Kathy Rowland gets asked a lot about where she's from. It wouldn't be an issue but for the fact that she is Malaysian, has a Caucasian surname and doesn't look white. And so in racially-defined Malaysia, with its obsession for categories, Rowland is the odd "dan lain-lain".

unusualmusic

I would sit there with my classmates penning my “If I were to travel in time…” essays for English class or fantasizing about the Baroque period in Humanities class. I would travel to the deepest, darkest Africa with Cecil Rhodes in my History class. Yet as I got older and became more seasoned in the realities of global race relations, the beauty of the past faded. I knew for sure that no matter how beautiful an outfit, hairdo, or even lifestyle may have seemed, my participating in the nostalgic longing to return to the past was, in fact, an art I had picked up from the privileged.

And I think this raises the question of how do we deal with racism? Because if there's one thing that irritates me about the discussion of racism in Malaysia it's that one side is always seen as the aggressor, and one side is always cast as the victim. And if you are a hybrid like me, then you realise that all sides can be aggressors and all sides can be victims. So I was victimised by Malay [Malaysians] and I was victimised by Chinese [Malaysians]. But I had Malay [Malaysian] friends and Chinese [Malaysian] friends.

This has been driving me crazy...i can't remember which book or author it was...but years ago i read a story about a girl who lived in the same house in the countryside all her life with her father, and he did an education experiment by teaching her the WRONG words for things. so she thought that 'yes' means 'no' and vice-versa. then maybe the hero of the story, some guy, falls in love with her and tries to help her escape.'

horusporus

penatlah [tired]
mula2 [firstly] must testify am a person
then not a sock puppet
haiz if there's someone fisting me i'd know la

deepad

We need our words, and not only to have someone say them for us, but to say them again and again, over and over, until we own them, and the meaning they carry.

That’s why these discussions are important. Not for what some white person may or may not take away from it, but for us, to rephrase the argument we heard someone else make, so that we can throw it out with our own tongue, and know what its tartness tasted like. For us to say, "Don’t silence her, don’t insult her, you are erasing her, they are negating her", until 'her' becomes 'me'.

fen_at_sea

sea_sff

horusporus

cesperanza

So he was looking for an Asian name for what would be my character. Now Asian names are very nationality specific; Tanaka is Japanese, Wong is Chinese, Kim is Korean. Now Asia also has a reputation for warfare and colonization. Roddenberry didn’t want to bring that into that character. So he was looking at a map of Asia and trying to solve that dilemma. He saw there was a sea called the Sulu. It’s in the South China Sea area. He thought, 'The waters of the sea touch all shores.' So that’s how he came up with the name Sulu.

Little Laura Ingalls, her sisters and their beloved Ma and Pa were illegal squatters on Osage land. She left that detail out of her 1935 children's book, Little House on the Prairie, as well as any mention of ongoing outrages—including killings, burnings, beatings, horse thefts and grave robberies—committed by white settlers, such as Charles Ingalls, against Osages living in villages not more than a mile or two away from the Ingalls' little house.

- Little House on the Osage Prairie, Dennis McAuliffe, Jr.

fiction_theory

The other and more hopeful point is that never before have so many Readers of Color existed to *have* the conversation, or been able to communicate with each other to do so. ... As far as I can tell, the biggest single factor driving the current shift and growth in diversity in genre readers has been the invention of the Internet.