Notes to My Sister: On Language and Belonging

By Shumin Tan

24 March 2022 at 3:50PM

It has been way too long since I have smothered you in one of those chaotic hugs—messy, awkward, but somehow still the best thing ever. I know I am hurting for home, but I bury it under football practice, endless meetings, and back-to-back classes. I sidestep the grief like I’m dodging tackles, but it catches up to me when I sit down with these delicate poems. That’s when I’m forced to face it: I grieve the loss of presence, the loss of touch, and yet, my body won’t let me cry. Maybe because deep down, I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to.

I blame Sharon Olds. Throwing me into a pool of homesickness that I desperately try to climb out of. When Sharon writes, ‘My sister knew things, / sometimes she knew everything, / as if she’d been born knowing,’ she captures the uncanny magic of sisterhood—the innate, often infuriating understanding sisters share. These lines from ‘Ode to My Sister’ immediately make me think of you, who always knows exactly what to say, even when I don’t want to hear it. Your certainty, maddening and comforting all at once, has a way of cutting through my doubts, much like Sharon’s words. It is this directness, this almost conversational quality of Sharon’s language, that reminds me of our late-night banter. The way we would bicker over nonsense—like the neighborhood aunty who lived across the street, who dressed her dog in a different outfit every day. You’d find her endearing, even creative, while I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the sheer absurdity of a dog in rain boots or a tutu. Our debates over her antics were never serious, but they had a way of reflecting our contrasting personalities—your appreciation for her eccentricity and my tendency to question it.

The bickering would always melt into shared laughter, so sudden and silly that it earned us weird stares from Mom and Dad. There were moments where we would catch each other’s eyes, grinning—not because something was particularly funny, but because we knew, without saying a word, that we were on the same wavelength. ‘My wonder went / along with me wherever we’d go,’ Sharon claims, just as our wonder followed us into the bathroom where we hollered into our hairbrushes, into the supermarket where we hid-and-sought, and to the playground where we hung upside down from the monkey bars. I’ve even taken this wonder abroad, and I can’t wait to share all of it with you.

‘I understood almost nothing, and I
loved pertinding, and I loved to go into the
garden and dance with the flowers, which danced
with me without hardly moving their green
legs, I was like a music box
dropped on my head.’

Like Sharon, we loved pertinding, foolishly thinking we were overly qualified for our school’s Spelling Bee team, so proudly claiming that we knew how to spell ‘pretending’ correctly. The image of the ‘music box / dropped on my head,’ in particular, captures our silliness so vividly that I can almost hear our past giggles of innocence, as if they were happening in the present. I yearn for the security of those shared moments. I can’t remember the last time I heard you laugh, and I’m scared of forgetting its sound.

So, I try to write. But the words I use to describe your beautiful smile and infectious laugh don’t do justice to my memory. I’ve tried saying that your smile felt like home, that it could quiet my wildest thoughts, or that your laugh carried a seriousness that made even my foolish escapades feel important. But I’m not a Sharon, as much as I want to be. I can’t find words as crisp as hers: ‘I was a little wild / and I said silly things, and she would laugh her serious / laugh.’ That was you—my younger sister, full of wonder and a laughter that steadied me, even when you were the smaller shadow following mine. None of my words seem enough to capture the way your laughter made me feel like I was the one being looked after.

In Sharon’s poem, the speaker’s sense of self is deeply intertwined with her sister: the speaker not only feels like a ‘copy’ of her sister but also a diminished version—'half-size’ and later ‘three-quarters’—suggesting that she measures her own growth and significance in relation to her older sibling. I wonder whether that is the case between you and me: did you ever compare yourself to me? She was the human. I aspired to her. Did you ever feel like you had to live up to certain expectations or pressures because I was older? I think there was nothing my sister wanted to take from me. Why would she want to, she had everything. Maybe there were times when you felt like you had to be the smaller version of me. Did I leave space for you to grow in your own way?

Photograph by author, Shumin Tan.
Image description: A polaroid picture captioned with the date “05.05.2020” is pasted on a white background. In the picture, two girls are sitting on the floor and smiling at the camera, each holding a dog.

