Nessa Anwar
The multimedia journalist and playwright ruminates over reclaiming her Malay identity.
In the late 1930s, a young Chinese girl, barely in her teens, was placed on a boat to travel to Singapore from a rural village in Shanghai. It was not known how she had acquired the funds to make the journey, or where she was headed to in the opiumriddled budding metropolis that was then known as Singapura. Also uncertain – and perhaps more insidious – were the circumstances in which she ended up on this perilous one-way trip, far from the family that sent her away for having the audacity to be born a girl.
When she arrived, she was found selling cheap goods in Kallang, and was adopted by Hajjah Saedah Abdul Wahab, a Malay matriarch in a village along Siglap Road. She was given the name “Zauyah”. She couldn’t remember her old one. By the age of 17, she was married off to a Javanese immigrant, a divorcee twice her age. She was his fourth wife, and the one he loved the most. By this time, she was so beloved by everyone in the village that she became better known as “Chomel”, a loving colloquial moniker that simply means “adorable”. She bore him his only children, a whopping 16.
One of them grew up to be a carefree, extroverted thing who wore pretty dresses and did typing for an international company in the early 1980s. That was my mother, Maimon. She married a man of Indonesian heritage, a young law graduate. She was divorced by the time she was 43, and raised three teenagers on her own.
One of them was me. A Malay-Muslim girl with a Chinese grandmother. This is where my story begins.
So many permutations, too many chance encounters. Multiple decisions to leave homelands, all of them ending up in Singapore, a curious little island that held so much potential for many people from different places. Even when they were paralysed with fear, uncertain of their future, they carved a space for themselves. They settled in Jalan Nanas and Kampong Glam. They relocated to Beach Road and Bedok South. They bought HDB flats in Serangoon and Pasir Ris. They had children, and those children had children who took on their tongues, their recipes, and their spaces.
These Malay women weren’t groundbreakers or smashers of glass ceilings, but they did the best they could. They were homemakers, and took on small part-time jobs to support the family. I can’t help but wonder what they could have achieved if they had been born in this generation, and hadn’t been bound by society. Could they have gone to university? Could they have been businesswomen? Would they have worn the hijab in the workplace? Could they have juggled career and family? Would they have been in any 30-under-30 listicles? And if not, then 40-under-40?
I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole, obsessed with success as a minority woman in Singapore. Growing up, I waded in a pool of resentment because I always had to make more effort and work harder to be recognised. I never saw any Malay names in mainstream media as people who were meant to be looked up to, idolised and celebrated. I even “Westernised” my own conventionally Malay name because I thought it would bring me ease. And for a while, it seemed like it did. I was bound by my own expectations, to prove to society that I could have it all, despite where I came from.
But I didn’t get here despite where I came from. I got here because of where I came from. I come from a line of women who lived simply, but they taught me how to live with dignity, sincerity and love. Even when they didn’t end up representing the glory of humanity, neither, in any glimmer of time and space, did they diminish it. And once I let go of being someone else’s definition of a perfect minority woman, I actually did end up having it all.
So, to that scared teenage girl from China sailing away with fear and uncertainty, your journey never ended. It will go on, through your daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter. Just like you, your descendants, three generations of women, are living for the future, in a cosy HDB flat in Pasir Ris, having so much fun cooking your favourite dish of lauk singgang. Would you have guessed that you would succeed like that?