Month: November 2021

Something changed in me when I decided that the Chinese aspect of myself had taken over the reins for too long.

And I tried to learn how to be bad.

I don’t know where this need to be different came from, except I know that I have always been different. But this second sort of difference was different, because it was “bad behaviour” that I consciously chose.

The bad behaviour wasn’t just about having short hair, or having dyed or bleached hair. It was really a leaving of the way that I had been living before. It was uncharted waters, definitely uncharted territory.

It actually became a way for me to say yes. To life.

I think learning to be a bad girl was imperative to saying yes to life. And through that process, it was as if I found myself. I think this is what I want to write about in my book. I am worried about writing in this book, though, because I think it will expose a lot of people, but there’s no way I can write this book and not do that.

But I feel like this isn’t a case of what Mark Twain said about writing memoirs (also, I didn’t know that this was going to be a Memoir! The agent told me it was going to be! And I listened!), which was that you should wait until everyone is dead. But I’m not so sure about that.

This is a picture of my grandmother’s sister. She had died in Penang or another part of Malaysia that I don’t remember. I got this picture when I visited Malaysia in order to try to find her sibling some time in my twenties.

It made me think about siblings and the relationships that people go through. I feel like it’s a good thing that I don’t have siblings, what with the complication and other factors that come with it, and that comes with keeping in touch.

I don’t really know what to write about the family above, apart from the fact that I do feel as if I was adopted by different families growing up.

I have this conversation with a lot of people constantly, about how I was raised, and what had happened to me as a child, and consequently, how it has shaped me as an adult.

It also makes me think about the ways that we present ourselves to different people– I was raised in so many different ways, by Malaysian Chinese people, by Brits, but I would not say by my parents, really. So what happens when you are raised well by others but not by the people who supposedly wanted you on the planet?

But something did occur to me. If my race has taught me anything, is that I’m expected to be a good girl. So what happens when you’re no longer a poor (figuratively) Chinese girl who needs to be saved? What does the world make of you then?