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This was written and submitted for the SBS Emerging Writers Competition 2021. My entry didn’t make it, but it felt fulfilling to be a part of the process. After reading the winning entries, I’m honoured and inspired to have participated. I will keep on writing to unleash that inner voice, may it be authentic.
“You’re pretty…
Pretty ugly, he grins.
That’s my brother getting back at me. I was so upset at mum for saying I had to share my Playmobil toy policeman with him. Why did I have to share?! Cheeky, not hurtful but totally annoying and from that young age, I already knew I had to be pretty… gungho! In one of our sparring sessions, he copped a Taekwondo hook kick to his chin. I couldn’t understand why boys had such fun toys so I wanted to be a boy called Peter and asked my aunt if our doggie Porgie could have a peepee, why couldn’t I? I was not going to have any less than what my brothers had. I knew I’d have to be better and stronger than them since I didn’t have that one membership thing. It wasn’t envy, it was the early days of my want for equality.
Who am I?
I’m a girl, gungho with long black wavy hair. That’s not unusual for a person of southern Han Chinese heritage with a chance of meatballs in our DNA makeup. We suspect Dad’s lineage via his high bridged nose which I have none, traces our paternal DNA back to the Arabian traders or possibly even the great Indian conquerors and with his father adopted, this suspicion is highly palpable. Pencil in hand, heart-of-glass-like-Blondie’s on my sleeve, I charge like an italicised sans serif Ubuntu font on a mission to be the best version of myself. Some days I feel like a modern day Mulan out to protect and serve my family. Other days I feel frustrated that I’ve not yet come out of the entrepreneurial closet as a Unicorn. On one of those navel-gazing days, I happened to have Australia’s highest-paid radio duo Karl & Jackie O’ on air. Karl mocks Jackie O’ as he does, and says, I don’t know why you women will somehow find something to feel insecure about.
18 and full of promise, I hid my pimply back under a crisp striped shirt mom bought for me from Petaling Street and prepared for my first overseas trip. It had a green logo – Accost, it said. A headband kept my hair slicked back like in that Greased Lightning music video and I was ready to face immigration officers with a no-eggs, no-meat declaration on my first entry down under as an overseas student.
Where are you from? An inquisitive man ahead of me in the queue asks, spotting my red passport. China?
No. Malaysian, I announced.
He nodded downward in disappointment that he had guessed wrong and turned away before I could add… Chinese.
I had never been asked that before and in that liminal, I got it. Motherland is where my mother and her mother were born and from that day onwards, I was Malaysian. Malaysian Chinese, if they press on.
I left with a skip of pride at the airport and checked-in to a brand new life.
It was the Summer of 1988 and Australians were out on the harbour celebrating the bicentenary – 200 years since the arrival of the first fleet. It turned out to be the largest questioning of national identity the country had ever witnessed with many parties calling out for Aboriginal rights to be recognised. Riding on a train to the city, I read that “White Australia has a Black History” and it painted a very different kind of Australia than what I had pictured. I was a vulnerable new arrival, all toothy and smiley, posing with the Opera House in the backdrop, unaware it was Cadi people’s land I stood on, ignorant of Australia’s subliminities like Welcome to Country or Acknowledgement of Country when a First Nations Elder isn’t present at a ceremony, oblivious to the greatest find at Lake Mungo of a man and a woman whose cremated remains date back two ice ages to some 50,000 years ago. My heart aches each time I see footage of The Stolen Generation in a documentary.
Growing up in Malaysia, my brothers and I played freely, cycling and running with our three-legged dog Spotty around the horseshoe shaped street lined with 25 x 75 foot terrace houses in a suburb whose residents were a multiracial genteel mix. We climbed up our tree house like how Daddy climbed up the corporate ladder. Two red chairs with plastic ropes strung across it a thousand times, jammed up between the Rambutan tree with its metal legs tightly wedged around the trunk in our front yard. We cycled without a care to piano lessons a stone’s throw down the road and readied our fingers in anticipation that Teacher may bring down a pencil if we hit the wrong notes. She gave up on my brother who wasn’t a natural. We played in the park on our skateboards and roller skates and cooked Maggi noodles in Milo tins using newspaper as fuel! I’d follow mum to the morning market every Saturday only to be lost in the folds of the latest British New Wave band zine and Beano comics while mum and aunty sought daily bargains at the makeshift wet produce market setup on an open carpark lot. I cherish those mornings, leafing through the magazines imported from so far away, listening to adult conversations at the newsagent, women bargaining, men heaving pickaxe cleavers carving meat from carcasses, chicken and their feathers strewn around shitty cages, oh, the smell and the din! I loved every moment!
Weekends would come and my neighbour and bestie Carol and I walked to the pasar malam night market – such a social affair it was too! We’d bump into school friends, school teachers, Wesley Methodist church members and even spot a famous personality or two! A head nod was enough to make you feel right at home for us 12-year olds. We’d race home pumped up with adrenaline but we were mostly running scared because there was a rumour going around that there was a Hantu KumKum (an urban legend vampire who’d seek out virgin girls and drink their blood dry)!