It’s easy to look back and think about how things could have been different. But I also know that those memories—the ones we share and the ones we don’t—are part of what has shaped us. As I read Sharon’s ode to her sister, I admire its ability to describe a sibling relationship in all of its nuances. The ode not only praises her sister, but also navigates the complex emotions of comparison and the unspoken pressures that often accompany an intimately close siblinghood. These feelings—perhaps difficult to express verbally to her sister—find clarity and depth through writing. In our family too, we rarely discuss social pressures. Mom and Dad have never explicitly placed expectations on us, as far as I remember, but it often feels like we carry the weight of those pressures instinctively. In-built. Just like the speaker in Sharon’s poem, I find myself grappling with the silent standards we impose on ourselves: getting straight As, attending prestigious schools, and even more subtle things like what taste in music or fashion we gravitate towards. These unspoken expectations crafted a narrative we live by, even when it goes unacknowledged in our conversations. Siblings and sisters as measures of identity. I suspect it isn’t always a comfortable space to be in, where love and comparison co-exist, a tightrope we walk on carefully but together.

‘[…] if anything
had happened to me, I think my sister
would not have known who she was, I was almost
essential to her, as she to me.
If anything had happened to her,
I think I would not be alive today,
and no one would remember me,
as if I had not lived.’

Sharon’s ode is one meant for overhearing. Sharing such an intimate relationship highlights the emotional labor involved in maintaining such a close relationship. The older sister’s sense of self is just as contingent on the younger sibling, which disrupts the power dynamic we often associate with sibling relationships. The idea that ‘I [am] almost essential to her, as she to me’ underlines how the two sisters’ identities are co-constructed, symbiotic. Each is incomplete without the other. It isn’t just a one-sided admiration, but a mutual connection that complicates the narrative. By now, I bet you would be shrugging your shoulders, rolling your eyes, thinking ‘meh, Che Che is being melodramatic again, doing her rambling.’ But forget all the cheesy melodrama because you do hold a ‘goodness’ and a ‘moral beauty’ that I have always admired.

The poem captures the double-edged nature of sisterhood: a source of deep connection and a shared identity that can serve as a barrier to personal independence and self-definition. The line, ‘[i]f anything had happened to her, / I think I would not be alive today,’ highlights a bond that is existential; without her sister, the speaker might lose not only a sense of family, but also a fundamental aspect of her own existence. I feel this too—without you, I would lose not only my sense of family, but also a part of who I am. Now that I am in college and away from home, this absence feels even more pronounced. I find myself feeling lost, grappling with the reality of navigating life without your immediate presence. I thus turn to writing, as if putting grief into words will make it real, will grant me permission to truly feel it. Articulating this loss becomes a way of acknowledging what I struggle to express otherwise. It’s only by leaning on Sharon, who so carefully strings words together to capture complex emotions, that I am reminded how to approach this struggle, the contradiction of being so deeply close with someone yet feeling the distance that exists even within that closeness. Sharon helps me to navigate this tension, finding the words to express what often feels impossible to articulate.

Sharon describes her sister ‘like a queen’ gliding across these halls, but I think of you as more of an artist in STEM. Bringing creativity to chemistry, bringing style to biology. It baffles me how we have navigated our sense of wonder: while I channel this wonder into alphabets, letters, and words, you bring it into spaces of structure and experimentation, uncovering new ways to see the natural world.

‘[S]he had straight black hair / that moved like a black waterfall as / one thing, like a black silk skirt.’ These lines remind me of the numerous occasions we would unpack our wardrobes to dance among messy hills of secondhand t-shirts, pants, and skirts. Dressing and undressing to find the perfect attires to pack in our suitcases as we move countries, move locations, move homes. Being away from home has forced me to confront my own insecurities and identity, and I find myself quietly wondering if you felt, and feel, the same weight of expectations. Yet, amidst it all, I promise you that even though I am a few years older, I will always be your ‘somewhat smaller littermate.’  

