The Story of the Banana Girl

I never wanted to become a banana girl. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Never one or the other, never really belonging to anything. This is the story of my struggle, caught as I was within the roaring riptide of clashing cultures, languages, and worlds.

I am a full-blooded Chinese. I was born and raised in Malaysia decades after my grandparents’ emigration there. Many Malaysian Chinese are trilingual, as we are expected to learn three languages: Chinese, our mother tongue, Malay, the official Malaysian language, and English, what we consider the international language. But if you were to ask the five-year-old me which of those languages I liked best, I would answer, unhesitatingly, “English!”

In my earliest childhood memory, I am standing with my father in the library of my hometown’s Chinese Recreation Club (CRC). I am five years old. Light is flooding through the left side of the small room, glinting off pale blue maps and polished wooden tables. A few people in ancient-looking clothes are shuffling huge, flimsy sheets of cramped print with their tanned, wrinkly hands. My father holds out a book to me. The cover has been bleached by sun and time into a blur of tired pastels. I have been used to picture books with shiny covers, huge font and explosions of color, and so this book does not look particularly appealing to me. My father says the book is something called “The Famous Find”. The famous find? What did they find? I think, my curiosity aroused. I take it, flip through the rough, yellowing pages. There are few pictures, but the walls and walls of text create a different, unfamiliar excitement in me. Even though the font is small and unfamiliar and the words are packed together densely in blocks, I realize that I can read it.

In retrospect, that realization marked the beginning of my obsession with books. I fell in love with that very first children’s novel I read (I found out later that it was actually part of the Famous Five series by acclaimed children’s writer Enid Blyton). I fell in love with the characters. I fell in love with the seemingly effortless way words could evoke so many emotions and images in me. I starting reading everywhere. In the car. In the bathroom. Under the desk while the teacher was lecturing. As a little girl, my only ambition was to be a writer. I decided that when I grew up, I was going to write stories and get published and be a great, famous author. There was no question what language I would be writing in, even though I could read and write and speak in three languages. English, to me, was special. English was a portal to faraway lands, a way I could escape the normalcy of everyday life. I lapped up eagerly Blyton’s descriptions of magical worlds at the tops of trees, hidden caves and passages and the secrets they held, tales of children escaping to islands or mountains and surviving only using their wits and friendship. The memories of those stories are still precious to me. Perhaps, in a way, I never left the magical childhood that those stories created. Even today, I read mostly in the fantasy genre, I tend to get bored with “everyday life” stories, and just thinking about my favorite Enid Blyton books makes my brain buzz with endorphins.

At this point, you might start wondering if there weren’t any good fantasy or children’s books in Chinese or Malay. Why did I focus so much on just English? It probably had something to do with the fact that the first ten years of my life, especially before I entered primary school, English was the language that I was most comfortable and proficient in. My parents, despite being multilingual (my mother, for instance, can speak four Chinese dialects in addition to Mandarin, English, and Malay), chose to talk to me in (mostly) English all throughout my early childhood. They wanted me to have an advantage over my future peers, since the standard level of English mastery amongst Malaysian schoolchildren isn’t that high. Consequently, at age five, my English was far better than my Chinese or Malay. Is it any wonder, then, that I preferred reading books that I had an easier time reading? And once I became obsessed with Enid Blyton, there wasn’t a whole lot of space left for anything else.

When I was ten, though, my love for English became tempered with a budding appreciation for Chinese. I watched the drama serial version of Journey to the West, fell in love with the story, so much so that I read the original novel in all its hundred-chapter, traditional-Chinese glory. It took me a year to finish that monster of a book, but the result was that I started reading Chinese novels as well. I remember the first time my father gave me an wuxia novel to read. I couldn’t put it down, literally. My eyes were glued to the page from start to finish. It was the first time I had the experience of closing a book only to notice in surprise that it was night. I remember spending afternoons in my cousin’s room, rummaging through the stacks of wuxia novels that he left behind after he went to college. Dust puffed off the bookshelves as I took out books full of vertical, cramped print, with the occasional illustration of billowing sleeves and swords clashing in ink. It was around that time that I gradually switched to talking in Mandarin to my family, as a result of speaking Mandarin all day to my classmates. And so my teenage years were spent, roughly equally, in both languages. Still, I wrote predominantly in English outside school, while I spoke mainly in Chinese.