It was a good thing we were forgetful. Carol and I took to walking a little further the next day. This time in daylight and accompanied by another bestie, Lenni. Our youthful naivety and adventurous spirit egged us on as we power walked from suburbia through to the leafy green back roads of Federal Hills, dotted by large colonial bungalows of the black and white blinds kind, then nervously crossed the road just outside of the same location where in two years I would be outraged by a boy who molested me by grabbing my tiny tween breasts before running into the National Mosque to hide! I ran after him until I ran out of breath then ran back to school, reported the incident and cried my eyes out in front of my counselor. I felt violated and angry that he got away! How could he?! How dare he!? I was shocked and disturbed to learn that years later, it would have been a crime scene for a bigger violation, one that harmed a girl from my same school to her death in 1999. I think of her mother’s pain and I think of the ones who got away. Surely, they cannot have gone far from their conscience to entrap them. That’s too kind for such a heinous crime. I think of all the little girls and teens, women and grandmothers, I think of boys who have grown into men having to live with the pain. I think of brave young girls who stand up to adults who prey. The underpass still reeks of piss today and links my alma mater to two great icons; Kuala Lumpur’s first and tallest building Dayabumi meaning Force of Earth and inside of that force, the city’s first McDonald’s outlet. This building would stand testament in postcards I’d send to the new friends I made in my Australian high school just to show them that hey, look, we really don’t live on trees.
We triumphantly walked past Chinatown, then the Central Bus Depot before coming to a screeching halt: flasher alert! Lift his white lungi did he, this one man, in a bid to shock us. Shocked we were – three teenage girls running like missiles aiming for detonation where we landed. By the time I was 18, I would have had three occasions of having colourful penises shown to me. I decided then, I’d rather be an emancipated young woman than wield one of those special membership passes as if one would need that to gain entry into the most exclusive clubs on high street.
Mum finally relented and bought me my first pair of Nikes. That sporty cyan swoosh sewn onto a beautiful white leather canvas set her back 70 Ringgit and while she didn’t understand why I needed it so badly, I honed in on the power of negotiation and proudly held my prize — a pair of expensive imported shoes, an upgrade from the local Pallas. I was part of the Oxford Five in school you see, and one of the things we did was we shoe-swapped. We were the cool kids of the 80s closely mirroring the lives of American brat packers like Molly Ringwald in the hit coming-of-age movie, Times Square. Sanjot had the Saratogas and Kareem Abdul Jabaar’s. Lenni had the Adi tennis classics. Carol’s parents didn’t relent so Bata it was. Malar had her head in Mills & Boons adventures, one a day and had no interest in shoe swaps. Three of us wore mismatched shoes and were too cool for school. I had perfected the art of removing my bra during class. What Gen-Xers we were with no cares, no worries and some style, so we thought! It was our identity!
Gentrification swooped in. It came through the printed word assembled in magazines with a Pegasus logo and a yellow box on the cover. It came through the colour TV and soon I was hooked on technicolour and Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s Moonlighting’s soundtrack was hardwired into my brain. Cousin Angeline from Sydney mailed me pinup posters of pop bands to decorate my bedroom wall. Mum came home one day with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s Grease soundtrack cassette tape and that sealed it. I was dead set on American pop culture. Bowzer’s deep bass voice provided me the foundation to chase the American dream down under in Australia.
I completed Year 11 and 12 under the auspices of my uncle and aunt and was elated to join the ranks of other undergraduates at Sydney University. In my first year, I signed up to 12 student clubs including the ping pong club as treasurer, the chocolate-lovers, the Malaysians and attended the Hari Krishna all-you-can-eat veggie Tuesdays for five bucks. Staying true to those values I left behind at the airport, five bucks for a weekly plant-based meal brought delight and a good excuse to depart from the throes of Merewether Building, where overseas students glued. I wanted to undo the comfort suit, be free to express myself, meet boys and girls and learn about gender and sexuality. I wanted to stretch values and not overthink stretch marks. Within a span of five years of arriving in Australia, I was reading Jean-Paul Sartre and Milan Kundera, and in wanting to feel light in my unbearable body-shamed being, went on my first holiday with high school bestie Eve. There on Gold Coast’s Broadbeach, I bought my first bikini and walked barebacked, brave and gung-ho. I was Sandy from Grease, except Danny was nowhere in sight. Australian Crawl blared from the speakers of a Torana as if sending me a reminder, “Don’t be so reckless… she don’t like that”. My back cleared up that summer and life was pretty peachy thereafter.
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About the author
Penang-born Jasmine H. Low is a writer, producer & podcast host of ‘Listen by Heart Podcast’, inspired by her mother Shirl. Jasmine juggles her creative escapades, while running a creative agency. A runner-up at the Motion Picture Association APAC Script-to-Screen Pitch Competition (Malaysia) for ‘Kurang Manis’, the documentary is on hold due to COVID-19, but is now also a podcast. For a decade, she hosted 100+ music and spoken word events in Kuala Lumpur. She created the Penang In-between Arts Festival, was a moderator at the Georgetown Literary Festival (2014-2015). She received a VIMA Hall of Fame Award in 2009 for her contribution to the independent music scene.