside school sharing cassettes and CDs of the pop music that defined their cultures at the time; twenty years ago, before the instant accessibility of digital platforms, these exchanges carried real weight. Even now, I am still affected by the interactions in school with my Korean classmates. A VHS of an episode of an anime popular in East Asia, handed to me as a thoughtful gesture by one of my Korean friends, caused a lifelong love for a media I might otherwise never have discovered.

 

Without this early exposure to East Asian culture from an early age, chances are I would have never become interested in Japan, an interest that eventually led me to move there, to study Japanese at university, and imagine a future for myself in the country.

 

This is why interculturality matters so deeply to me. Whilst some may see cultural diversity as a cause of friction or difficulty, I see places like New Malden as a shining beacon of what intercultural exchange can do for the individual; exposure opens the mind, challenges assumptions, and opens doors to possibilities we might have never known existed. In sharing space, culture and everyday life, we can do more than just coexist; we can enrich our horizons.