Not Everything Difficult Is Worth Enduring

If you could go back in time and give your younger self advice, what would it be?
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There are many things I could tell my younger self, but writing them all down would make this post lengthy. So, I will pick only one: leave sooner when something keeps shrinking you.

When I say “leave sooner”, I don’t mean leave the moment something gets hard. That would be stupid because you would just be avoiding the issue. Sometimes it’s good to stay through the hard stuff because it can teach you a thing or two. We should learn to tell the difference between difficulty and the damage caused by shrinking. They are not the same thing. There are things that are worth having, like marriage, motherhood, creative work, growth, and responsibility. These things often stretch us past what we thought we could endure. These are the things that demand more from us than we think we have, and somehow we find more.

I can say all these things now because I have gone through things in life. But when I was young, I was just groping around, trying to find my way like everyone else.

Difficulty can be good for us because stretching asks us to become more of ourselves. It builds our endurance and character. It forces us to grow. We can become more patient, more honest, more capable. Oh, it is hard. I am not going to lie to you and say the process is smooth. Not at all. But I can say that the experience is expansive. You might cry in private after a hard day of parenting and still not disappear. You might struggle with work and not feel smaller for it.

Shrinking is different. Shrinking looks like this: you make yourself smaller to keep the peace. You censor yourself before you speak. You distrust your instincts even when they have been right before. You feel watched or judged even when no one is watching. You feel relief only when you are away.

The difference between the two is that difficulty builds you, whereas shrinking erases you. And the worst thing is how long it takes to tell the difference.

I used to believe that staying was always the right thing to do. To me, endurance was the hallmark of a wise and mature person. I believed that loyalty to people, institutions, or commitments was a form of holiness and that adjusting myself to conform was simply being spiritually strong.

However, in each of those beliefs, there was a grain of truth. Sometimes staying can be genuinely the right thing to do. Endurance can be genuinely a mark of a mature person. Loyalty can be a virtue, and adjusting for the sake of others can truly be generous. The tricky thing is that shrinking knows how to wear all of them. It often calls itself being the bigger person. It gaslights you. It convinces you that leaving is selfish, that your discomfort is weakness, and that if you were more patient, prayerful, or spiritual, things would be different. So you stay and convince yourself that this is growth, a trial by fire, so to speak.

No one wakes up one morning and realises they have become smaller. Shrinking is insidious. It happens gradually through small compromises that seem reasonable at the time.

What do those “small” compromises look like? I can’t speak for others, but here are the things I noticed: you become careful about what you say. You rehearse conversations in your head before they happen. You stop asking certain questions because the answers may create tension. You learn which version of yourself to offer in which room. You become afraid of disappointing people, so you give in more often than you should. You stop trusting what you feel because your feelings always seem to be the problem.

Then one day, I realised that I had become irritable for no apparent reason. I felt stressed, worried, and angry almost all the time.

This year, I left a high-control evangelical church I had attended for nearly two decades. The decision to leave was probably shocking to others, but for me, it was something I had been thinking about for many years. I simply lacked the courage to do it. By the time I left, I had developed an efficient system of self-monitoring that was deeply damaging to me. I had learned to distrust my own questions. I had filtered my spiritual instincts through what would be acceptable, what would be approved, and what wouldn’t raise concern. I didn’t know the extent of that damage until I was no longer in that environment.

It felt so strange after I left. It was a mix of feelings: anger, relief, grief, and joy. I was so exhausted and didn’t know how to process the experience. What I did know was that I was tired of the constant internal audit and the need to ask permission to think or feel. I was tired of shrink-wrapping my soul to fit spaces that were never designed for its full dimensions.

Church was not the only place I left. I left some online spaces too. Social media often made me anxious and reactive. There were too many posts that made me feel as though I had to prepare for battle. The internet is a wonderful invention and it offers many benefits. However, there are sections of the internet that can train you to be perpetually braced, and I don’t think that is healthy for our mental well-being.

I don’t believe the church and the online spaces were all harmful. I think both have strengths and weaknesses. I won’t go into them here; I want to focus on who I became in those spaces. I had absorbed habits of self-surveillance that cost me greatly, and leaving gave me back some peace and room in my own chest.