26 March 2022 at 4:45PM

I let my previous note sit for a while, unsure as to whether any of my thoughts and questions will even resonate with you. I will be transparent though: the premise of all these heaps of thinking and questions are for a class. I was tasked with writing a paper comparing a series of poems, but my mind keeps returning to a conversation with my professor about finding ‘ways into the text beyond analysis.’ How do we approach the poems not only as objects to analyze but as living, breathing texts that stir something beyond the intellect? That’s the challenge I’m wrestling with, and I’ve tried many different ways to navigate it, but it always leads me back to writing to you. Imagining myself talking to you, and wondering how you would respond—a voice that holds my hands when things get hazy. I’ve realized that my approach to studying has been shaped by our relationship, using writing to make sense of things, just like when we would talk. Your absence here makes this approach even more significant—my note entries are now filled with messages and thoughts I wish I could send to you, helping me sort through the jumble in my head. I never end up sending these notes, afraid that doing so would feel like a final acknowledgment of the absence itself, something I’m not ready to face head-on nor make permanent.

It’s extremely warm today, and I’m sitting in Fen Cafe in the Sharjah Art Foundation neighborhood with Tatyana, both of us furiously typing emails and essays. We’re sitting indoors away from the sun, but the window flaps and doors are open, letting the sunlight illuminate the spaces inside. It’s 4:45pm here in the UAE, which means it’s 8:45pm where you are—night has fallen, and darkness has settled. I wonder what you may be doing now as I open Sharon’s Odes again.

‘I know why they say the heart is in
the heart. Where you think about people you love,
you get warm there.’ 

I close my eyes, reciting the words in my mind to imagine what this warmth in my heart should feel like. But the only warmth is the heat beating down on my head, not in my heart. I feel frustrated, a little discontented, and it strikes me odd that I have to dig harder to find this warmth of home. Isn’t distance supposed to make the heart grow fonder? Do you feel warmth in your heart when you think of me?

Photograph by author, Shumin Tan.
Image description: A collection of memorabilia such as polaroid photographs, postcards, and ticket stubs are pasted on a white wall, next to light switches and plug sockets.

When Sharon speaks of ‘the snapshots’ in her ‘Ode to My Sister,’ I am reminded of the mix of ‘snapshots’ I’ve pinned above my bed: one of us with our foster animals, in matching school uniforms, and a postcard from China that you sent. The ‘snap’ in snapshot reflects not only how quickly these photos are taken but also how fleeting the moments they capture are. This fleeting nature of memory is something Agha Shahid Ali captures in his poem, ‘Postcard from Kashmir’ from his collection titled The Half-Inch Himalayas, when he writes, ‘my home a neat four by six inches.’ Shahid uses this image of the ‘half-inch Himalayas,’ a photograph on a postcard, as a vehicle to explore the experience of exile and yearning for one’s homeland:

‘This is home. And this is the closest
I’ll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won’t be so brilliant,
the Jhelum’s water so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.

And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.’

The themes of displacement, nostalgia, and longing in Shahid’s poem resonate deeply with me as a student who has just moved to New York University Abu Dhabi. Being here, I often find myself longing for home. What I find particularly striking about this experience is how the very diversity of the student body, which is often celebrated as a strength, can at times feel isolating. With students from over 100 countries, there is a constant need to navigate diversity—explaining my own experiences and adapting to those of others—leaving me standing on the edge, observing but not quite belonging in the way I thought I would.

Shahid’s emphasis on the physical landscape of Kashmir reflects the speaker’s deep connection to his home, conveying both affection and reverence. Words like ‘brilliant,’ ‘clear,’ and ‘ultramarine’ don’t just describe the land; they make it luminous, as if memory itself sharpens the colors, making everything more vivid than it might have actually been. But then comes the pause—my love—a breath, a hesitation.

In photography, overexposure washes out details, flooding an image with too much light until it loses its depth. When Shahid calls his love ‘overexposed,’ he suggests an emotional feeling so consuming that it might potentially blur reality and make memories indistinct. Perhaps nostalgia works the same way—it makes the past seem brighter, almost too impossibly vivid to be real. But what happens when we return? The place itself cannot match the brightness of memory. Like an overexposed photograph, the past is unreachable—too vivid to forget, yet too altered to step back into.

