In being successful, we cannot be Malay. And in being Malay, we cannot be successful. That will always be the general sentiment.

Successful women strew my mother’s contacts from her time in school. She comes from a school well-known for fostering such women whom I’ve gotten the chance to meet throughout my childhood. My mother is especially close to her own community, allowing me to meet women who aren’t only successful, but are also Malay like me.

I met her Malay friends from school for the first time, already having a feeling of ease nested in my chest from knowing we share the same ethnicity. What I didn’t know was that that feeling of ease would immediately be reamed out of me. The sinews–the accents, the slang, the cadence, the humor–of that group of women were almost Anglophilic, barely revealing a vestige of our culture. It recalled interviews with successful Malays, sharing the commonality that none of these people had Malay accents. None of them seemed Malay, and I’d never understood why.

***

“So, what kind of girls do you like?” I asked as I fell into step beside my crush on the way to class. I was twelve, and I’d liked Austin since I was ten.

“Chinese girls,” came his terse reply, with all the swiftness of a thread snapping. My chest twinged. The waning hope I had left turned to puffs of dust and curls of ghosts. I stitched on a half-smile, but my eyes went rheumy and he was no idiot. He knew I was hurt.

He quickly realized his response was about to mar our friendship. His eyes took on a panicked sheen, and words blundered off his tongue, “but if it’s Malay girls like you then can lah. I mean, Malay girls that aren’t Malay-Malay. Basically Chinese, you know?”

‘Basically Chinese’? ‘Not Malay-Malay’? My reflex was to bristle at his affront. My eyebrows were knitted, my words were lined up to sluice, my mouth was open, but the words turned to ash. The remark left me muddled. Do I not act Malay? What does it even mean to be Malay? Am I basically Chinese?

For as long as I could remember, I’d been acting Malay; I partook in Malay competitions, I fervently celebrated both types of Hari Raya every year, I trussed myself up in Baju Kurung for every cultural school event, and I even spoke Malay at home.

“You’re smart, you study, you don’t smoke with them, and your skin isn’t dark like theirs,” he mused, his timbre blithe and devoid of ill intent. That made it so much worse. Unintentionally, he answered my question that was never asked. Apparently, according to him, that’s what it meant to be Malay: stupid, lazy, dark-skinned, and into smoking.

of the myriad of implications coaxed into that sentence, ‘like theirs’ was the part that carved knives into my heart. ‘Theirs’ as if I wasn’t one of them. ‘Theirs’ as if I wasn’t Malay. ‘Theirs’ as if I was expected to be proud to hear I wasn’t one of them.

I became a child who had just learnt that the world is somehow smaller than the womb. The conglomeration of questions I’d hoarded over the years, about successful Malays and their Anglophilic demeanors, answered by a twelve-year-old boy in a single stream of words.

That was what Austin thought of Malays. I couldn’t begin to fathom what everyone else thought. An inane possibility, that even the best of people had this impression of us, became a reality. The paradox that is the prevalence of racism in Singapore materialized like a blow to the jaw.

The truth is that the periphery is one ugly road, laden with nettles and barbs. Being a minority race is being on that road so long as you live. There is no separation between ethnicity and qualities; only a yawning chasm between ethnicity and ethnicity.

My ethnicity is synonymous with my qualities. Rending a hole in the stereotypes doesn’t prove they’re false. All it proves is that I’m not truly Malay; that I’m ‘basically Chinese’. Needless to say, I want to be successful. But how am I to be successful when I am seen as Malay–when I am seen as stupid and lazy?

I have a choice because I have fair skin. God help those who don’t. I have the choice to blot out the reality of my ethnicity and parade myself as such. I can swathe myself in different accents, different friends, and different ethnic clothes until I am merely a palimpsest. I can blow on dandelions, wishing myself into the pages of a fairy tale. While it is undeniably wrong, the sad truth is that I continue to do it for the sake of my future, and so do many others.

I am space

But not the useful kind—

Not the kind that holds galaxies,

Nor the kind that partitions words.

