Look at the picture book in your hand, glancing over each glossy page hoping to see it. Small hands tremble as you grasp the thick cover, searching for a treasure you know you will never find.
The Flor de la Mar’s of your self-discovery.
You are an other.
Books with characters, all around the world, celebrate differences. Your difference does not make the cut. Never fitting in that cookie-cutter mould. You learn young to cut out bits of the dough. Bits of yourself.
Another white girl appropriating Asian culture. Even though it’s your own.
“Saya anak Malaysia”
Grow-up hearing the language spill from your mother’s lips like a song, fluid and effortless. It wraps around you, familiar and warm, a reminder of home. You repeat the words back to her. Syllables are soft and hesitant, trying to mould your tongue around the sounds that feel yours (almost).
Search for yourself in books, in movies, always following your gaze as it caresses the screen but never lands on its prize. You watch characters travel the world, celebrate different cultures, fall in love, go on adventures (None look like you).
You never see someone. Someone like you. Your features. Your skin tone. Your mix of cultures. Reduced to an exotic mystery, a joke passed, a filler in a crosswalk scene. Spend your years waiting for a main character, but they never come.
You wonder. Deep down. If the world never sees you as a hero. (How can you ever be?)
At school, you study books. Ones that shaped history – Classics that have endured generations (Little Women. Dracula. Eyre). Turn the pages, looking for something. Anything. Yet the stories you read belong to others. Their struggles not your own. Their words – foreign as they bounce cheek to cheek.
Resonate most with Frankenstein:
- A creation stitched from scraps. Never quite belonging
- Wandering between worlds. Unwanted by both
- Monstrous not by birth. By perception
You realise. In stories that matter. You don’t exist.
Speak your mother’s language with hesitation (Accent betrays you). Laughter floods your ears when ordering “Maggi Goreng Ayam.” The occasional word slips out. You freeze. Doubt ripples through your body. Pray no one heard.
“You’re trying too hard.”
So, you stop.
Let them decide who you are because there is no one in the world of stories, in the world of movies, in the world of heroes. No one tells you otherwise.
The pages stay empty.
A stack of books rest on your bed – Hannah Alkaf and Jane Austen. A mix of languages sprawled across the spines, echoes of two worlds you belong to.
You humm a song, unsure of which language the lyrics belonged to first, as the scent of last night’s dinner fills the air with its soft aroma of garam masala. Your ceiling fan fights the pre-monsoon heat and circulates the delicious scent. You just see the green and gold peeking out of your closet. Your Wallabies flag flutters in the artificial breeze, hitting you with a sense of homesickness for a place you’ve never lived.
Every inch of this space whispers the truth you’ve struggled to see.
Wonder. Ponder. If the world does not make space for you in its stories, how will you ever learn to write your own?
Learn to shrink.
Fold yourself neatly into the spaces that society gives you. Pressing yourself into the edges, hoping you will fit. You mimic. You imitate. You mould yourself into someone easier to understand. Someone is easier to categorise. Someone else.
Laugh when they laugh. Stay silent when they speak.
Cut yourself into pieces. Trimming the edges of a photograph that was never meant to fit a frame. Erase words you once spoke freely, swallow the sounds that used to dance on your tongue. That you don’t miss the pieces of yourself hidden between each blade of the scissors.
Late at night. You whisper the words you were once too afraid to sit aloud. You trace the outline of who you used to be, caressing her smile as your finger strokes the glossy print. Before you learned that being you was something the world had no space for.
And then, one day. One day, you find her. One day, you find yourself.
Not in the pages of a book, not on a glowing screen, not in a history lesson. Fairytale. Bedtime story.
But in the mirror.
Blink. Once. Twice. As if seeing yourself for the first time.
You see the shape of your hazel eyes. The curve of your plump lips. The the tarik shade of your sunkissed skin. Hear the way your name sounds in your own voice, not theirs. Taste the words of your mother’s tongue on your lips, sweet. Familiar.
You let them settle there. No longer something to be hidden. No longer something to be ashamed of.
You step back. You look again. You see her.
Stop waiting. Stop wishing. Stop hoping someone else will tell your story for you.
You write yourself into existence.
Learn to love parts of you that you once tried to erase. The way your voice shifts between languages, the way your skin holds the sun, the way your accent changes its default settings every second week. Find beauty in the in-between spaces, in the duality of who you are.
You realise that you are not half of anything – you are whole.
Tell your story, in your own words, in your own voice. And maybe. Just maybe. Someone else who is searching will find yourself in your pages. Maybe they will see themselves in your story.
So maybe. Just maybe. They won’t have to search so hard. Maybe they won’t have to feel alone.
Maybe they’ll know. From the very beginning, they belong.
Too white to be Asian (Too Asian to be white).
And yet – Never too ‘Frankenstein’ to be me.
Notes
- The Flor de la Mar, meaning “Flower of the Sea,” was a 400-ton Portuguese carrack that sank in 1511, carrying
a vast treasure looted from Malacca, and its location remains a mystery to this day. - ‘Saya Anak Malaysia’ directly translates to ‘I am a child of Malaysia’ and is a reference to a popular patriotic song with the same title.
- Maggi Goreng Ayam is a popular Malaysian dish consisting of stir-fried instant noodles (Maggi) with chicken.
- Hannah Alkaf is a YA Malaysian author.
- Garam masala is a blend of ground spices used extensively in yourself, Indian cuisine.
- Tarik is a popular Malaysian milk tea made by “pulling” hot tea and condensed milk between two containers to create a frothy, smooth texture.