At one point during those years, I started having difficulty finding and using words in one language that I had no problem expressing in others. I realize now that it was because the languages I used were tied to certain discourses. The discourse of everyday life, for me, was Chinese mixed with a little Malay, and so when I needed everyday terms, I would have no problem finding those words in Chinese. In contrast, when I wanted to write in certain genres of fiction, I would find it easier to use English because I had more exposure to those particular discourses in English. (Even now, I find that talking casually in English is much more problematic for me than academic or creative writing in English, since I’ve more practice in the latter.) In some cases, I had to switch between languages in order to participate fully in each discourse.

It was when I tried to participate in a discourse tied to a particular language by using a different language that I ran into problems. For example, I found it challenging to talk about scientific concepts in Chinese because my entire high school science education was in Malay. And so when I spoke, I dealt with those problems by simply mixing languages together, picking and choosing from each language as the situation required – the common linguistic strategy of all Malaysians. When I wrote, however, I had to spend some time and effort translating a word that I needed from one language to another, since, in writing, I could only use a single language. Now I hope that one day I’ll be able to publish a book that’s written in multiple languages, mirroring the natural mixed way that Malaysians speak – but the me back then didn’t think that this was plausible. At one point, I realized that if I wanted to be really good in writing, I had to pick one language over the other to focus on. I chose English, for the entirely mercenary reason that writing in English would ensure I had a wider, international reader-base. My reasoning was that, if I wrote in Chinese, only the Chinese people would be able to read my work. But if I wrote in English, not only would all my fellow Malaysians be able to understand me, English-speaking people from other countries would be able to as well. I did not realize, at the time, I was not just choosing between different mediums, but also a different – overlapping, but at the same time different – set of discourses. Choosing to focus on and write in English has probably made me a different person, and think and write in a different way, than if I had chosen to focus on Chinese instead. I might have been taken over by the discourses of Taiwan and China instead of Britain and America. As it was, I was irrevocably changed by my immersion in the English language.

But how exactly did this change happen?

We use words to make sense of the world and to communicate our perception of the world to others. When we read what other people write, we take in their perception of the world, which influences how we ourselves perceive it. Thus, the world we perceive and react to is the world that has been shaped and molded in our mind by all the different people writing about their perception of what the world really is. This is an ongoing, massively interactive process, as we collectively use words to shape our shared reality.

This process is also inevitably a violent one. As the scholar David Bartholomae once said in his essay “Inventing the University”, “writing… is an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity”. We use language to communicate with an audience, and many of us are unaware of the fact that the very act of communication is an act of aggression. Sometimes this is obvious, as in when you are arguing one side of an issue and trying to convince the audience to take your point of view into consideration. But you may argue that when you’re writing a fictional story, or simply providing information to the reader, or musing about trivialities, you are not engaging in an act of aggression. If you think so, you are wrong. Humans cannot escape subjectivity. In everything we write, our biases, preconceptions, and basic assumptions about the world seep through.

Let’s say you write a tragic romance and the main character’s love interest dies. You then have your main character muse about whether or not they will meet again in an afterlife or in reincarnated forms. By doing this, you are essentially feeding your reader a worldview in which an afterlife is plausible. Let’s say you write an article about fly fishing and you use “he” to refer to the hypothetical average angler because it’s more convenient than “he or she”. You are feeding your reader a worldview in which the male experience is default and females are seen as deviating from some sort of mainstream norm. Let’s say you write a blog entry musing about how excited you are about planning to go rent a movie with your friends. You are feeding your reader a worldview in which friendship leads to happiness. Let’s say you write a textbook to educate students on a particular subject.  You are feeding them the knowledge you think they need to know. The very act of setting down words on a page involves the mass deaths of millions and millions of ideas, the silencing of millions and millions of voices, in favor of the ones you choose to express, the ones you think of worthy of expression, in order to influence your reader in some way or form. Most often, you think you’re doing your audience a favor when you write. You think you’re going to make them more knowledgeable in a certain area. You think your words will have value to them. But at the same time, you are imposing your worldview on them.

