I am not entirely hard-hearted. Of course I fret about this. I have no interest in ruining anyone’s life.
But also. If it weren’t for all the secrets. If we had simply said things, stated what was happening out in the open, then maybe someone could have stepped in to prevent my parents from ruining mine.
CHAPTER 28
My family was good at trading in secrets. So good, in fact, that I never seemed to realize the depth of their deceptions until decades after they were seeded.
When I was sixteen, I was the main subject of gossip in our family. My father called his entire family disconsolately multiple times a week, seeking comfort and complaining about me. He’d already done the most shameful thing he could do—get a divorce. At this point, he had nothing left to lose, so he spread news of my exploits through his lens: I threw his car keys into a bush. I screamed obscenities at him. I almost burned down the house.
I heard back from the Malaysian cohort, trying their best to discipline me on my father’s behalf. My eldest aunt, Tai Koo Ma, sent me several emails stating that I needed to get it together. That cousin who loved to draw sent me an email saying I wasn’t so great at art after all. And, oh yeah, I shouldn’t have such a big head about how awesome I was given that I’d broken up my parents’ marriage.
At this point I had lost two parents. If they had died, there would have been a funeral. Gift baskets. Someone to take care of me, maybe. But instead, all I got were emails blaming me for it. Saying it must have been my fault. Clarification didn’t seem worth the effort. Anything I said would be my father’s words against my own. So I stopped corresponding with anyone back in Malaysia.
Still, eventually I had to return. It was what we did, the pilgrimage every two to three years. And I thought that maybe, in person, Malaysia would be the refuge it always used to be. That the heat and the smells would bring comfort and stability, that I would still be the favorite despite my sins. I didn’t go with my father. I brought my college boyfriend instead.
Things started off normal enough. We were welcomed with open arms. My family escorted us to the nicest restaurants in town, to the best tourist attractions—the Petronas Twin Towers, the limestone caves, the bird park. Auntie cracked jokes about my boyfriend’s surprising ability to eat spicy food. She called him “the white devil” and cackled. But everyone seemed a little reserved. There wasn’t that extreme, performative drama—sudden, wonderful screaming matches over nothing at all. Instead, conversations ran out of air and deflated. My aunts had a hard time looking me in the eye. They mumbled that I was “too American.” I wasn’t the golden child anymore.
To be fair, I wasn’t acting like her, either. When I was younger, we had mostly talked about food and my crushes at school, but now I felt empowered to pick fights about their opinions and their politics. I was grown now, smart enough to identify their racism and criticize it, sneer at their simplistic understanding of American economics. Finally, someone asked me how my dad was. I said I didn’t know. I said he was an asshole.
They got defensive. In quiet moments, Auntie and my other aunts cornered me and asked why I couldn’t be a better daughter. “Is it true?” one of my aunts asked me gently in her sitting room. “I heard from Tai Koo Ma that you have such great fights with your father, that you say things to him no respectful daughter should. How can you do this kind of thing, girl? You must be calmer.”
I told my aunt, “Okay, yes. I did that.” I had thrown the fucking car keys and screamed and struck the match. “But is that all he told you?” I shouted. “Did he tell you that he moved out? Did he tell you that I microwave my dinner every day? Did he tell you that I suffered through an infection for months because he refused to take me to the doctor? How, when I was delirious from anesthesia after I got my wisdom teeth taken out, he screamed that it was my fault he left me?”
“Is that so?” my aunt asked, but she seemed disbelieving. Unsympathetic. My family shook their heads, clicked their tongues. This was impossible. I was exaggerating. I tended to be overly sensitive about these things. To take everything the wrong way. And what did I mean he left? Not left left, of course. So he went back to hang out with his girlfriend for a few hours that day, big deal. No need to be so jealous, to make it seem like an abandonment—how ridiculous. How American—to be so self-pitying. We complained about food here, not feelings.
Auntie just laughed at my anger. “Don’t get like this, lah. Everything ah, you must tolerate a little bit. Even if you are right also. Even if you are right, there must be some things you don’t talk about.”
“You don’t keep anything in your heart, Auntie?” I asked.
“Nn-nn. If I hold everything in my heart, then I died long ago.”
I crossed my arms and pouted, and she just sighed and looked at the wall.
I spent several days in Ipoh with Auntie, but when my family took me to the airport, Auntie grabbed hold of me and hugged me tight to her. She whispered in my ear, “You are not a good person, okay? You need to become a better person.” Then she let go and walked away. I shrugged it off. What could I expect? They hadn’t been there. They hadn’t seen what I’d lived through. They could never understand the lack of love that I intimately knew.
Regardless, it felt like a failure. All the women in my family—Auntie, my grandmother, my great-grandmother—had endured their difficult lives with silent dignity, not blinding rage. They had shown that suffering was the heart of strength. I was not capable of that decorum. I was a meteor, a ball of whirling knives, an American girl who walked with her pistols blazing. And I paid the price for it. Because Malaysia no longer loved me, either.
After that trip, I stayed away from Malaysia. I worked on my career. I cycled through men. I no longer declared “aiyah” when I tripped. I said “shit.” I made pancakes and paella and worked at the farmers market selling cheeses that Auntie would have never dared to touch. I did not call. I did not email. I had survived alone this entire time and would continue to do so.
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