In 2010 or 2011 I took a trip to Malaysia with Joel. I visited my grandmother’s family– one sibling was still left, in his nineties– who she hadn’t seen since she was 15. She had no contact with them until the Opening Up of the ’80s when she was finally able to take some organised tours back to Malaysia. But she never made it back to the small town where she was born, as a Malaysian-Chinese baby, daughter of immigrants from Guangdong. Her grandfather was a labourer who migrated.
She never saw herself as fully Chinese, but always in conversation with her identity as part of the diaspora. She also tried to prove that she was fully Chinese, and went further than a lot of people, who had grown up here, to prove that.
This note was from that trip in 2010 or 2011, and it was written in the hand of the brother of the man her sister (her only sister, who was born after she left, I think) married. They took over the pharmacy shop that her sister had run in the county of Perak, and I think this is their address, written in that old hand.