I no longer believe that staying is automatically noble, but I also know that leaving is not always the answer. Sometimes leaving is necessary when something costs more of you than you are willing to surrender. I now strongly believe that no amount of loyalty, endurance, or maturity is worth the slow disappearance of who you are.

I wish I had understood that ambiguity earlier. I wish I had learnt sooner to tell the difference between a stretch and a shrink, and trusted myself enough to act on what I saw.

These are the questions I would ask my younger self:

Do I become more myself here?
Am I allowed to question?
Am I becoming more curious or more afraid?
Do I feel constantly monitored?
Do I feel lighter when I leave?

These may seem like simple questions, but the answers can be difficult. Sometimes we don’t want to ask them, but they are still worth asking early, often, and honestly.

If I could change anything in the past, would I rescue my younger self from every place that affected her negatively? The answer is NO. Some of those places taught me things I couldn’t have learned any other way. They taught me what shrinking felt like, how insidious it was, how it disguises itself as virtue, and how deeply it can embed itself in a person without her noticing.

Those experiences also taught me a valuable lesson: what expansion feels like. Expansion gives me confidence to be myself without apology. I don’t have to rehearse before giving my opinions. I can ask questions without fear. I can connect with others without wondering if I am too much or not enough.

I stayed too long in places that mistook my shrinking for loyalty. And now I know the difference between being stretched and being erased. Since leaving, I feel peaceful, content, and more like my true self. And that, I think, is what my younger self was looking for all along.

I write about Iban culture, ancestral rituals, creative life, emotional truths, and the quiet transformations of love, motherhood, and identity. If this speaks to you, subscribe and journey with me.

I Kept Creating and My Art Became a Mossery Cover

What’s something you’ve done that your past self would be proud of?
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I think my past self would be proud that I never gave up on writing and making art. I continued working despite not having a large audience, praise, or assurance that the work would go anywhere. I understand why people stop when their work receives little support. But for me, I never thought to quit. I did it because something in me still needed to make things, even when life seemed uncertain and I worried whether anyone was paying attention. I kept writing and making art because that invisible, persistent urge would not leave me alone.

Nothing glamorous or sexy about persistence. It meant making zines nobody asked for, experimenting with drawing when I didn’t even know I was any good at it, and picking up new skills just because a project needed them. Persistence required me to continue despite doubt, illness and the constant question: Does any of this matter? I had no answer and I simply kept going.

Perhaps that is why receiving an invitation to create a cover for the Mossery × KL Art Book Fair 2026 collaboration felt so special. It did not arrive because I had it all figured out. It arrived while I was still creating, learning and finding my way.

The cover is called Bejalai. Bejalai is an Iban word associated with journeying beyond the familiar in search of experience, knowledge and growth. The design features two bungai terung or eggplant flowers, traditionally recognised as the first tattoo an Iban young man receives. It marks his passage into a new stage of life.

At their centres are spirals called tali nyawa, the rope of life. The flowing forms connecting them suggest a river, representing movement and connection to home. I drew and coloured everything by hand using watercolour pencils, markers and black fineliners. The cover itself embodies, in many ways, the persistence that made it.

Pre-orders for the Mossery × KLABF 2026 cover run from 16–29 October. You can customise your name on the cover when you order. You can pre-order it here.

I don’t know where any piece of work will lead, and most may never lead anywhere measurable. But I think my past self would be happy that I kept producing them nonetheless.

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Rituals and Rivers: The Story Behind My First Poetry Collection

I published my first poetry collection in August, brought it with me to KL Zine Etc. Festival, read from it in public, sold copies of it, and somehow never wrote about it here.

The reason is simple. Shortly after the festival, I became very ill. It was not the kind of illness that passes after a couple of days of rest. I was hospitalised a couple of times and was at risk of developing sepsis. I am not going to disclose the actual illness, but it was serious enough that I was unwell for almost two months. I had to stop writing and making artwork. I disappeared from this blog and from most other things while I recuperated. The book, however, did not disappear. It existed quietly while I was recovering and waiting for my return.

Now that I am blogging again, I have realised that Rituals & Rivers has never had a proper post of its own. So here we are. This is not a launch announcement because that ship sailed in August. I just want to introduce my book to my blog readers and visitors.