(PS. The last postcard I sent you was from Bahrain and I wonder where it is in transit. Sigh, it has been two months!)

While the following stanza juxtaposes the color of the landscape being recollected with the non-color of the speaker’s recollection, signifying the gap between the speaker and his home, the continued use of photography jargon blurs the distinction between the photograph and the speaker’s memory. When I envision the words a ‘little out of focus,’ I picture the emerging image of a print film, one that will forever remain a blurred landscape—‘still undeveloped’ and ‘overexposed.’ The speaker’s struggle to bring clarity to this ‘home’ from his memory mirrors Shahid’s own experience as a Muslim Kashmiri poet, born in India and experiencing displacement long before immigrating to the US for his education. Holding a small photograph of the HImalayas, the speaker laments, ‘this will be the closest / [he will] ever be to home.’ Yet the concept of ‘home’ remains elusive. Is ‘home’ where his mailbox is, or does it lie in the home pictured in the postcard?

The final metaphor of home as a ‘giant negative,’ reduced to just black and white, ties directly into the speaker’s ambiguous notion of home. This metaphor reflects a tension between the past and present, suggesting that home is not a singular, fixed place but exists in multiple forms. It encompasses both the homeland left behind and the present reality. Neither negates the other. Memories of home, like the concept of home itself, remain incomplete—part of the image is always out of focus, never fully developed. The desire to hold on to something—anything—to keep the feeling of home intact, struggling against the negative, the emptiness, not wanting to forget. There’s a discomfort in acknowledging that no matter how tightly I grasp the past, it can’t entirely coexist with the present. Perhaps these ‘snapshots’ are not meant to provide a final resolution, but to acknowledge the incompleteness inherent to home itself. Can we ever fully leave nostalgia behind, or is it that home—like our memories of the past—is something we must accept as always blurred and developing?

The origin of nostalgia entails an interesting history which I think you would enjoy knowing about. In 1688, a Swiss physician Johannes Hofer wrote a medical dissertation on an affliction he conceived as ‘nostalgia,’ coined from the Greek nostos meaning to ‘return home’ and algia meaning ‘pain.’ The disease was first associated with Swiss soldiers in war who became susceptible to nostalgia when they heard a particular Swiss milking song. The disease was thus ‘similar to paranoia, except the sufferer was manic with longing,’ beginning to confuse the past and present, making them lose touch with reality.

For Hofer, the best treatment to cure this nostalgia—that is, after considering the use of leeches, opium, and hypnotic emulsions—was to send these soldiers back to enjoy the comforts of home. It’s a far-fetched comparison, but I suppose as students we similarly become the soldiers of education: marching forward, breaking into new metaphorical fields.

Recently, I found myself unable to answer the simple question of where home is—something that had felt certain until I learned that I couldn’t return to my previous life in Shanghai. Having lived a life punctuated by expired visas, the notion of permanence feels like a privilege. We clung to these visas like a lifeline, renewing them every few years, first every five, then three, and finally a month at a time. It’s only now, with the reality of not being able to return, that I realize I had romanticized the idea of ‘home,’ seeing it through a lens that overlooked its fragility, its impermanence.

There is a specific line on the visa that states ‘purpose for residence’ and for me, this purpose has changed over and over again. It moved from being a dependent, to a student, then after that was terminated, to humanitarian (which results in a visa that grants you an extra one-month stay beyond the expiration date.) It never fails to baffle me: how someone like me, who has grown up in Shanghai for the past fourteen years, needs a humanitarian visa to stay at home, to stay with Mom and Dad, to stay with you.

To re-enter Shanghai now, I will need a ‘visitor’ visa which dictates my relationship to Shanghai as that of a tourist, a guest, a sightseer—robbing away years of childhood, adolescence, and youth. It feels like I am forever in the state of ‘waiting for a visa,’ as Dr. Ambedkar described in his autobiographical account of exile and exclusion. To obtain a ‘visa,’ thereby to acquire permission to stay, hinders my ability to access memories associated with childhood and home. Perhaps I was romanticizing our childhood in my first note to you; it seems too picture-perfect now.