I am sent in lieu of that.

I am the space nobody thinks of—

The kind that creeps in threadbare cottages,

the kind that prolongs and rends couples

And yet, with you, I am not.

You make me a space I am happy to be—

The one that teems your gallery,

the one that dots your mind.

The one that’s so habile,

you even make it rhyme.

"You're a bloody psychopath."

"High-functioning sociopath... with your number."

In my head, I blow on dandelions, and try to wish myself into whatever show has been playing on the TV for the past two days. I imagine the inane possibility of being able to swipe aside the hair smothering my face, or call for a nurse to turn up the temperature on the air-conditioning. I use every last remnant of my consciousness trying to heave my limbs, eyes, and lips everyday. And everyday without fail, my prayers fall upon the deaf ears of God.

Doors open and close, curtains rattle, families cry. These four walls prison tragedies, confining them for the sake of public safety - for the sake of preserving sound minds milling about outside the ward. The insurmountable cries of friends and family that beg for us to function in ways we simply cannot are enough to crush the average soul. All of us in this ward take the periphery below more sentient beings. We are all no longer unparalleled by inanimate objects. It's only natural that I grow accustomed to unwillingly eavesdropping. Perhaps, I rend a hole in the homogeneous unconsciousness and I am the only one here who hears. I will never know what the others can do.

"You're a bloody psychopath."

"High-functioning sociopath... with your number."

I can barely catch the witty English man's line this time. Deplorable conversations between a family hazes the sound of the show. It is the family of the patient to my right, who I found out is named Ezra. They come on the daily, excluding the day they attended Zara's, Ezra's younger sister's, wedding. They are a supportive family - they speak to and about Ezra with upmost respect at all times, despite his unfortunate state of coma. From their exchanges, I infer they're kind too, considering they bring gifts for the nurses and doctors.

The words they utter stain the stagnant peace in the ward. The words quickly transition into gibberish sniffles and sharp breaths as they start to deviate from their equilibrium. Incongruous to their routine unwavering hope, Zara suggests pulling the plug on Ezra. It isn't easy, but her parents gradually come to the same consensus. The doctors and the ward's assigned nurses are informed the very same day. All of us here teeter on the boundary dividing life and death, and have been doing so for a while. Ezra is starting to tip over, the grim reaper near in his future.

At night, I deduce the doctors and nurses don't carry out the final procedure on Ezra as there is no commotion. It must be a dream then. When the grim reaper first comes, I don't recognise it. It is lanky with a waxen, porcelain complexion. It is draped in pure white fluorescent silk from head to toe like a greek statue. First and foremost, it is a woman - a woman with a face purposefully sculpted to appear soft and feminine. Her opalescent eyes are large and round like a deer's. They naturally squint into crescents that make her look happy without having to smile at all. Her nose is tiny, its tip rounded and soft, not sharp. The grim reaper I'm familiar with doesn't have a face, and neither is he a woman. The only thing that gives her away is the scythe clutched in her delicate hands, which too looks out of place being disproportionately big to her stature.

Her steps slow as she gets closer to Ezra. She stoops, bending over him with her scythe held low. Fine lines form between her eyebrows as she sighs empathetically, as if apologising for the pain she is about to induce. She finally raises her scythe.

"You're a bloody psychopath."

"High-functioning sociopath... with your number."

"I'm afraid Ezra has passed away in his sleep last night. Your family did a very good job at supporting him up till his last breath. You did all that you could," says a grave voice. A cacophony of caterwauls unfolds. It was not a dream. The woman was in fact the "grim" reaper. That concept is strange when you look into it - the concept of the grim reaper. It is merely a hollow construct of misconstrued beliefs of death as the condemner. Religious pablum feeds us such beliefs to digest and take as gospel. Rarely ever is death portrayed as the kind saviour that liberates souls.

When girls gnash, and gnarl, and gnaw at themselves because they don’t resemble cover girls, you mustn't blame them. For at the measly age of twelve, I realised this phenomenon is so much greater than it is made out to be. People often dismiss it as “girls being girls”. No, it is so much more logical than that, seeing how “being girls” is far from being logical. Business is business, and a girl’s beauty is a commodity which will never drop in value.

