fantasy; coda 2022

waseh this voter ink damn smelly

The essay below is a reformatted and condensed version of another issue I wrote in 2020, titled “seduce me, fantasy,” about the 2018 Malaysian elections and 2020 coup. On the night of 20 November 2022, I have found it resonant once again following the distressing results of the General Election Malaysia held on 19 November 2022, in which the far-right ethno-religious political bloc are likely to gain control of Malaysia. Parts of this essay have been rewritten to incorporate new thoughts and narratives that have emerged in the wake of the election, while other parts have been cut for relevance, but the core sentiment is unchanged. The world is a lonely and terrifying place today. I cannot take away the fear, but I hope that when you read this, you will feel less alone.

There was a historic election we had in Malaysia back in 2018, when we really thought something had shifted for just a moment. We thought we had resolved centuries of racial, capital, political conflict, in this one moment of glorious transformation. It felt like we had been in a cocoon for decades, and were finally ready to emerge into a brave new world of possibility. I sat in my school library half a world a way and cried in a way that I know I will never cry again, half out of my mind with worry that race riots would burst out back home, half hysterical from the euphoria that comes with witnessing a moment in history I thought I would never live to see. 

I took the 1 train downtown that night to find my friends waiting for me, elated, with a Malaysian flag on their shoulders and random white people passing by on the street were staring at our unrestrained display joy. All our eyes were bright that night; all of us were feverish. I went home and cried and wrote some shitty poetry and cried some more, because sometimes that is all you can do when you see the impossible happen. I have never deluded myself about the messy (for the lack of a better word) nature of Malaysian politics, and I think we know that the 2018 election was motivated more by petty personal conflict than a genuine desire for change. But it felt like, even if one did not enjoy the v. problematique driver at the wheel, at least there were people in the car committed to something bigger than themselves, who knew how to do their jobs with minimal corruption and zero murders of Mongolian models.

Of course, now we know the ending to that story. We know what happened in the Sheraton Hotel in February 2020, and what has come to pass. The most painful thing has never been the chaos -- Malaysians are used to chaos, if you've ever taken the NKVE highway at 5.45pm on a weekday you will know this -- but it has been the feeling of powerlessness, the paralysis. Also, I guess, the general collapse of electoral politics.

The capital, seismic Event of 2018, the one that we thought would change the world, has ended. The fumes of euphoria have passed, and 2020 saw old problems resurfacing in new forms. At that time, it felt like a lethargy descended over us all, a perpetual blanket of apathy that we have taken to dragging around with us as we pace the four walls of our homes like caged animals. Are we grieving? Are we just dead inside? Are any of us even still alive? Is the simulation glitching?

In 2022, this sensation of overwhelm feels more acute than ever, but numbness has been replaced by fear. I am so terrified, as a Chinese person, as a woman, as a Chinese woman. On the early morning of 20th December I drove home at 5am with a flat tyre, half out my mind with fear that the events of May 13 would repeat themselves. I am eaten inside out by the awareness that half of this country hates me, compounded by doomscrolling through endless opinions on Twitter that there was something more Pakatan Harapan should have done to validate the racism of the majority, that in validating racism, there could have been salvation for the rest of us. Choose the lesser of two evils, and democracy will prevail. What happens if the democracy wants you dead?

There are many things that Pakatan Harapan needs to answer for, and many missteps that have led to the current moment, but in this very moment all I want to do is scream.

Could we have been saved by our own dehumanization?

Maybe they are right. Maybe the socioeconomic and racial landscape of our country is so stratified that it is impossible for many us to recognize our shared humanity, and the only thing we can do is accept our own degradation. Maybe we should resign ourselves to the endless march of alt-right fundamentalism. Maybe we should surrender, abandon hope, and be grateful for the scraps we have been dealt. Or maybe we are paralyzed within a system so perfectly set up to suspend each of us under a sheet of amber, so that we (well, I) observe without action, thought without movement.

Some days I wake up and am suffocated by this paralyzing dilemma. In a long history of being told that conceding dignity for survival, how could I not? It is a terror that nothing will ever change, that we shall stagnate in this state of discontent forever. Without me knowing, this national malaise had crept its way into my body from the water. I could be saved by being palatable, I thought to myself. I can be saved if I do everything to align myself with global capitalism and structures of power. It took root in my mind, manifesting in my own individual psychology, affecting my everyday actions, taking me to United States where I found a whole new kind of communal pessimism (Wesley Morris puts it like this: “Each person here carries a native negativity towards their presence on this land”). This new, fresh, flavour of strife was a rude awakening that the cannibalisation of my own self had not saved me from terror; it had only taught me to perform better for a different oppressor. Surrounded by a new racial majority, I found myself eaten alive by the realization that nothing can save you, as long as a single other person is suffering.

Malaysian Chinese people who leave Malaysia searching for a "better life" elsewhere always amuse me (as one of them myself), because there is so little investment in rethinking what it means to be part of a community. The multitude of wealthy Malaysian Chinese students who study and settle in Australia do not ever seem to think that the land they are occupying were stolen from indigenous Australians, because it is easy enough to settle in a new place where you get to be the oppressor with more ease, less ancestral accountability, and further alignments with whiteness. My aunt is overjoyed that her grandchild was born in the USA, because, to quote her, "He can become president! In Malaysia he cannot become president, but in America he can!" First of all, Malaysia doesn't have a president. Second of all, to quote Wesley Morris (truly so wise): "[It [is a powerful myth that] only requires you to buy into the fantasy as being simultaneously ahistorical, but also very rooted in a particular way of being in this country.] Which is to say that you must ignore the entire history of anti-Asian racism, a cornerstone of the USA, and also have this false belief that democracy actually exists anywhere. A happiness built on alignment with power and oppression is as hollow as the bones of the crow, soon to be shot down from the sky. Problems do not go away when the immigrant leaves home. They merely outrun it.