So if I cannot go home, how can I truly cure my nostalgia? There’s a poem by Michelle Peñaloza titled ‘Nostalgia is a Dangerous Thing’ that encompasses my struggle to find an answer to this question. It begins with, ‘[i]f you’re an immigrant child / nostalgia is your sibling.’ The poem, in focusing on the speaker’s relationship with their mother, explores the speaker’s taut relationship with the motherland. 

‘[…] My mother, in the scheme of things, asks for little.
At most, I am tasked with simply coming home
and even then I fail.
           Nostalgia makes home hard
to find. I have grown so far from the stories my mother tells […]’ 

I agree with the poem’s assertion that nostalgia complicates the idea of home. For the speaker, nostalgia isn’t just a sentimental longing; it’s a dogged sibling, always present but intangible and haunting, a ‘[p]hantom sister, brother specter.’ The mother’s past is vivid and visceral, shown through the act of killing chickens and seasoning rice with their blood. In contrast, the speaker struggles to connect with that history, instead finding comfort in familiar, repetitive films like ‘A League Of Their Own’ or ‘Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead,’ saying they could ‘sing their scripts in [their] sleep.’ These movies become a substitute for the deep, ancestral connection the speaker feels distanced from. The speaker acknowledges this longing to claim a heritage that feels both near and out of reach. The speaker’s distance from these traditions creates a gap, making the heritage feel simultaneously part of them and something they can’t fully claim as their own. As they recognize, ‘I have grown so far from the stories my mother tells / that movies are closer nostalgias.’

By presenting nostalgia as a ‘dangerous thing,’ the poem underscores its capacity to create an idealized, sometimes distorted, version of the past that makes the present feel insufficient. We may not be immigrant children, but we too are susceptible to this danger. Do you remember Mom and Dad telling us about the ice-cream man ringing his bell on a motorcycle through their taman? This sound would echo down the street after school, promising a treat that would make doing homework a little more bearable. Mom and Dad would hum it to us and I always thought of it as this perfect, simple thing, even though we never quite got to experience it ourselves.  

Then, that one summer I came back to Penang, I heard that same bell. I rushed out of our apartment, hoping to see him, to taste the ice-cream I’d imagined so many times. But when I looked around, the ice-cream man was nowhere to be seen. The bell on the front door of the nearby Family Mart jingled as customers came and went. Was that what I heard? Or did I completely imagine the ice-cream man’s bell? Either way, the disappointment was sharp, and it hit me that the memories I held onto were now more fantasy than reality.

That night, I cried and cried like an idiot, calling to Hofer for a new cure—well-aware that my nostalgia has merely shaped a version of a past (or present) that never truly existed.

28 March 2022 at 11:15PM

I just got off a call with you and it breaks my heart to see you cry. I resonate with your anxieties of growing up in an international British school, and all I desperately want is to give you a hug. Your anxiety reminds me of an episode I recently listened to from The Poetry Magazine Podcast during which Asian American poet Victoria Chang read her poem ‘Barbie Chang’s Tears.’

I take my time to imagine the character of Barbie Chang, and more specifically, the apparent paradox that her name invokes. While ‘Chang’ signifies that she is ethnically Chinese, ‘Barbie’ alludes to the iconic blonde plastic doll we are all too familiar with. She is an individual that is always trying to fit into a culture that never truly accepts her because of the way she looks. Sound familiar?

To adopt the name ‘Barbie’ also strikes a chord because it reminds me of the deep embarrassment I felt when my primary and secondary school teacher called my name out loud from a list full of English names. Anna, Eva, Lisa, Helen, Juliet … Shumin. I feared the moment of hesitation before my name was read, anticipating the worst. And even if they were to pronounce it correctly, I have (at times desperately) felt the need to anglicize my name to fit in. I didn’t understand why my name did not appear in the books I read, in the movies I watched, nor in the music that I listened to.