If beauty were a weapon, I would have been sprawled on the battlefield. Between the ages of nine to eleven, my weapon of choice was grades. Emcee, debater, prize winner, top student; You name it, I’d done it. I was a far cry from being short on validation, especially from adults. The flood of validation which came with every release of exam results was enough for me to be enough. Students would swarm me like bees, teachers would favour me like I were their own flesh and blood, and my family couldn’t have loved me more. Life was, as it seemed, flawless.

Of course, I was no divine being. I was chubby, but in no way fat or obese. I was marginally bigger than the girls in my school. But could you blame me? I live in Singapore, where Chinese beauty standards run rampant, and my parents didn’t believe in following them. Conforming to those standards would have meant that a slightly underweight version of myself was the best version. Naturally, outside the pockets of time I was showered with praise, I was treated like a cabbage in a fruit basket. I had stumbled into a party I was uninvited to. Neither the girls nor the boys granted me the privilege of experiencing school like the average student. Everything I did sent faces scrunching and goosebumps erupting along skin, and not in a good way. My every action warranted a reaction. Running in gym class, tying my hair, answering questions, eating; You name it, I’d been teased for. How splendid it would have been had my problems ended there, but my weight was only a fraction of this series of teasing. Simultaneously, my hair was always tautly slicked back into a ponytail sitting at the very top of my head. My teachers and family calling me by my name was a pleasant reminder that my name was not actually, “Jojo Siwa”. My peers, on the other hand, found it a challenge not to mistake me for her when our hairlines and foreheads were uncannily similar.

When I was eleven, I met a boy named Samuel when we were assigned new classes. He was well-known, equally for his good and bad traits. While he was the captain of the floorball team with girls ogling him from the courtside, he was also seldom in class since he spent a good chunk of his time with the discipline mistress. He had a waxen complexion, with dark thick eyelashes and eyebrows to contrast. He was lanky too, but that didn’t make him any less attractive to the girls. The crush I had on him led to no sort of attempt of confession to him, but I did confess it to my best friend. A tale as old as time, my best friend blew the gaff. What followed was a cacophony of taunts for the next month, seeing that he was one of my most avid bullies. Samuel’s behaviour towards me from then on brought me all the way back to kindergarten, when girls were still thought to have “cooties”.

Through the age of eleven, my quality of life became linear, decreasing everyday with purpose. Currently, as I leaf again and again through those memories, the lowest point of it all was the day I saw Samuel in the school library. He ambled in with his usual pack of followers and plopped down at the table across from me. The stagnant, buzzing silence was instantaneously brought to a halt by quick-fire comments about girls flying about, and excitable signalling that they were in fact straight. My ears perked up when I heard my name drifting around in the sea of useless insight. “Who? Jojo Siwa? Why would I like her?” an otherwise charming chuckle was let out. Thorny tendrils snaked their way around my heart. If the ground had swallowed me whole right then, I’d have thanked God when I got home. To this day, I haven’t a clue if they were aware I could hear them. What more if that was the motivation behind what they did. I didn’t cry that day, not a single shade of crimson tinted my eyes. Instead, it became a mystery to unravel. Why wouldn’t he like me? I’m smart, am I not? I’m kind, and I’m funny too. I’m great at speaking. There’s nothing missing. The synapses in my head started firing, sending me into a paroxysm of doubt that I’d never once casted on myself.

The school bell sounded, and I slipped into the last fraction of the bus. Like clockwork, I yanked my shoes off and bounded up the stairs upon unlocking the front door. I danced to the rhythm of my daily after-school routine. After taking a shower, I glanced at the mirror as always, before stepping towards the bathroom door. Strangely, my hand hovered above the door knob. I twisted back to wipe the blanket of steam off the mirror. And I searched, scoured, and surveyed my face for that reason: The reason a boy liking me was something so unbelievable, almost laughable. My forehead was a given. My hairline too. Needless to say, my weight played a huge role. What else was there?