In the City Arts and Lectures webcast by Jenna Wortham and Jia Tolentino from May 2020, they spoke about how it’s easy to become quickly frustrated when our (“our” as in we youths, and those of us who have had the privilege to be unaware for the longest time) efforts to resolve racial and social injustice do not create seismic change overnight. There is a myth that singular moments of brilliance have enabled earth-shaking change, which, sometimes they do. Sometimes it takes ten seconds of limitless courage to change the world forever, but more often than not, bravery and resistance are muscles that are stretched across generations. Decades of work are reduced to a moment, centuries of suffering are condensed into seconds, and millennia of history are compressed for our swiping thumbs and avaricious eyes, a singular square in the endless doomscroll of human attention.

I keep having to remind myself that there are a lot of good people doing good work, who have been doing this work since the forever times, and maybe we should ask ourselves what it is about the nature of Malaysian life that discourages the rest of us from even the most shallow investments in The Movement(TM). We desire radical change without intending to commit to radical sacrifices for the people around us, expecting structural change in our name but not individual divestments from privilege. _I want racial equality for myself,_ says the Chinese girl posing for Instagram pictures outside yet another chic cafe franchise, _but I also want to hold migrant workers at a distance, so I can continue to see them as vectors who produce my food and cheap property, but nothing more. And I also want to say racist things about my Indian friends. #equality tho._

Now I think about the 2018 election times, and wonder at my own (delusion) optimism. Evil, as I know now, waits for no one and no thing. I have been bursting into tears intermittently over the past two days. The thought of what is to come, all that has come to pass, and the way loving this country is an untenable cruelty. With each passing day, I am convinced that I have no more hope left in me. Then a fresh terror happens-- You feel something give out inside the depths of you-- And you realize you had more to give, after all.

I wanted too much to believe in the fantasy. I want to lose myself in the time loop in which everything is fucked but nothing matters, and all I need to do is enjoy myself in the hellscape of the world. I want the fantasy that neoliberalism can save me!! I want the freedom to exploit myself and other people. I want the fantasy that nothing matters beyond my own enjoyment, that voting one time can save me from generations of hatred. I want a single election to overhaul Malaysian history. I want one moment of blinding change, followed by days of a mindless haze in which nothing ever changes and I can go on doing whatever the fuck I want, because nothing matters.

But then I think about PSM being kicked out of PH for speaking out about LGBT+ rights in support of the queer people arrested at Shargrilla, and fielding two candidates anyway. The three hundred thousand people in Klang and Kota Raja, who have never been rewarded for their loyalty and are being left to fend in the floods themselves, but who have never wavered. I think about the people working Bike Commute KL, who attended candidate meetings to push for safer roads. My friend's elderly neighbour, who was determined to vote in a wheelchair, because her husband had forbade her from voting for 53 years. I think about the PACA that had a heart attack at the polling center and passed away, who was a teacher at my mother's school. I think about Bendera Putih and Kita Jaga Kita, my grandfather who survived May 13 but will not survive cancer to see this country as what it could be. The queer people whose very lives are in danger, who we must hold close more than ever. I think about all of us who have known what it is to have hoped and lost, but hoped anyway, because the alternative is the staggering tragedy of lonely individualism.

Jenna Wortham and Jia Tolentino's discussion highlights the myopic approach many of us (maybe just myself) have towards activism and change. We (or at least I) see the easy and simplified versions of resistance. The experience of consuming it on our screens is already so frictionless, so to participate in it must also be easy, yes? As a result we feel inadequate and disempowered if our own, tentative efforts do not immediately bring about structural change in a world where the odds are always stacked against us.

I watched this movie called Palm Springs in two people are stuck in a time loop where each day resets. As time goes on, one of them gets increasingly frustrated at being stuck in the time loop. She comes to the conclusion that since nothing matters, you might as well hurt everyone and get away with it, because nothing ever changes. I might as well kill someone, torture them, torture myself, if nothing ever fucking changes. The other character, trying to stop her, says something oddly profound: “Pain matters. What we do to other people, matters. It doesn’t matter that everything resets and that nobody remembers. We remember. We have to deal with the things that we do.”

This terrible metaphor is just to express that this election is a time loop. It can reset in five years, it can reset tomorrow, it has reset yesterday. But what we do in it, what we do to other people, that is what matters. The road towards justice is a long and tiring one, a cumulation of our everyday beliefs, thoughts, actions. What we contribute today matters. What we do tomorrow matters. What we do for the rest of our lives, that will matter, too. Prejudice and inequality want us to believe otherwise, so they tell us that complacency is the answer. It wants us to live in the timeloop fantasy, where we can fuck around and hurt each other and not care. But what if, like Ross Gay said, we joined our sorrow together?

For a brief moment in time at the start of the pandemic, it seemed like the world was becoming a gentler place, less concerned with hustling to exploit oneself, more willing to accommodate the wildernesses within us. The world seemed to shift ever so slightly, just enough that it jolted us out of the fantasy. We were brought back to reality, this reality where kindness matters, not the one constructed to make us think that revolution is no longer possible. Revolution can happen, it must happen, because individual people, bent under the weight of the world, are in this country, joining their sorrows together.

The ink on my index finger is fading, just like we knew it would. This election will not save us, but we can save each other. Hope is an inexhaustible resource when you have others to share it with.