Though I didn’t end up adopting or being assigned an anglicized name such as Barbie, I would say that I devoured white media and Western values at an unhealthy rate. Even if I wasn’t aware as a child, I drifted away from Malaysian culture and actively distanced myself from Chinese culture and the other Chinese kids in school, knowing my name sounded distinctly Chinese. I felt a need to engage in Western art in order to fit in and be like my Western friends and to meet the standards set by my British teachers. If my name was not pronounceable, I figured that I had to stand out in a way that was uniquely acceptable to the West.

‘Barbie Chang’s tears are the lights of
           the city that go off on

off on the men walking around the city
           move but Barbie Chang

doesn’t she cannot promote herself if
           she had legs she would

stop begging if she had a head she
           would stop her own 

wedding but the city has no extra
           bedding it is not

ready yet the maids are still making
           beds Barbie Chang is […]’

Barbie Chang is a striking figure in the poem due to the deliberate contrast between her anglicized first name, ‘Barbie,’ evoking Western ideals of femininity, and her presumably Chinese surname, ‘Chang,’ which grounds her in Chinese heritage. This duality sets the stage for the poem’s exploration of identity, as Barbie Chang is forced to navigate a world that demands conformity to both Western and Eastern expectations, yet offers no clear space for her to fully inhabit either identity. She is depicted as an incomplete, disembodied figure—without legs or a head—emphasizing the way Barbie Chang’s overlapping identities produce a fragmented self and sense of reality. I realize this as I listen to the poet’s reading of the poem. Hearing the internal rhyming and repetition of words like ‘wedding,’ ‘bedding,’ and ‘begging’ creates a sense of merging and distortion, making it difficult to separate what is real and unreal for Barbie Chang.

Upon reading the poem visually, the absence of punctuation feels like a direct reflection of Barbie Chang’s fractured sense of self. Each line blending into the next intensifies the sense of disorientation, mimicking the mental and emotional fragmentation she experiences. The lack of clear breaks between her thoughts mirrors the constant, overwhelming blur of her identities—caught between the external expectations of others and her internal longing to understand herself.

The repeated use of ‘if she had legs’ or ‘if she had a head’ illustrates the limitations placed on Barbie Chang, much like the constant pressure I’ve felt to perfect my English to meet the expectations of an Anglocentric society. Growing up, teachers, family members, and even strangers in China and Malaysia would tell me to refine my language skills—to speak with the fluency and precision of a native speaker. I was always told to practice the language until you feel it inside you, to master the English language better than the native English speaker can, yet these directives only deepened my insecurities. I encountered subtle, persistent reminders of the ways I fell short—my accent, my syntax, my ‘foreignness’ would always mark me as different. No matter how much I practiced or adapted, I realized that I would never fully be accepted as a ‘native’ speaker. This divide between how I felt I should sound and how I was perceived mirrors the fragmentation of Barbie Chang’s identity, who is constantly constrained by external expectations that she cannot fully escape. As Dorothy Wang describes, ‘for Asian American poets, the writing—and wished-for mastery—of English takes on a heightened sense of self-consciousness because of their constitutive exclusion from the category of native speaker.’ In light of this insight, the question remains: how does the English-speaking Asian-looking writer contend with the understanding that no matter how much they try, their English will never be good enough?

I wonder whether this is why you dislike English literature so much, whether it has driven you away from it because English was never a loving language, but one of necessity. Perhaps this is also why I have a hard time loving myself and the writing I produce. The pressure to meet external expectations—to fit into a mold that was never able to quite contain all that I am—often makes my words feel hollow, as though they’re not truly mine. And in that disconnect, the act of writing becomes less about expression and more about compliance. It’s a struggle to claim ownership of something that feels more like an imposition than a creation. I wonder if, like me, you’ve ever felt the tension between the language you’re ‘supposed’ to use and the one that feels most like your own—if you even know what that is yet. Maybe it shifts, depending on where you are and whom you’re with. Maybe some days, it feels within reach, and other days, it slips away before you can hold onto it. I don’t have an answer, only the sense that this search is never quite finished yet. But I want you to know that I see the work you do to push back against boundaries, and the effort it takes to hold onto a voice still taking shape. These notes I write to you are a small way for me to say that I recognize this struggle in you, and in me.