As the abnormality in my routine that day became a formality, I soon realised I had lots to work on. I slathered my face with cleanser and cream every night, as if the sun wouldn’t rise the next morning if I hadn’t. I devoured vitamins every morning, but only after assuring myself that they didn’t have any calories. I avoided the canteen like the plague, and even in those scattered instances when I ventured there, I couldn’t take my eyes off the food. I couldn’t stop adding up everything I’d eaten that day, either. I used to be attentive in class, but then lessons gradually muffled as my mind struggled to balance them with the thoughts of food.

The day I was officially thirty five kilograms came like spring after the most frigid winter. I inched onto the weighing scale, as fearful as always. The frozen weeds of worries quickly blossomed into a vast field of euphoria. I hopped off the weighing scale and sprinted to the mirror like a gazelle. Just as I had anticipated, everything was different. Everything was visible: my jawline, my cheekbones, even my ribs. My eyes no longer shrank from the size of my cheeks when I smiled. Everything was perfect. I did it. My face fell into my hands. I couldn’t believe it. I recall thinking that that must’ve been how wedding days felt; The feeling that nothing could possibly ruin it.

I kept up my rigorous routines and diets. I’d reached my goal by then, but it felt too good to stop. The teasing didn’t stop either, so I was still known as Jojo Siwa. That didn’t change. Except, I was then a slightly underweight Jojo Siwa, who lumbered around school because she barely ate or spoke. Somehow, I was still being made a mockery of, but for the exact opposite reason.

A few days after I turned thirty five kilograms, I cut my hair. It wasn’t nearly as self-serving as all else I’d done. Prior to cutting my hair, I had realised I would always bear the brunt of the bullying in my school. Natch, I had no qualms about my mother cutting my hair short. She claimed it would save me time in the morning, not having to tie it. I didn’t share the same sentiments, but what I did with my appearance didn’t matter since I would have always been the girl with the big forehead. My previously past-shoulder-length hair was cut down to a Japanese doll haircut. It framed my face such that my face appeared the size of a fist. My forehead was curtained by bangs, while the sides of my face were chiselled down by strips of hair on either side.

The day, and the days, and the months, and the year after I cut my hair were surreal. Like usual, I came into school with my eyes riveted on the ground. Whenever they reached anywhere above that, they would meet those of another student for some peculiar reason. I brushed my hands against my face to make sure there wasn’t anything on it. Why else would they be looking at me? As my hands fell back to my sides, it clicked. Oh yeah, my haircut. As the rest of the morning passed, the head-turns and stares then made sense. That afternoon, something equally bizarre took place. Nigel, Samuel’s best friend, sauntered towards me as I was reading on the bench in front of the canteen. “Nako, do you still like Samuel?” he asked blithely. My face flinched at the absurdity of his words. Nako? He called me Nako? I didn’t manage to catch anything after that, hence came my curt reply, “Sorry, what?” “Do you still like Samuel? He’s asking.” My eyebrows couldn’t help but furrow. “Why is he asking?” “Just answer the question,” he replied, clearly growing impatient. “I guess so,” I mumbled. Nothing was going to stop me from being teased so I might as well have done as I pleased. The ends of his mouth sprung up into a cheeky half-smile and he retreated back to the canteen, where I could see Samuel awaiting my response.

If beauty were a weapon, I would have been a whole machine gun. That wasn’t what I thought, but it was what others did. Although I rarely went to the canteen, I never went hungry. Samuel would buy a carton of chocolate milk every recess, and deliver it straight to our classroom where I spent my time. Miraculously, he was in class a lot more and his visits to the discipline mistress became less and less frequent. Classmates, who had hardly ever spoken to me, even made it a point to concern themselves with my affairs. They started asking meaningless questions like, “Are you okay?”, “Why aren’t you eating?”, “Do you think Samuel likes you?” and even conjuring up theories that Samuel was behaving better just to be in class with me. The validation I received soon wasn’t dependent on exam results or debate competitions. I was endowed with it, as if it were my birthright. In fact, I was endowed with many things: friends, boys that liked me, and quintessentially, respect. My every action warranted a reaction. Running in gym class, tying my hair, answering questions, eating; You name it, I was praised for. Things I was once demonised for now made me angelic. I didn’t need to do anything to be enough. I just was.

