(be)longing
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some of my earliest memories are of airports and airplanes: waking up before the sun rose to go through security at Changi Airport. refusing to eat airplane food except for the biscuits, not sleeping when everyone else was because of jetlag. how fitting that is for child of diaspora. my parents were both born in Penang, Malaysia in 1968, five years after the British allowed Malaysia to become independent (but only on British terms) and three years after Singapore was expelled from Malaysia. my parents both lived their entire lives in Penang. in 1989, my father immigrated to Singapore to attend National University of Singapore for a degree in Computer Science. my mother joined him later after finishing college in her hometown at University Sains Malaysia to become a quantity surveyor in Singapore. it has become common for those who are able to get higher and specialized education in Malaysia to move to Singapore, leading to a huge brain drain from Malaysia. for my parents, who fall into ethnic minority categories in Malaysia, the education and employment systems that are inequitable in providing access across ethnic groups pushed them to leave the country. this is the historical and ongoing legacies of Dutch, Portuguese, and British colonial and imperial structures of race and ethnicity. in December of 1999, I was born. we lived in a planning area called Bishan, which historically was the home of Cantonese and Hakka communities in Singapore. we visited our old flat once when we went back to Singapore, and what had once been just large drain had been heavily developed into an urban neighborhood. all I could remember in Bishan was the McDonalds that I used to beg my parents to take me to. in 2005, my father took a job offer to move halfway around the world to work in Research Triangle Park of North Carolina. he took the job in part because my parents didn’t want me to grow up in Singapore with the toxic pressures and stresses of academics. my parents moved to North Carolina away from their family and friends and childhood home and familiar languages and foods and cultures in part because of me. from Cary, North Carolina, Penang is at least 32 hours of traveling and sitting in airports, sometimes four different planes, 12 hours in time apart if we don’t count daylight savings, 15,424 km (9584 miles) away.
souce: western imperialist propaganda (BBC)
if I search for my history, where do I even begin? when I look up Malaysia and Singapore’s history, the front page of Google is filled with colonial sources that tell me Stamford Raffles found Singapore and Francis Light found Penang, Malaysia. while living in the imperial core, I’m trying to find the history of our people and our homes and our communities that were torn apart and divided by imperialism and colonialism, only to find sources and perspectives and histories told through the eyes of the colonizers. to be part of the Southeast Asian diaspora in the West means that colonialism and imperialism are so deeply embedded into my identity, it’s in my name, in my family’s im/migration, in the languages I speak, in the food that I eat, in the history I carry. yet, Singapore, where I was born, and Malaysia, where my family is from, are nothing more than footnotes and asterisks in Western history that can be reduced down to less than 10 or less events on a timeline. centuries of pre-colonial Indigenous sovereignty and fluid migrations and development and lives erased. centuries and ongoing legacies of colonial oppression and trauma and pain ignored. my history, my family’s history, our histories are ongoing, are fluid. it cannot be packaged into neat timelines.
how do I even try to find the history of a place that I have never really known, yet it’s a place touches and seeps through every part of me?
souce: western imperialist propaganda (BBC)
Nusantara. an old Javanese term which literally means “outer islands� and refers to the Malay/ Indonesian archipelago. a fluid archipelago where coastal settlements are transit points where people come in and out with ease. colonial powers arbitrarily carved up Nusantara in the 19th century. Malaysian borders were demarcated through British property (notably opium farms). historical and ongoing colonization divided common histories, peoples, and cultures that have been (and still are) shared.
borders as we know them today were invented by Europeans.
post-colonial Southeast Asia is made up of nation-states that compartmentalize, categorize, delimit and demarcate, fix borders/boundaries and police them. the post-colonial nation-state is simply the inheritor of the hierarchies, power structures, biases, and myopia of the colonial state of the past. postcolonial nation-states continue to police their people, their borders, their identities and the very epistemology and vocabulary that frames our understanding of ourselves. from colonizers, we have inherited and internalized dubious concepts like racial differences (imposed onto us by colonial censuses) and divisions based on nationality and citizenship. how do we talk about Southeast Asia in a way that isn’t bound by artificial borders of nation-states and in the language of the colonizers?