Where The Book Came From

Rituals & Rivers began with a simple fear: that what I remembered would not be enough. I grew up with fragments of Iban life around me: my family history, tales of my ancestors, old songs and omens, rituals, family names, women’s work and remembered journeys. Many of the things that shaped me were never written down. They lived in memory, in work and warning, in speech and in gesture. They were part of my life and I didn’t think of recording any of them.

However, as I grew older and lived away from Sarawak, I became more aware of what I had taken for granted. The Iban language that I grew up with is not part of my everyday life. The stories I heard as a child became fragmented or forgotten. As a mother raising children far from ancestral land, I learned that inheritance does not always pass down by itself. Sometimes we have to be intentional in researching, recording, and passing that knowledge down to the next generation.

The fear of forgetting is really the seed of this collection.

What The Book Became

What began with personal memory eventually grew into a collection of 69 poems across six sections. However, the more I wrote, the wider the scope became. I realised I was no longer only writing about myself. I started to write about language, longhouse life, women, rituals, spiritual beliefs, family history, colonial resistance, land and environmental change, and eventually about what happens when cultural knowledge is no longer passed down naturally.

The poems are organised into six sections that together form a journey of sorts. They begin with questions of belonging and move backwards into childhood, longhouse life, and the women who shaped that world. From there, the collection goes deeper into Iban rituals and spiritual beliefs before turning to my family history, colonial resistance and eventually the question that rests underneath much of this book: what remains, and what do we pass on?

The six sections are:

The Question of Belonging
The Longhouse Remembers
Women Who Hold the House
Rituals, Signs, and the Unseen
War, Resistance, and Inherited Courage
What Remains, What We Pass On

Four Poems and Why I Wrote Them

I want to feature four different poems and the story behind each of them.

a) Tum Ketumba, I Sang the Lullaby

This poem is about a childhood song my sister taught me when I was small. I remember the lyrics even though much of the world around them has mostly vanished. I tried to preserve whatever I still recall of that world. Hopefully, through writing, I can pass it down to my children.

b) Woven Name

This poem is about my great-grandaunt, Selaka, who was a master weaver of pua kumbu, and also about me. Even though I never learned to weave, when I write, I feel connected to what she did. She wove her pua kumbu from dreams, signs, and patience, whereas I write and make art from memory and words.

c) Aji and Dimah (Two Poems)

These poems were inspired by my family history. Aji Apai Limpa was my great-great-great-grandfather, an Iban war leader who resisted the Brooke government and died in battle at Sungai Langit in 1858. Dimah was his wife, often remembered for one tragic incident before the battle. Writing about them was not simply a matter of saying “my ancestor was a warrior.” I was trying to understand them as people, but I was also thinking about what happens when a name you have heard within your family becomes someone you are trying to see clearly.

Research and Uncertainty

Some of these poems came directly from memory, while others required me to research things I remembered only partially. I read ethnographic and historical sources as much as I could. I revisited family histories and tried to understand practices I had grown up around.

I want to be clear that this collection is not presented as a definitive record of Iban culture. It is a personal offering, drawing from memory, family history, oral tradition, and cultural knowledge.

There are gaps and uncertainties in it, and I have allowed those gaps to stay rather than fill them in with something I cannot honestly claim.

Why Rituals & Rivers?

The title came to mind because those two words seemed large enough to contain the entire collection.

The poems are full of rivers. Sungai Layar is the river connected to my ancestral longhouse. Its water carried people and news to and from home before roads existed. Rivers appear as routes, witnesses, and places where history is laid down and life continues.

Rituals are an important part of traditional Iban life. Healing rites, funeral laments, child naming ceremonies, and wedding customs: these are communal rituals that sustain and strengthen a community. They are how we mark what matters and how we pass it on.

Together, rituals and rivers describe what this collection is trying to achieve. Rivers carry things across distance and rituals hold everything together. I am trying to do both.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my children. The final poem, “When They Are Ready”, emphasises that idea. In it, I describe the poems in this collection as perau, or small boats that will carry my children to the things that can reveal their roots.

“… So I write these rivers into words,
each poem a small perau waiting.

When they are ready,
they will launch them,
follow the names I have kept alive,
and find, at the source,

a home that never stopped calling.”

Final Thoughts

After years of working on this collection, the book is finally here. I sold copies during the festival and have continued selling them since. I have read from it publicly, and only now am I sitting down to write about it here.

