by P.H. Low
When my father is a child in Malaysia, he walks into a bookstore.
Or rather—I am not sure if it is a store, or a kind of hawker’s stand on the street, the pages warping with humidity, or like one of those places in New York City’s Union Square, stacks and stacks of volumes laid out on blankets and tarps. In any case, he is the kind of kid who skips lunch so he can buy books. Who lives in a house in which all seven siblings sleep on the floor of one room. No money for baby formula, for bread sometimes, much less air conditioning. One of his favorite stories to tell me: an orange cut into seven parts, the juice of his one slice sliding cold and sour down his throat.
Malaysia has Chinese language schools alongside its Malay ones. My father reads Romance of Three Kingdoms and Sun Wukong and Jin Yong in the original Mandarin; is taught to decipher intricately allusive poems over a thousand years old. But he is also drawn to Western works in translation: Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm.
They were better, he tells me, as we stand at the kitchen counter of our American house, afternoon light flooding in through the windows. Nowadays, with him contemplating the possibility of retirement, these strange in-between moments come more often, fragments of memory I like to call the old lore. And I think about the imperialism of translation, of foreign rights sales as an instrument of cultural conquest. How even halfway across the world, in a different former British colony, empire sings just as loud a siren song.
But who am I to talk. Some things are passed down through the blood.
In one of my mother’s favorite family stories, I am two years old, sitting on my parents’ bed, an illustrated children’s Bible in my lap, and reciting in fluent Chinese the story of Jesus calming the storm.
Fēng tíng, làng jìng!
My grandmother—who, for whatever reason, Hokkien-izes my English name into hūi bi instead of using my Chinese one—visits around that time; claps her hands, calls me smart. And in that moment I am a perfect child, a flawless inheritor of language; in those early days I can no longer remember, I am without reproach.
One or two years later, when I begin preschool, my parents will start speaking English to me, in case I have to tell someone that I need to use the bathroom.
You came home and everything was English, my mother will say, as if it is entirely my three-year-old self’s fault. Oops, dropped your language, sorry!
Coincidentally, from preschool through fifth grade, I use the school bathrooms maybe twice.
Around the mid-2010s, I notice a rise in QTBIPOC books put out by mainstream publishers, works by Asian diaspora authors in particular. Suddenly, faces similar to mine on book covers. YA novels about tailoring competitions and court intrigue. Rich, sprawling adult political fantasy. Reclamations of mythologies—fox spirits, dragons, old gods. Crazy Rich Asians.
There is a joy in stumbling upon these works. In seeing the fan art and Tumblr aesthetics, foods I’ve eaten and the relationship dynamics of extended family I’ve observed the few times I visited Malaysia. I love that BIPOC and diaspora authors can reclaim the stories of their homeland; that I can walk into a library or a Barnes & Noble and see their work on shelves.
But, as well, the weight of expectation: that these are only the kinds of stories that get published, or acclaimed, from people who look like me. That these are the selling points we have been given, the reasons found for why our stories were worth acquiring in the first place. And I find myself at a loss, against what feels like an expectation to write about a culture and mythology that was never quite mine—or else, on the other hand, to pick at the same tired old wounds of diaspora that only remind me how much I will never belong.
The interviews of so many immigrant and diasporic writers are filled with stories they absorbed by osmosis from parents and/or extended family. The oral histories, the language, trauma spelled out in action and event. Their work flowing so naturally from this ambience of culture and narrative: It was instinct, it was gravity. Here are the things that made me.
And I, dizzy with envy, push the old children’s Bible back onto its shelf.
An imperative: Go back to where you came from.
Another: Write what you know.
I think America, to my family, was a fresh start, a clean slate. And I am forever moving among the smudged eraser marks, squinting at words that no longer exist.
But what happens when squinting only gives you a headache? When your vision blurs, and you stop seeing at all?
The way the poet Yanyi responded to a letter I wrote him, about the writer who is alienated from themself by the violence of colonization:
The decentered writer has been taught that they are not the source of expertise, so they constantly look outward in a search for their own authenticity…[They have] been mandated to become another person in order to belong. By design, they will always fail. By design, they will never belong.