Southeast Asia is complex, complicated, diverse, and vast. An archipelago. A peninsula. Islands. Ring of fire. Exoticism. Tourist destinations. Maritime trade. Part of ancient trade routes. Southeast Asia is a place, a product of trade, colonizations, migrations, occupations, and settlements. There is diaspora, there is change, there are people settling down, there are people leaving, there are livelihoods linked to land and sea.
Southeast Asia is complex. Southeast Asians are complex. I cannot be defined by nation-states that exist as skeletons of colonial pasts.
home is where the heart is then where is my heart then? here? or there? or somewhere completely irrelevant? when people ask me “where are you from?” I say “here” “but where are you really from?” where I do wonder where am I really from? I do not know a searing sun prods me awake, where is giant mosquitoes nipping at my skin, home waves gently beating against the ship’s hull, I am still looking the sea holds onto me. but I cannot hold onto the sea. my callused feet slip on the jagged wood, my hands clasping rough rope, burning. friction is just a fraction of my infractions. I want to belong but I cannot belong. in another life, in another time, I knew these waters, I found balance in the disposition of their movements, in my movements, in my migration. I rooted myself in the sea and the sea rooted itself in me. My heart searches for its voice in the howling of the wind. I was here. I am elsewhere. remind me of diaspora, of migration, of finding a home across seas and oceans.
mama - raveena
there are these kopi cups and saucers that you can only find in kopitiams in Malaysia and Singapore English-styled cups made in Malaysia trying to be nostalgic for Chinese design like me
My mother mixed Milo for me every morning, even the days when I woke up at 6:30AM to go to high school and could hardly stomach a breakfast. Two spoons of Milo, hot water, a splash of milk, and sometimes a spoonful of Nestum mixed in. I remember asking other kids about whether they also had to drink Milo every morning, only to be shocked that no one else knew about this watery hot chocolate drink. Like my family, Milo ended up in our home as the result of multiple migrations and global capitalism. In 1934, an Australian named Thomas Mayne developed Milo and was marketed as a malt powder that could fortify children who were not getting enough nutrition. Huge marketing campaigns claiming that it’s a nutrient supplement have resulted in Milo becoming popular in South America, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa, all places deemed “developing” and in need of such nutrients, I guess. In fact, Malaysians are said to be the world’s largest consumers of Milo. In kopitiams and mamak stalls, Milo drinks are endless: Milo Peng, Milo C, Milo Ga Dai, Neslo, Milo Dinosaur, Milo Godzilla. Every time my family is able to go back to Malaysia, one of our suitcases when we return to the US is always filled to the brim with Milo and Nestum. We always insist that the Milo sold in Chinese and Indian groceries and the ethnic food aisles of Walmart and Harris Teeter were just somehow worse. Perhaps my parents’ insistence in drinking Milo everyday is rooted in diasporic nostalgia. As an immigrant from Asia, I can never understand my identity as separate from its political implications. People like me who have bodies and experiences like mine are constantly haunted by the US empire’s past and present. From unending and arbitrary regimes against undocumented im/migrants to Western colonization and imperialism leading to refugee and asylum seekers and brain drains, Asian im/migration is constantly tied to the needs and wants of the imperial core. And sometimes I wonder, then, if my immigrant parents are stuck in nostalgia that is naive and based in illusions, dreaming of a precolonial, pre-imperial past to come back to them. But other times, nostalgia has become a homing instinct for us, allowing us to create home. Nostalgia for familiarity and belonging guides my parents to find kinships in Malaysian Facebook groups and house parties to makan, and recreating Malaysian dishes with what they find at grocery stores. We make new traditions based in diaspora and based on archetypes in our memories. We create our selves, our homes. We search for trinkets and start new traditions and eat our ancestor’s foods that remind us of our past and of our memories. But those trinkets and traditions and foods are not stuck in the staticity of our past imaginations, not indications of how we, as immigrants, have one foot stuck in the past. Rather, they are guides that simultaneously ground us in the lives of our ancestors and inspire us to build our identities in America. Immigrant nostalgia does not have to be rooted in deep sadness and mourning of our displacement, and it can be inspirations for the creation of our collective futures, as we attempt to make homes and communities in the imperial core.