I am back and writing again. The book exists, waiting for whoever needs it.

Rituals & Rivers is my first full-length poetry collection. If you would like a copy, you can purchase it from my Shopee online store.

The Price of Being Chosen | Reading Su Tong’s Raise the Red Lantern

I found Su Tong’s Raise the Red Lantern while rummaging through books at Bookaholics’s Jom Baca! RM5 Book Fair. I have been reading Asian literature lately and this book naturally went home with me.

When I finished reading it, my first reaction was something like: what the hell did I just read? The story is almost unassuming, very ordinary and plain on the surface. A young woman named Lotus marries a wealthy fifty-year-old man, Chen Zuoqian, as his fourth wife. She enters his household and finds three women already there: Joy, Cloud, and Coral. What follows is a story of jealousy, rivalry, deceit, and eventually death and madness.

There is nothing particularly elaborate about Su Tong’s prose but I kept stopping while reading, going back to certain scenes and asking myself: why did he do that? Why is Lotus so emotional? Why are these wives organising their entire emotional lives around whether this ageing old man visits them tonight?

That is when I realised the story was doing something clever. It was showing me a system and letting me figure out the rules.

The Novella vs Zhang Yimou’s Film Adaptation

I was fairly new to Su Tong’s work even though I came across his books several times in the past. I wasn’t aware that the novella was originally titled Wives and Concubines. It was published as Raise the Red Lantern in some editions following Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation.

In the film adaptation, the red lanterns were raised outside a wife’s quarters when she was being chosen for the night. The whole household can see who has favour and who does not. Those lanterns don’t exist in the novella. In the original story, Chen Zuoqian simply goes to whichever wife’s room he fancies for the night.

The Wives Are Not Waiting for Sex

I admit my first reaction to the wives’ conniving and petty behaviours was disgust. These women spend their waking hours scheming, competing and humiliating each other. They wait around for an old man who, by the end of the story, is struggling with impotence.

That reaction was too simple and easy. They are not just waiting for sex. In that household, Chen Zuoqian’s favour determines everything. If he visits you, you get better food, better treatment from servants and more respect from others. If he doesn’t, you become invisible and lose ground. Sexual favour becomes status.

In other words, sex has become currency and they did not design the world in which they are living. Take away women’s choices, their money, their freedom to leave, their control over their own futures. And put them under one powerful man and make his attention the only path to comfort and dignity, then watch them compete.

The system can point at the result and say: look how petty and vicious women are. It is easy to blame the person rather than the conditions they are living in. The system created those conditions. Chen Zuoqian doesn’t need to actively oppress anyone every minute of the day. Because once the hierarchy exists, the women police themselves and each other.

Lotus and Her Impossible Position

Lotus is the most tragic character because she enters the household believing she made a choice. After her father dies and her circumstances change dramatically, she decides to become a rich man’s concubine rather than marry an ordinary man. She thinks she’s choosing Chen Zuoqian and a life of comfort. She doesn’t realise that she is actually choosing the Chen household.

Once she’s inside, almost every relationship becomes contaminated by hierarchy. She can’t be friends with the other wives because they are competitors. She can’t trust the servants because they gossip and have ulterior motives of their own. Even her own body becomes a site of conflict. She is young and her husband is old enough to be her father. She has desires and eventually Chen Zuoqian cannot satisfy them. When he asks something of her sexually that she finds degrading and she refuses him, his resentment becomes punishment and he withdraws his affection.

Her descent into madness happens through accumulation. She fears that her servant, Swallow, is being used against her. She becomes obsessed with the mysterious well where women of the household who violated the sexual order were disposed of.

Lotus is also drawn towards Feipu, Chen Zuoqian’s eldest son, who is older than her. Feipu fascinates me because Su Tong never gives a proper explanation of his character. Lotus tries to seduce him but he refuses her advances. Is he a homosexual? Is he frightened of his father? Has he been so overshadowed by his father that even his desires have become inhibited? Or is Feipu himself still confused about what he wants?

Coral’s Crime

Coral’s fate makes the double standard absolutely clear. Chen Zuoqian can marry Joy, Cloud, Coral, Lotus, and fondle servants. He eventually marries a fifth wife even when he is impotent. His sexual plurality is institutionalised and society sees no issue with that.

