A Probability of Being

As one of the Author Spotlights for AnomalyCon 2016, con chair Kronda Seibert invited me to participate in the AnomalyCards, a set of postcards distributed at random, to be traded with other attendees for the whole set. Writers would contribute a flash fic, and artists would illustrate them. This sounded like a fine idea, so of course I sent in a thing! Here is the result!

So before I run out of Malaysia Day, I should say something about it.

While in Canada, I tend to miss celebrations that I should be aware of, like the Lunar New Year, or Adilfitri, or Hungry Ghost Month (which is happening now, should be ending soon). August 31st was Merdeka Day, or Malaya's Independence Day. It's the day when the British left Malayan leadership roles after dicking around with us for a few hundred years.  At the last Steampunk World's Fair, I kept referring to how the British colonizers left our shores, but left their mark behind. ( Moniquill rightly put me in my place by reminding me that "the colonizers never left ours ".) The thing is, I was being simplistic. After the British left, we had their parliament system, their education system. We were and are still dependent on business from the West. We still use the economic success of the West as a yardstick against which we measure our own growth. (Seriously, what is there to grow? In the West Peninsula we are a small small land, and hell no are we going to des...

This post was originally posted at Jeff Vandermeer's blog, Ecstatic Days, at which he very kindly asked me to guestblog for a bit! See the original post plus comments here .

Sometimes, I like to take note when boys are doing the smashing of the gender binary.  There is a national cheerleading competition every year here in Malaysia, which got its start several/a few years ago (depending on how you calculate time - I know its first year was before I left for Canada, so that's quite a long time from my perspective). I've never actually seen it in person, but there's always one splash page in the newspaper, featuring the teams in some sort of cheerleader-y pose, with the name of the team and what school they're presenting.  The first year this happened, I noticed that there was an all-boys team, and I thought, that is so awesome! Good for the boys. I hope they do their best. And from what I read later on, they certainly did.  There are a lot of gender stereotypes floating around, many of them stemming from the West, about how men should act and what women should (not) do. I've noticed that some of them just don't have any roots h...

Some context for non-Malaysians On May 13, 1969, riots broke out on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. These were racialized riots, between the majority Malay and minority-but-still-sizeable Chinese factions, a result of racial and religious fractioning between political parties of the people. Malaysia was still a very young country at the time, and had not really had much time yet to grow used to its multi-cultural identity now that the overwhelming British influence was gone. I would still argue that the Malaysian identity is still in flux; cultures take a long time to change and syncretize with each other.  Since then, May 13 has become a force under which we have all rallied to do away with race-based politics, with a certain degree of success. We recognize now that we are Malaysians - born, bred, raised in similar environments and contexts, with a shared history (that can also be called propaganda), in a particular cultural context that is similar but not quite exactly the same ...

This is where all Malaysians and residents of Malaysia are welcome to leave links to their participation in the May 13 Blogswarm. For more information, check out LiveJournal and Facebook . Comments Policy:  Please note that moderation is turned on for comments older than 7 days. I try to check in regularly, but this may be hard as I will be traveling. Do not use this place to debate what others have said. If you do and you crash my site in due process, I'll get very irritated at you. That shit is rude. Don't do it. 

Sometime when I was home earlier this year, my dad and I noticed this Indian man struggling with a walker in our housing area. He wasn't very old, and we'd seen him, walking, sort of tottering, past our road, along the football field, down a road which has several road bumps, because it's a one-way street passing through several.

If you haven't heard already, my friend Tariq and I recently started a new Dreamwidth Community called steampunk_nusantara . This is not a writing community, although there is writing involved. Its genesis began here , as a discussion for a meta-setting set in South East Asia, particularly the region called Nusantara, which is mostly Malaya, the Indonesian islands and a bit of Borneo. Tariq and I had many conversations about how this would work - a collection of documents, some descriptions of stuff that could go in, something to give people a starting point if they wanted to write a SEA-centered steampunk story. We tried using GoogleWave and it didn't work, because Tariq and I are very chatty people, and it just didn't look right as a single document. So we left it on the backburner, although I thought about it occasionally. I just did not know how to make it work. It had to be in a format where a bunch of people could work together on it, but Wave is limited in that w...