I just want to give you the biggest hug.  

31 March 2022 at 11:15AM

So, hear me out: I have a goal. My goal is to get back to, read into, learn about Malaysia. Yet, I don’t know if I am capable of achieving this goal. I’m embarrassed by the fact that I don’t even know Malay, one of the main languages of Malaysia, that I don’t know whom to turn to without judgment in my attempt to relearn it. But I also wonder—why do I feel like my connection to Malaysia depends on this one language alone? As someone who is Malaysian Chinese—a term that itself flattens the complexity of ancestry and origin—my heritage already lives in the Mandarin I speak and the Hokkien I understand. Yet, I still feel like something is missing, like knowing Malay would make my belonging feel more whole. But am I mistaking language for legitimacy? Am I too easily equating Malaysian-ness with the Malay language, as if my connection to this place needs to be proven? Maybe my Malaysia has always been multilingual, layered, shifting, never just one thing. And yet, I hesitate, caught between what I have and what I lack.

‘Patterns of love and people of diaspora
I want to sing but I don’t know any songs.’ 

These are the few lines that I quickly scribbled during class as our guest speaker, Alvin Pang, recited his poem titled ‘Candles.’ The poem follows two siblings discussing whether to steal candles from a church to study, with their conversation reflecting their differing views of honesty, religion, and future aspirations.

‘jesus also like government what. he where got care whether you blind or not, house got light or not. he just hang up there all day for people to see, put money in box, give him so many candles for nothing. he also not taking exam, i borrow some candles to study why cannot.’

His reading makes me cringe, not because of the strong Singlish accent, but because it echoes something so familiar, something I’ve tried to suppress. It stirs discomfort, a part of myself I’ve worked hard to avoid, a part I don’t want to face. The act of taking candles, using them, and returning them mirrors the way I engage with parts of my identity that don’t feel entirely mine. It’s like borrowing a Malaysian passport without being able to speak Malay—taking something that’s meant to signify belonging, yet still feeling disconnected from it. Like the candles from the church, an institution tied to culture, the Malay language represents a cultural identity that feels simultaneously familiar and alien. What does it say about Malaysian society when belonging—or the sense of it—is so often mediated by the ability to speak Malay? Why does fluency in a single language become the measure of who truly belongs? 

In a way, this struggle to fully embrace my identity echoes the embarrassment I felt during parent-teacher conferences, when I would turn red hearing Mom and Dad complain in Manglish right in front of my white teachers. The way they would mix languages, expressing themselves with phrases like, ‘walao leh, this is too easy for her,’ felt like an intrusion in a space I was desperately trying to be accepted in.

And when we got home, I would recall hearing:

‘Yur ang moh teacher don’t know how to teach wan.’
‘When are you going to gao dim your work?’
‘Adui, so late already. So dark how to read, how to study?’
‘What do you want me to da pao ah? aiyu up to you lah.’
‘Go sayang the dog.’

Writing down these phrases feels like an act of translating a lived experience. I mimic Mom and Dad, embodying a certain rhythm, an accent, a feeling that I know by heart but that never fully fits into the standard of ‘proper’ English. The words themselves might seem broken or incomplete, but they carry with them a deep connection to the way I was raised, to the way my parents spoke and thought.

The process of transcribing them, of trying to capture the exact phrasing, feels wrong, almost disrespectful whenever I try to write them down as though they should be fixed or cleaned up. Recalling these phrases sends me into a spiral of searching for something that might validate or help make sense of them. I find myself thrust into a series of Google searches, desperately trying to uncover if Manglish poetry even exists. It was through this search that I stumbled upon a YouTube video titled ‘Kopi Break – Manglish Ah?,’ a video that makes me laugh as it explains a concept called ‘Bahasa Rojak.’

