Intentions: feeling for the borders

I feel like so much of my life is reaching out and trying to feel for the boundaries and borders of myself. My place in the world, the ‘where’ I am situated. Borders are things that exist only when being policed, they are violent because of this. Am I policing myself if I look for the edges? There is security in knowing what keeps me bound in, what binds me, but in all this seeking I keep finding myself without boundaries - what do I do, is a question my loved ones never know how to respond to, for example. At my sister’s birthday recently her and a few friends explained how they had described me recently and asked how I describe myself - we all had different answers, all of them the truth. 

Can the borders of myself shift, and is the current world able to allow for this flexibility? This idea of borders and boundaries seems to be a physical pursuit, I am picturing my fingers wiggling into the darkness, searching for a soft surface to caress. 

I never want to write a memoir, but I do always want to navigate the self. Therefore this year (or more?) I want to write a series of essays about this examination. I think. I want to lean into my preferred style of writing which I believe is called creative fiction. Below I have brain dumped the essay topics (I think there are more, I think about this so often, so I might add to this list)

I started writing this and my friend Jenny Lau published a substack entitled Boundaries > Borders, and a new year list (sort of) of ins and outs. This feels like a good articulation of trying to feel for an idea of self, its a great piece, you should read it. 

The colonial body

I want to write about the colonised body; the embodied experience of being from lands that have been stolen, taken, and forever changed. This is about agriculture, as it is about the landscape and how the landscape is both a space and place of belonging, but also a place of sustenance, something that gets lost within colonialism and capitalism. 

This is a search for understanding the complex and at times contrasting desires and relationships with (your) environment, it is the 'country girl that loves the city', it is the yearning for a landscape you don't know but somehow has been passed down generations. I am interested in generational trauma, but instead of focusing on the trauma it is thinking about the generational yearning and how do we harness that? I am so aware of my need, that feels deep in my bones, of wanting to be soaked in tropical sunshine and to run away to cold Scottish highlands - the multiplicity, holding both/ all those desires. It feels like the landscapes of my ancestors are alive within me. 

In some ways this is looking at the mixed identity, but I actually think that when you have grown up in colonised lands you are embodying the multiple cultures that have built a space - including (especially!) the dominant, colonial culture - and how do you reckon with that? I know so many people in Malaysia who talk about how under colonial rule, Malaysia was better... 

Why I read American military action books: a study on grief 

I watch a lot of murder mystery tv, crime solving, pro cop and military. I love Law & Order (as do so many, why is that?). It is finding the equalitarian takes in a hostile environment, soaking up the crumbs of representation with diverse casting but only in a militarised or ordered space… but what these are, are formulas, they are order in chaos, they are the hero arc that all cultures story-tell about. In grief, we need a hero and a saviour, we need the scrappy female cop that wins despite it all. 

In these books - Jack Reacher, Jack Ryan Universe, Arliss Cuter, The grey man…  - I am also very interested in how food and drink get used to create and define an identity (Reacher and black coffee, Cuter books always have a recipe…) The masculine relationship to food is something I am fascinated in. The sexual politics of meat by Carol J Adams comes to mind, of course. Although I think that consuming protein is not such a feature in these books, delving into the sign posting of what foods signify gives comfort too. 

Cooking: the space of feminist rebellion

Lorde questions in her essay of Master’s Tools, why she was asked to speak on that particular panel and do women have nothing to say about culture, then?. Cooking and the joy in it feel like safe spaces and topics for women to write about, and I rage against it. But it is cutting my nose off to spite my face. 

I don't really enjoy cooking, and yet everyone I speak to seems to think I must be a good cook because i write about food (I am a good cook, but that is beside the point). Why can’t cooking and food be simply political and that I write about it means that I am a political writer?

Difference 

A continued rant about how we must understand difference to build solidarity and collective-ness. 

Indigenous/ indigeneity

Being indigenous is not about believing in a pantheon of gods, but I struggle to see how abrahamic religions can claim indigeneity - that top heavy structure seems against all my understandings of indigeneity. This seems like a hot take to cause conflict, particularly with the violent obliteration of Palestine and Palestinians by the Israeli state sharp in our minds. But when thinking about this, what I would call a ‘feeling’, my answer is that indigeneity is an identity that is related to, is about a relationship with, colonialism. It is, as well, about seeing the world through landscape, and finding a way to encompass, include and be in conversation with the natural world. 

Authenticity 

I don’t want to talk about cultural appropriation any more, but in thinking about the edges of my identity, culture and colonialism is a constant. Instead, another way to approach the same topics, is to look at my relationship with authenticity, this is one that is a continued development, and has changed over time. Appropriation and authenticity are not interchangeable and yet the media is determined to insist that they are. 

Authenticity is a connection and conversation between the past and the present… It is deeply personal, but it is also about understanding place and identity within a collective identity. 

Being Malaysian in the UK is being four dishes

I touch on this in my book, but I want to expand on how the Malaysian identity is shrunk to the definition of a handful of dishes. A country with hundreds of indigenous peoples, many migrant groups, 13 states, complex colonial histories, and across multiple islands, is represented and believed to be understood through a few core dishes. Working in a Malaysian restaurant has also allowed me to see that everyone has an opinion about how an exact dish is meant to be cooked, and if their version is not represented then authenticity is not achieved - regardless of the fact each town will have its own version. 

You’re not a real X, if you don't cook/like/speak X is a diaspora troupe that harms everyone. But being Malaysian, and understanding the culture through food, has set up a judgement from outside of the diaspora. It is also extremely weird, tbh, when you see well meaning people review or discuss Malaysian food and, through trying to do research and be understanding, simply put boxes and defined boundaries of what the food should be - there is clout chasing in being well researched that only shrinks the possibilities of the cooks, the people, the chefs, the eaters… 

As I wiggle my fingers to find my borders I am deeply displeased with others’ need to place borders on me. 

More failing: not yearning motherhood 

But desperately wanting to be a mother and (feel like) I am being punished for not fitting the ideal of motherhood yearning. I dunno, maybe this is too personal and painful, and will stay forever as a ‘to do’.

I also want to talk about love, the (cliched but real) sense of radicalism in that. The difficulties of loving, the triggers that it creates. The expanse of love, the multiplicity of love. To me, the idea of holding multiple thoughts at once, is akin to exploring the boundaries of love. Lets see, I fear mostly the blurred lines between my public life and my personal world.