But when Coral seeks a lover outside the household, she is thrown into the mysterious well. Coral and the women accused of adultery in Chen’s family history are punished because their sexuality belongs to the patriarch, while his sexuality belongs solely to himself. Coral’s crime is to exercise sexual autonomy.

Lotus witnesses that and she understands the danger. The possibility that she might someday desire someone else is not out of the ordinary. What is extraordinary is living in a world where acting upon that desire could kill her. Lotus knows on some level that she might end up in that well herself.

Swallow’s Tragedy

Lotus’s descent into madness also appears more complex than simple jealousy. She lives in a household where paranoia is often warranted. The wives plot against and undermine one another while the servants gossip. Alliances change, and so does their position in the hierarchy.

Lotus’s fears are not unfounded when she discovers that Swallow has made a doll bearing her name and pierced it with needles. However, Swallow is just a lowly servant, beneath Lotus in the hierarchy.

There are many things beyond Lotus’s control. Chen Zuoqian’s favour. His other wives. The structure that imprisoned her. But she can control Swallow; therefore her fear travels downward.

She humiliates and punishes Swallow. When Swallow dies, Lotus must live with the consequences and her guilt. This is one of the distressing things in the story. The person on top doesn’t have to be the one performing every violent act for an oppressive system to work. Once a hierarchy is established, those lower down may start hurting each other.

Cloud’s Cunning

The character I found myself admiring, almost against my will, is Cloud. Amid the vicious competition between the wives, Cloud survives through social intelligence. She knows when to use her charm, when to appear harmless, when to gather information, and when to act accordingly. She works through whatever channels are available to her instead of brute confrontation. She doesn’t act dramatically, but she becomes very good at living in Chen Zuoqian’s little kingdom.

This Is Still Happening

Here is what makes Raise the Red Lantern feel contemporary rather than like a story about a distant past. We still see these things today. Women undermine other women everywhere. Working mothers versus stay-at-home mothers. Married women versus single women. Women with children versus women without. Women who abort versus women who keep the pregnancy. The list goes on and on. There is no winner when we argue over which version of womanhood deserves approval.

It makes me think of the term “pick-me.” Originally, it describes a woman who presents herself as ‘not like other women’ and therefore more deserving of male approval. However, when women start using “pick-me” to police other women, we create another category of performing femininity incorrectly.

But I have to tread carefully here because not every disagreement between women is caused by patriarchy. Women have free will and we can be selfish, judgemental, competitive, prejudiced, and cruel for all the ordinary reasons human beings can.

However, it is undeniable that patriarchy has historically created systems in which women gain security and social legitimacy through their relationships to men. Under those conditions, it’s not surprising that female competition thrives.

Feminism Is Not a Dirty Word

And that is why I think feminism is not a dirty word, though somehow it has become one for some women. I find that odd because many choices women now take for granted exist partly because women before us fought for them. The right to education, to work, to own property, to enter politics, to divorce, to have children. Those rights are incomplete and not the same everywhere in the world.

Feminism does not have to mean that every woman makes the same liberated choice. A woman who chooses marriage and children is not necessarily less free than a woman who chooses neither. A woman who stays home is not necessarily oppressed, just as a woman with a career is not necessarily liberated.

It all comes down to one thing: choice. And Raise the Red Lantern made me think about what that word means. Lotus made a choice. She chose concubinage over marrying an ordinary man. But how meaningful was that choice when the alternatives were already so constrained? How free is a woman who can choose between one form of dependence and another?

Those questions are not confined to Lotus’s world. I am an Iban woman reading this story in Malaysia, many decades after the world Su Tong depicts. My life is infinitely freer than Lotus’s. My circumstances, culture, and time are different from hers. I don’t want to iron out those differences by assuming that all women’s experiences are the same.

There is a bigger question: How much of what women call choice is genuinely ours and how much of it is dictated by what our families, cultures, religions, and societies have taught us to believe a woman should be?

After finishing Raise the Red Lantern, I no longer found those women pathetic for waiting for Chen Zuoqian. I found their situation tragic. They had been placed in a world where their status, their security and eventually their survival might be determined by one man’s attention.

And while our world is radically different from theirs, women are still arguing about who among us is doing femininity right. Maybe the more pertinent issue is why we are still being expected to prove it at all.