Bahasa, meaning languages.
Rojak, meaning a salad dish with a mix of fruits and vegetables.
Bahasa Rojak, meaning a delicious mix of languages (English + Chinese + Malay + Tamil + other dialects.)

The familiar cadences of Bahasa Rojak make me smile, but I can’t help wondering whether I have lost my Malaysian tongue. And if so, what was it to begin with? Was it the Malay I rarely spoke at home? The Manglish in casual conversations? Or is it the way languages blur together—picked up, forgotten, and reshaped—that feels most familiar? Maybe the Malaysian tongue isn’t what I once thought it was—a singular thing—but a shifting mix of languages, constantly making room for each other. If that is the case, is it even possible to forget your native language? And if I’ve lost something, was it the words themselves or the sense of belonging they once carried?

Truth be told, I needed to watch that YouTube video to remind me what Manglish or Bahasa Rojak even sounds like. Yet as I listened, something stirred—recognition, amusement, maybe even belonging. But not quite. It felt familiar, yet distant, like a song I once knew the lyrics of but can now only hum along to. And maybe that is okay—language isn’t just about what we remember, but how it lingers in us, how it resurfaces in moments of familiarity. I once believed fluency meant mastery, that I had to practice a language until it felt innate. But now, Manglish slips out in casual moments, unpracticed yet instinctive, a reminder that some things stay with us even when we think we’ve forgotten.

I have spent years trying to master English, until every word feels measured, every sentence deliberate. In a recent class discussion, we talked about the gravity of voice—not just as words on a page, but as a kind of truth, something that allows a writer to stand firmly on their ground. But what if that ground itself feels unsteady? What happens when a voice is overexposed, too closely examined, held up to an obscure standard of authenticity? Perhaps language, too, can be overexposed—scrutinized until it loses its depth, its quiet shifts and in-betweens, much like a photograph drowned in too much light, its details washed away. I think of English, the language I was taught to wield with precision—one that gave me a sense of belonging, yet carried a pressure akin to overexposure—making me hyper-aware of every word, every inflection, until speaking felt more like calculation than expression.

So, after all the confusion, the questions, and the struggle to find belonging, maybe it’s a little clearer now: our voices aren’t shaped by trying to return to something raw or perfect. They come from juggling fancy English, playful metaphors, and the blend of Bahasa Rojak and Manglish that’s just part of who we are, messy and awkward at times. My voice doesn’t exist in returning to an idealized past or rejecting the mixture of languages I’ve been using. It lies in how they blend together. My voice is in the overlap, the space where Manglish and English meet and speak to each other. It’s not about fixing the language or expressing myself in one way. Writers like Alvin and Victoria do this—finding a way to merge language, identity, and experience. I’ve learned that writing doesn’t need to be perfect. Perhaps that is why Sharon’s ‘Ode to My Sister’ strikes me as also an ode to memory, to the spaces where raw candor can transport me to memories I’ve tried to resist but can’t escape.

‘[…] I want to thank
my sister for loving me, which taught me
to love. I’m not sure what she loved in me,
besides my love for her […]’ 

Photograph by author, Shumin Tan.
Image description: A polaroid picture captioned with the date “05.05.2020” is pasted on a white background. In the picture, two girls are sitting on the floor and smiling at the camera, each holding a dog.

I write this final note in hopes of lifting your voice. For when you shout that voice of yours so imperiously loud, calling me ‘Che Che’ all the way from Shanghai, may it weigh on the world and reverberate to Abu Dhabi.

Please text me when you are free to call, I’d love to hear your voice soon, Yong.

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Shumin Tan is a Malaysian-born research-based writer whose work explores the intersection of literature and landscape, drawing from her experience as a third-culture child. A recent graduate in Literature & Creative Writing and Theater from NYU Abu Dhabi, her poetry and personal essays have appeared in Exit 11 and the European Cultural Center in Venice. Now back in Malaysia, she is using her writing practice to explore her connection to a place that feels like ‘home’ by identity, but not by experience, reconciling a sense of belonging in Malaysia that is both familiar and foreign.  

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