In short, whenever we write, we seek to produce a change in how our audience thinks or behaves. This fact holds true even if we don’t perceive writing as an act of aggression. But writing is indeed a violent act. By changing your audience’s perception of the world through your words, you are in effect changing your audience. People will change the way they behave depending on what they think the world around them is like. One particularly dangerous effect of this phenomenon is the self-fulfilling prophecy. People tend to become what they believe they are. If the media portrays girls as bad at math, girls will tend to become bad at math. They tend to think that since being bad at math is part of their female identity anyway, why bother trying? The consequence is that girls who could have been good at math fail to take their mathematical skills to a higher level because they believe that it’s outside of their ability. If the media portrays gay men as having limp wrists and swinging hips, gay men will tend to walk and talk in the way that the media depict them as, because they believe that those mannerisms are part of the gay identity. In a famous experiment by Jane Elliot, blue-eyed children did better on tasks compared to brown-eyed children when the teacher told them people with blue eyes were more intelligent than brown-eyed children. In short, the teacher was influencing the children’s intelligence by manipulating the way they saw themselves. What happens when we, as writers, manipulate the way other people see themselves on a massive scale?

I am referring to the dominance of the Western media throughout the world. What happens when a non-Western society becomes saturated with Western discourse? I argue that people of non-Western cultures will start perceiving themselves in relation to Western values and paradigms, and change in order to better suit their perceptions of themselves. In this way, words are changing the world. The domination of English throughout the world is, in one sense, like an encroaching wave of bacteria, modifying the entire world so that it makes sense in the context of Western-based culture. Words are weapons. Media are weapons. Weapons, I argue, that are even more dangerous than physical ones, because they are the instruments of acts of aggression disguised as acts of charity, which means they are much more effective and devious than nuclear bombs or missiles because the victims of those weapons don’t even realize that they’re being invaded. And so we happily endure those acts of aggression, until the countries that wield those weapons achieve a bloodless domination of the world. I say “wield”, but it is my impression that many wielders of those weapons are not aware of the colonializing process at all. 

Fiction plays a crucial part in this process. Compare the output of fiction in America, which are all from American perspectives, about issues that Americans think are important, about American ways of living – to the output of fiction in Malaysia, which seems to me to be relatively small (due to the disparity in population size and length of history – Malaysia as it is now only started to exist in the past century). This difference in quantity and quality is crucial. By not having works of fiction through which we can make sense of, understand, and reaffirm our culture, by not having a body of fiction through which we can form a coherent, consistent, cultural consciousness, we Malaysians are constantly at risk of being assimilated by the cultures whose ways of life and discourses are more comprehensible to us than our own. Without a strong, rich framework of diverse discourse communities, like the one that is the foundation of all Western culture, Malaysia’s cultural “soul” is nothing but a wisp of mist in the harsh winds of the global Zeitgeist, translucent, shallow, barely visible among the vibrant colors and textures of other cultures. Our ways of perceiving the world will be irrevocably lost, torn apart and devoured by the foreign discourses that have metastasized into the very core of our consciousness as a nation.

As for me, I have resigned myself to the fact that my insides have been bleached white due to my enthusiastic participation in English-based discourses communities. I have resigned myself to the fact that who I am today has been shaped, in part, by Western culture. I have resigned myself to the fact that my cultural identity has been compromised, invaded and taken over by the English words that I love. Consider this analogy:

Whenever I read a book or watch a movie or play a game that I love, the first thing I do is search for fan fiction about that particular book or movie or game. Because reading the stories that other people make up about the stories I like is my way of making sense of my experience. By reading fan fiction, and by seeing how other people react  to the stories I like, I feel as if I am part of that community of fans. I feel like I can better understand my experience of the original work.

Now, replace book/movie/game with real life.

The same process happens. Only now the fan fiction I’m reading is about a book/movie/game that I have never read, have never come across (Western countries), but the fan fiction (Western media imported into Malaysia) is so good I go and buy the book that the fan fiction is about and read it (my subscribing to certain aspects of Western culture).

I became particularly aware of this process ever since I arrived in America a little over a year ago. I became hypersensitive to American cultural norms, values, conventions. And my soul started to rebel. I refuse to change myself, my identity, to fit into American expectations of what I should be like. And yet the form of my rebellion is shaped by the very culture I am rebelling against. It doesn’t help that I feel like the only one who is rebelling.

For example, I despise writing my name with my given name (Xiang Xiang) in the front and my family name (Liew) in the back. For the first 17 years of my life, I've always written my family name first – Liew Xiang Xiang – and it's only in the past 3 years that I've had to deal with writing my name in a way that it's not supposed to be written. I’m sick to death of explaining Chinese naming customs to people who think that "Liew" is supposed to be my first name and "Xiang" my last, and then get all confused because of the repetition of the "Xiang" because they think the "Xiang" in the middle is supposed to be a middle name.