I am haunted by what I sounded like as a child. I remember speaking bits and pieces of multiple languages, switching quickly from one to another, all the languages bundled together in Singlish phrases and words. when I moved to the United States when I was five, I switched to only American English, as my parents only spoke English to me at home in hopes of getting me to learn faster. and now, my tongue can’t get itself around the words of my past. it has become a ghost lodged in my throat. there has been a painful and slow erosion and death of my tongue, resulting in a haunting of words that I know but can’t remember. there is a shame in trying to remember. that shame is rooted not only in my immigration to the United States and the settler colonizers’ insistence that I must speak English like them, using words like them, with accents like them. but it also rooted in how English is the language my ancestors were forced to speak after they were stolen from their homes, exploited for their labor, raped, emotionally and physically abused, bred like cattle, and generally maltreated on an unspeakable scale. over a century of British control in Malaysia and Singapore and the implementation of British education for assimilation and all we have learned is to be ashamed of ourselves, our languages, our lives. in Singapore, there have been huge pushes from the government to eradicate Singlish,
an English-based creole language with loan words and grammatical structures from Malay, Japanese, Tamil, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien Singlish is considered an ugly, informal, uneducated language. the government insists that “Singaporeans must speak grammatically correct English that is universally understood.” post-colonial Singapore is still trying to please our colonial captors. there is a shame in trying to not remember. I search constantly for the words that haunt me, that are just beyond my reach. remembering distinctly particles that no one could explain the meaning of, hearing the non-English words my parents would slip into when speaking with me. I butcher these words, romanizing words that cannot be expressed with my stunted, English tongue, that were never meant to have a place within the English language. when I ask my mother what words mean or what she is cooking, there is shame and sadness in how I didn’t know and how I whisper the words under my breath, again and again, trying to force them into my memory. I learned English quickly, mostly through reading, resulting in countless words that I pronounce incorrectly. and so over the years, people would point out that I had said the word wrong—it’s paa-muh-gra-nuht, not pohmeh-gra-nuht. but there are words that creep up on me that I wouldn’t have had to say outside my home and among my family. I hold onto those mistakes—the five-year-old child, who haunts me, had found a way to burst through.
to a five-year-old Shania who is about to move halfway across the world, before you even arrive, they will tell you that this is for the better. that America is where dreams come true, where you can be anything you want, do anything you want. that America is the land of opportunities, country of the free. that America is a nation built by immigrants; immigrants just like you! they will tell you to hope and dream and wish (for your individual success). when you arrive, they will tell you that all you have to do is work hard and study hard, and then you’ll succeed. that they promise comfort, belonging, and relief from fear and exhaustion, so long as you put in the work. that it’s not that hard, because other yellow immigrants (just like you!) worked their way to the very top. when you are here, they will tell you to put your head down. to be grateful that you even got the chance to be in America. to keep your mouth shut, to not say anything. they will tell you that you are indebted to this nation who chose to give you (you!) and your family (your! family!) this blessed opportunity. that you are your parents’ American Dream, don’t disappoint them. when you start to doubt, they won’t tell you what to do when you wish you were white. what to do when people call you a quiet kid because you were so afraid of other kids making fun of your accent. what to do when they call your English broken, but you know in your heart that you are whole. they won’t tell you what to do when you nearly work yourself to death chasing after the American Dream. when you start to open your eyes, they will never tell you that the optimism they taught you is cruel. that the individual success your family desires is actually an obstacle to our own flourishing. that your immigrant family is dependent on the very institutions that harm us. they will never tell you about the empire that you live in, or about how it scatters the world’s people, destroying and ravaging their homes so they are forced to find homes elsewhere, how colonizers built it upon the land of Indigenous people, stealing their lands, their culture, their lives. how it commits genocide of disenfranchised, dehumanized, marginalized people, of Black and Indigenous people. how it binds and forces you into strict binaries of cisheteropatriarchy. how it forces you to internalize these systems that tell you that you are wrong, you are less than, you are not worthy. how it has manufactured an economic system that allows unrestricted exploitation and subjugation by the elite. when you are in the imperial core, you must tell yourself to hope and dream and wish (for our collective liberations). you must fight.