the sad truth about the periphery

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.