However, most Chinese just accept the change in name order without too much fuss. It’s required on visas and official documents, and you have to accept the change in order to survive in Western administrative systems. But some people take the name change a step further. They link the two characters that are their given names together – like Xiangxiang – or hyphenate those words – like Xiang-Xiang – in order to accommodate the Western linguistic framework. Some even  drop their real given names altogether and substitute an English name, like “Sarah” or “Andrew”. Apparently they find this type of name change not only convenient, but also empowering.         

This attitude is common amongst modern generations, presumably because of Western economic and military dominance, which leads to cultural dominance. Due to the proliferation of Western media, many non-Western societies are saturated with American movies, novels, games, songs, shows, and plays. In this way, American culture is glamorized and seen as superior. We are fed American paradigms, American values, American ways of perception. Perhaps young Chinese nowadays switch to using English names because they feel that by becoming part of Western society, they will earn the prestige that is associated with the white race.

I dislike this practice. I feel it's analogous to a murder victim encouraging the murderer to stab him or her - like we’re condoning this act of linguistic colonialism. Some people will scoff at what they perceive as my overreaction. They’ll say that this is no big deal, when writing in English do as the English do, it’s easier for Americans to understand anyway, and no one except you thinks it’s a problem so why change what works?

Let me tell you exactly why this name issue is such a big deal. Take Chinese as an example: when we have to write an English name in Chinese, do we write that name with the family name first, and given name last, as Chinese names are written? No, we write the English name as close to the original pronunciation as possible, with the first name first and the last name last. The same in Japanese. The same in Malay. In fact, out of all the languages I know, only English takes our names, these symbols of our personal identity, and tortures them into a syntactical framework that is an integral part of "Western" culture.

For me, passive acceptance of this violent act is impossible. Every time I write my name backwards, in the wrong way, I feel like I'm dying a little inside. I think of English as my language, just as much as English is the language of many of my classmates and professors in America, and yet my language is rejecting me and my personal identity. I don't belong to English; English does not belong to me.

I live constantly without a sense of place; I am constantly being rejected by the places and languages that I think of as mine. Malaysia, my own country, rejects me even though I was born there, even though I grew up there - simply because my grandparents were immigrants from China. Looking to China as "home", as a place to belong, is even more problematic: I have never been to China, I am not a citizen of China, I am a foreigner there in the same way I am a foreigner in America. Even my Chinese is impure, inauthentic, irrevocably tainted as it has been by my Malaysian upbringing. There is no place in the world that I can call home, no language in the world that I can authentically claim as my own.

And when I see many of my U.S. classmates, cruising along in a culture and a language that has never rejected them – there's something like jealousy, but not quite, that flows through my chest. Is that why I always try to remain detached from the people around me? I am conscious of the fact that if I get closer, exchange thoughts and feelings and emotions - I might be swallowed whole by the writhing, giant amoeba that is Western culture.

For once, just once in my life, I want a place and a language that I belong to. Completely. Without question. And I know that I'll never have those things, ever, for the rest of my life. 

But then again, maybe life is more interesting this way. Maybe I should accept the fact that instead of having a single cultural identity, I am an amalgamation of all the cultures that have influenced me, directly or indirectly. So what if my thinking has been shaped by English-based discourses? So what if my soul is British-Malaysian-Chinese-American-Japanese-male-female and doesn’t fit exclusively in any of those identities? I am me. That’s all I am. Me. I’m just me. I’m not a Chinese, a woman, a Malaysian, or a banana girl, and at the same time, I am all those things. 刘襄襄。That’s my name. That’s all I am.

Perhaps it’s time for me to reject my desire to identify myself exclusively with a single culture or language. This way I can be free, free to submit to certain acts of aggression when I find submission useful, free to fight against other acts of aggression when I don’t, free to pick and choose elements from any culture I want, any discourse I want, and build myself a whole new identity that is flexible, ever-changing, and independent of the cultures I use to create it.

Yes, I pity those people who box themselves into little categories, little white labels with bold black lettering denoting their identities. I find it pathetic, the way they change themselves, adopt behaviors that they associate with that identity, even if they didn’t like those behaviors in the first place. They are slaves, chained to the dominant discourses of whatever community they feel they are part of.

But I’m different. I’m free. Or at least I’m trying to be. And for now, I can sleep easy at night, knowing that I am who I am. And that’s the only thing that matters.