 Petaling Street in Kuala Lumpur is famous for its night market. It's always busy, there're a ton of cheap pirated goods, good food. It was so prosperous and such a draw for tourists that the government decided to refurbish it, give it a nice arch at the end of the street, and I think there's even a roof to keep the rain off the good folks who shop there. What happened? It became a Chinatown, with cheesy red pillars to match. Why the fuck do we need a Chinatown? The Chinese shop at other places too. I felt really betrayed, like the government had decided to shunt us Chinese into one area to capitalize on tourism as much as possible, when Petaling Street, despite being Chinese-dominated, really belonged to  everybody . This refurbishment happened while I was gone, and even though I don't go to Petaling Street all that much, whenever my family passes through that area now and I see those godawful pillars, I cringe inwardly, because it feels like Malaysia is aping ways to...

The other day, after a job interview, I went to KFC and had chicken rice. It's mainly two pieces of chicken, a bowl of rice, three slices of cucumber, and a small bowl of soup with a couple of meatballs in it. It was quite delicious, because a) our chicken generally tastes better (I suspect it is due to the halal state of the meat), b) it's been localized, what with the rice and all, and c) you gotta have soup to finish off the meal, you just gotta. One of the things that's always frustrated me about the Canadian KFC franchise, besides the general disgustingness of the chicken that I will consume anyway (hey, low bars and all), is the lack of metal cutlery. What we get are plastic forks and knives, maybe spoons. And we're supposed to use these on paper plates. I hate this concept. I hate using plastic cutlery. No, I don't care about your excuses, Canadian KFC. I don't care that it's cheaper, because buying a set amount of metal cutlery that can be re-use...

A few years ago, DiGi Malaysia, a mobile phone service, had an ad campaign. DiGi's best known for its prepaid service, which in North America is called pay-as-you-go, which I think is silly. Anyway, DiGi's signal mascot in this campaign was the Yellow Man. Despite being an anthropomorphism of telephonic coverage, Digi Yellow Man has some personality to him, although in the first ad, those aren't much more than loyalty, a somewhat cheery disposition, curiousity in both what you do and the world around him, and a dogged determination to follow you everywhere you go, even to the bathroom: He will be available at your disposal even out in the middle of nowhere, and will be your constant companion wherever you go: Even on your wedding day: Digi Yellow Man always wants to be the first to serve, and will fight to be of service: But DiGi Yellow Man is under no obligation to never be embarrassed about you when you decide to be a rude obnoxious jerk in a cinema: Nor does ...

In high school, I was asked, "[Jha], are you a Christian?" and I would say, no, why? "Because you speak such good English." In Canada, I was frequently mistaken for a Canadian local, or an American. I was told, however, on a trip to England, with a few other students on a course on Shakespeare (wherein we had two weeks of seminars on Shakespearean plays which we would then watch in Stratford-on-Avon, and every day was a flurry of lectures, discussion groups, and plays, with afternoons off), that my Malaysian accent came out once in a while, "whenever [I] discuss difficult concepts". I didn't know I even had a Malaysian accent. It's very slight, my professor told me, but it's there, because otherwise I have a rather powerful command of English (which only makes sense, seeing as it's the only language I have so I really ought to make the best of it). But there are other things I hide when I'm among Canadians, just as there are thi...

I'm working on a couple of steampunk costumes right now. I avoid the costuming bit, because I have no skills in putting them together, and it seems like a hella lot of work. However, I do find pieces here and there in ordinary stores which suit my purposes. Right now, I'm working on a more Asian side of costume. I do have an ao-dai that my mother bought for me that looks remarkably like a cheongsam, but Ay-Leen's already got the steampunk'd ao-dai down, and she's actually Vietnamese too, unlike me, so I'd be totally unoriginal. However! I do have a yellow, Chinese-esque blouse I bought in some second-hand store. And the soft white trouser piece of the ao-dai works well with it. Not only that, but if I add a sarong, the ensemble would look remarkably like the baju Melayu worn by men in Malaysia, for formal occasions. Not totally close, because the pants usually match the shirt, but there's only so much I can work with, ya'll. I would prefer a mo...

