Sum up: Q1 2021

Ah. It is frustrating, and increasingly so every year, when I find that I have once again let my reading slide to the sidelines to give way to other things happening in my life. Other things that, I’m adamant to deny yet is so shamefully true, I simply place in a position of higher importance over my reading time.

During the two months after January 2021, I have only managed to somehow squeeze in one book. ONE book.

It’s frustrating.

I’ve made multiple attempts to read, or to start reading again. I read the first ten pages of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys while I was waiting for a friend to pick me up. I read maybe a few chapters of Aaron Thier’s Mr. Eternity while having some coffee out one day. And I still have Gaiman’s American Gods and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children sitting there, simply adding burden to my already heavy desk, waiting for me to miraculously find the time, or mood, or motivation, to pick them up.

It’s extremely frustrating.

But still, I look back on this first quarter of 2021, and I also feel blessed. Blessed that despite all the challenges we face in terms of health and economy, I am both healthy and working. Blessed that despite being alone at home during this time of semi-lockdown, I have friends to talk to, and the occasional cafe visits to stay in touch. Blessed that I am spending so much more of my time writing, creating stories, and having meaningful conversations with characters to find out what it is that they truly want deep down in their little fictitious hearts.

It’s a constant cycle, a battle that never really ends or begins, this frustration with what hasn’t gone right, and this gratitude for all that has been right. They replace each other, they co-exist, they wipe each other out, and they validate each other. It’s a little bit like night and day: there really simply isn’t one without the other.

So back to that one book that I’ve managed to read so far. It’s Danzy Senna’s You Are Free, which is a collection of short stories that revolve around being different, about being coloured, in this world that for so many is overwhelmingly a white one. But their colour does not take center-stage. It feeds into the story, into how their lives unfold around them, before them, after them. It’s in the details, and yet it may or may not be important.

It’s a dynamic that I’ve seen countless times, on screen and on pages. This feeling of otherness because of the colour of one’s skin, because it is not white.

And while this dynamic is so so familiar, it is also not so familiar. I was born and raised in Malaysia, a country blessed with its multiracialism and multiculturalism. We are nothing if we are not coloured. White is the other. We are not.

But at the same time, we are also such racists in our cores. We see shades with a kind of sensitivity that Westerners will probably find rather unfathomable. Without batting an eye we know if you’re local, if you’re one of us, if you belong in our group, or not.

Yellow-white, yellow-beige, and yellow-brown are different. Light brown, medium brown, and dark brown are different. Black is different. White is different.

Every shade and hue is different.

Should we really care what colour our skins are? Maybe we shouldn’t. But then again, maybe we should. Maybe we need to. Because our stories, though they may be similar, are really so so different. It is in the way we experience the world. A slight twist of the lens filters creates a world of difference.

Maybe this is what Danzy Senna was trying to show us in her collection of eight stories that felt almost as if it could happen to anyone, and yet could really only happen to those exact characters in her stories.