To put it another way, you live out your life in a story that doesn’t exist. Because it doesn’t exist, you can’t be a character…You can listen and even understand other people’s stories, but you don’t have one of your own.
The part of me that is tired of not knowing is tired, too, of being told I do not know. A problematic impulse, I am acutely aware, in the context of white tears, or belief in science. But I sometimes feel like I need to have a PhD in the history of colonization before I type the first words in a new Scrivener document—that my knowledge of what it means to be Asian American must be airtight, impregnable, before I deserve the right to speak.
But isn’t it also a kind of racism, to be told I don’t have a story? That because I was born with these features, this shade of skin, I should focus on writing about the legends my parents failed to pass on, and/or one specific flavor of insoluble pain? As Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings: “Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that…since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians…since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature.”
Did you ever hear vampire stories when you were a kid? I ask my mother, on winter break from my MFA program. I am reading Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad, the first book I’ve ever read that uses vernacular Malaysian English. Women who die and come back to life and eat human intestines?
Ew, she says.
Maybe it’s a Malay thing. I am already backing away—haha, never mind. We are (mostly?) ethnically Chinese, the pontianak and penanggalan and orang bunian of their country not truly theirs. And my mother converted to Christianity when she was thirteen, the hungry ghosts of Chinese mythology pushed to the outskirts of a newly forbidden belief system. And so: What else should I have expected? Why would she speak to me of that which has been deemed unholy?
So you just want to tell stories about white people?
…not exactly?
I’ve written about differential ability and land-based magic in the very British A Marvellous Light as a diaspora metaphor; loved R. F. Kuang’s observation of Everything Everywhere All At Once (“what’s most refreshing about Everything is that it at last gives us a diaspora movie that neither tortures the protagonist with choosing which country to which to cast their allegiance, nor seeks catharsis in either successful assimilation or some authentic reunification with the motherland”); had my eyes opened by Z. Aung’s article about portal fantasy as an expression of immigrant and diasporic experience.
That children’s Bible may be my only mythology, but I find myself writing in slant, in parallel, in the things the body remembers. In the subconscious shadow of my parents’ early years of credit card debt, which I learned of only recently; in their unique mashup of Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, and English; in gestures and half-completed sentences and expressions I will find echoes of, upon “returning” to Malaysia, in their siblings, their parents, strangers at restaurants. To quote Yanyi again:
What survives in the decentered writer is desire—a yearning for that which we are missing. It is not so much a choice…but the struggle to know at all. Memory survives in slant through our wordless bodies and inexplicable dreams. The story isn’t laid out logically, but the decentered writer might make out the characters, refill their speech bubbles.
My memory will always be incomplete, incoherent. I cannot speak the languages I would need to ask; do not have the time or energy or resources to make recovering this history, relearning the necessary words, the primary project of my existence. But that which exists beyond language—the constant shifting from place to place; the urgency of my parents’ survival in a country that would kick them out the moment my father stopped being able to work (and chooses its victims, now, seemingly at the flip of a coin); what it means to grow up, to take responsibility, to be a parent—I think has seeped into my stories anyway.
A question I have been asked about my debut novel, These Deathless Shores: “Why a Peter Pan retelling in southeast Asia?”
Because I read on the blog of a bestselling white author that she set her book in China after visiting for two weeks in high school. Because Ocean Vuong wrote, in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, of an immigrant mother’s second grade-level Vietnamese: “What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out?” Because the months I’d spent in Malaysia, over the course of my life—and my parents’ formative decades there, their love of nasi lemak and the way they call snot bae sí and the way they had to fly from Iowa to New York in bitter winter, just weeks after my mother gave birth, to file paperwork at the embassy—are intimately tied to the way America takes one look at us and says not mine, not really.
Because these small facts are enough of a crack in the wall of my ignorance to let me slip in my own story; might be, at least, a place to begin.