Months passed with my new-found identity. The looming expectation that I had to act the way I looked became increasingly apparent. The more friends I made outside of my class, the more it dawned upon me what impression people were under: bimbo. When posed with the question, “What class are you from?”, the words melted off my tongue like custard - velvety and rich, “6 Amethyst”. For context, the top class was Amethyst, followed by Diamond and Emerald. They go on to respond, “Oh, didn’t expect that. You’re actually quite smart,” and I was left to slowly comprehend what exactly that implied. Another notion adults preached to me was ditching my studies and just finding a rich husband when I grew up. Through enough conversations and little comments like those, it didn’t take me long to understand that girls couldn’t and shouldn’t be both intelligent and attractive. They had to choose, since those two were mutually exclusive. God forbid that a girl was both attractive and intelligent. How impossible. It went without saying that the more ambitious they found me, the less attractive I became. My commodity was losing its value.

I had to bury my aptitude in a corner of my existence if I wanted to continue being treated well in school. The truth was that my ability to answer any question in class, and score perfectly on countless exams was diminishing how attractive I was. I layered on masks to give me the newfound identity that I so yearned for. I would, like my peers, emphatically sigh and complain what a bore it was when we had to write essays or do practice papers. An innocent, “I don’t know,” became an instinctive response to anyone who asked me questions. I even skipped debate sessions and refused to enter competitions.

Soon enough, I was turned over by the character I was playing, and I couldn’t differentiate between those acts of pretence and the real me. It wasn’t long before I started facing difficulties in my strengths. I found that I lacked the ability to give debate speeches fluently - they were filled with awkward pauses and speech-fillers while I racked my brains hard to find a suitable word to describe my argument; my Math and Science remained stagnant at a level where I could barely satisfy my parents’ expectations.

We willingly disregard the truth, as it is always more uncomfortable than lies. Girls try to hide the truths about themselves which are deemed as unsightly, instead preferring to present partial truths or even complete lies. We cannot bring ourselves to admit that we are ugly, we are fat, we are stupid - we are different. Because that is not what society wants from us. We shouldn’t be anomalies that deviate from the best-fit line. We don’t reach the qualifying score to be treated decently. We foolishly attempt to change that score by shading over those unsightly truths with false facades. We eagerly delude ourselves into thinking that we are identical to everyone else. We consciously mould ourselves such that we conform to the status quo. Ultimately, no matter how we seem to emerge victorious, we know deep down that all has been lost. In our search for ease in life, we have since lost ease in ourselves. But how else are we to lead an adequate life?

I greet the sun,

as one would an abusive father.

It greets me back as always,

and leaves kisses from which I can’t take cover.

A layer of kisses a day,

the kind that appears crimson even against my umber skin.

The stinging kisses cover my body,

more than my clothes ever did.

I greet my books,

as I would my favourite teacher.

And it’s only fitting because

I’ve never had the chance of having either.

My shovel is an extension of me,

more familiar than a pen.

Often, I carry too much,

more than my body possibly can.

My hands are different,

but I only notice at Papa’s wake.

When my cousin clasps my hands,

I do a double take.

He is my age.

His hands are like those of women divine.

I thought the roughness and bumps came with growth,

especially since Mama’s and Papa’s look like mine.

When can I be like him?

Like them?

When will the day come

when I can bring home

a report card instead of money,

a school bag instead of a sack,

a stack of books instead of tools?

When will the day come

when I can wear a

a white pair of shoes,

a white shirt,

a white pair of socks?

When will the day come

when I can pick up a pencil,

not a tool,

when I can be a kid,

not a tool?

Will the day ever come?