 Tariq pointed me to a couple of Farish Noor articles on, firstly, migration as a form of protest , and secondly, a response to the comments received on the first link. My response is three-fold. Firstly, the more I study the concept of nationhood, the histories surrounding so many countries today, the colonialism that continues to thrive within minds and hearts, and the struggles of post-colonialism, the less faith I have in the idea of a solid Malaysian identity. Like other countries, it is a space with man-made borders, with certain cultural identifiers which are shared with other nations in the region, governed by human beings who are prone to fuck-ups. I still call myself Malaysian, though, because I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of not belonging to Malaysia. I certainly don't always fit in while in Canada. I love Nova Scotia, and one day, might consider becoming an official Bluenoser, but until I know for sure where my life path takes me, I don't wa...

I am currently finishing off Leela Gandhi's Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. It's been a very good read so far - I've had so many moments of recognition within the book, I don't even know where to start with it! But while reading, Gandhi discusses the counter-narrative that Rushdie provides. She notes, "Rushdie's invective against India here ... is ... characteristic of his larger oeuvre. ... we might consider the fact that Rushdie's narrative renditions of [India] have always been pathologically and unequivocally reductive." (Shorter layman's terms: Rushdie's a jerk who simplifies India in a completely non-productive manner.) So how to respond to this anti-colonial, anti-nationalistic prescriptive method? Gandhi suggests, "we might still observe that perhaos what postcolonialism literature needs is a properly romantic modality ; a willingness to crtique, ameliorate and build upon the compositions of the colonial aftermath...

A while back, there were some dumb shenanigans in Malaysia, involving the protestations of a few crazy people against the building of a Hindu temple in what they felt was a Muslim area. For some dumb reason I do not understand, they took this seriously, and there were photographers floating around showing pictures of these dudes walking around with a cow's head - like, a real cow's head, not some papier-mache doohickey - in order to make their point. Aside from how utterly stupid this display was, which caused a bit of an uproar, there's not much I can say about that incident per se. What I want to address are the reactions to the incident, which I will now refer to as Cowhead Fail. Specifically, the lack of reaction. There were a lot of emails floating around about how "real Muslims don't do this" and "how can this happen in this day and age" and "why are people so barbaric". Which is fine for the first few times, but eventually it all boi...

Because I apparently cannot go without a disclaimer, I wish to make clear that what I said in the earlier post is merely opposition to the idea of doing away with race entirely. On the flip side of the coin, it is clear that differences between races in Malaysia have been a wedge between race relations. These differences however, are played up by specific people, for specific reasons. There is no good reason why Chinese are apparently controlling the economy and why the Malays apparently control the politics and why everyone else are just SOL. That's how power plays itself out, how people retain power and refuse to let go of it, even though it is obviously detrimental to whole swaths of the population. There is no goddamn reason why I should have to note what my race on any sort of application in Malaysia - it's irrelevant for most administrative reasons. Except, of course, for that strange affirmative action policy in place which insists that Malays need to make a specific pe...

A while back on my post "Colourblind", I got a very interesting comment: 1) What do you think defines a chinese or any other race? If one was American-Chinese but disconnected from Chinese culture, does that make the person more chinese, less chinese or not chinese at all? How does such a person identify himself? Therein lies the crux of the problem. Labeling, stereotyping and then racism. We need to start appreciating the differences at the individual level not by accepting human constructs of what is "chinese". Now, I appreciate where Keisha is coming from here. Like many others, I resisted the idea of labelling, because the whole thing about race is that it divvies up people. In my archives, there is a series called "Quintessentially Chinese?" in which I ask her question: what defines a Chinese person? As for the question of whether an Asian-American is more or less Asian than an Asian sourcelander (thanks, oyceter for the term !), that is really up to ...

So, Farish Noor is really smart. Just making sure that's out there: I respect him, I respect his work, I know how important he is in Malaysia. I haven't come across much of him, seeing as I tend to read in different circles, but occasionally my dad sends me stuff written by him, and other friends pass on links. But occasionally, because the man isn't perfect, he will say things that get my goat. Case in point, this post . Firstly, we don't even know what being Malaysian means. I assume, in my readings and discussions on nationhood and identifying and immigration and other such subjects, that being Malaysian, much being Canadian, means having been born in Malaysia or otherwise attained citizenship in Malaysia, living in Malaysia, abiding by Malaysians laws, as per expected as a Malaysian citizen. However, every citizen will have different experiences of these limits within Malaysia itself. The priorities of a Malaysian-Indian will be different from the priorities of a Ma...