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A Weekend at KL Zine Etc Festival

I meant to write about this sooner, but I was seriously unwell over the past couple of months and had to put a few things aside. Now that I feel a lot better, I am returning to some of the things I wanted to share, including my weekend at KL Zine Etc Festival, or KLZE.

From 7 to 9 August, I took part in KLZE at the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. It was my first zine festival as an exhibitor, so I was eager, worried and a little overwhelmed by everything.

I had half a table, sharing it with another exhibitor, Not Just Love Stories from Taiwan. I brought my newly published poetry collection, Rituals and Rivers, together with several of my zines, art prints and drawings.

Much of this work began at home, long before I decided to publish any of it. My handwritten drafts and drawings had filled countless notebooks and sketchbooks over the years. Over the past few years, some of those pages gradually became books.

Preparing for the festival meant dealing with the less romantic part of making things: printing, pricing, packing and deciding what would fit on the table. By the time everything was laid out, I could see how much I had made.

It was a strange experience watching strangers look through my books, turn the pages carefully, ask questions about Iban culture and even buy them to take home. These things had existed privately for so long, as ideas, scribbles and files in my notebooks and on my computer. Suddenly, they were travelling home with other people. For the first time, I felt that people outside my immediate circle were supporting my work.

My work often returns to my Iban heritage. At KLZE, those stories could reach people who might never have come across my blog or found my work online, especially Iban people living away from Sarawak and those of mixed heritage. I have always wanted to share Iban culture through simple forms such as zines, particularly with younger people of Iban descent who grew up away from Sarawak.

I liked that directness. The work was there for them to look through, and I was there if they wanted to ask about it.

Selling my work was part of why I was there, of course. Independent publishing costs money, and every purchase helps me continue. I am grateful to everyone who bought something, whether it was a card, a zine or the poetry collection.

I also appreciated the chance to see people encounter the work in person. Publishing online gives me very little sense of what happens after someone reads a poem or looks at a drawing. A festival offers a different kind of contact, even if it is only a brief conversation across a table.

On Saturday, 8 August, I also gave a poetry reading from Rituals and Rivers. It was my first public reading.

Before the festival, the organisers invited anyone interested to give a talk or a public reading. I jumped at the chance without thinking too much about it. I was not nervous and had no hesitation about doing it, even knowing there was a chance no one would turn up to listen.

Writing a poem and reading it aloud to an audience are quite different experiences. On the page, I can take my time and revise in private. At a reading, I have to give the words a voice and let people hear them. I am glad I took that step and grateful to those who sat and listened.

I also came home with work by other makers. Part of the pleasure of a festival like this is being able to browse what everyone else has brought and take some of it home. Being an exhibitor did not stop me from being a reader and a buyer too.

Looking back, KLZE gave me a chance to bring together parts of my creative life that usually happen quietly at home. The writing, drawing and making became something I could share across a table, and the poems became something I could read aloud.

Thank you to the organisers, everyone who stopped by, and those who supported my work. This post is late, but I still wanted to give that weekend a place here.

What the Dead Leave Behind

I finished Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory thinking about the characters and people in my life. Johnny Lim, Snow Soong, Peter Wormwood and Mamoru Kunichika had occupied far too much space in my head by the time I finished the novel. I was thinking about my family too. My parents, my grandparents and, eventually, my ancestors.

One idea keeps getting emphasised throughout the book: death erases all traces, all memories of lives that once existed, completely and forever. Different characters in the book express it in different ways. Jasper heard it from his father, Johnny. Johnny most probably heard it from his wife, Snow. Snow writes about it in her diary, and Peter repeats it in his own narrative.

I honestly think it is not that simple. I don’t think death erases everything. It leaves fragments: what we can see, hear or touch. Photographs, diaries, houses, objects, newspaper reports, rumours and memories. All these things survive long after someone is gone. The problem is that each object is just a fragment. It is not the same thing as a person.

The novel gives us three narrators trying to understand Johnny Lim through their unique perspectives. Jasper sees his father through his research, family history and resentment. Snow sees her husband from inside a disconnected marriage that neither of them seems capable of fully inhabiting. Peter remembers Johnny from the distance of old age, guilt, friendship and secrets. Each of them is convinced they know something important about him, but none of them knows him completely.

In an interview included at the back of my copy, Tash Aw explains that Jasper, Snow and Peter project their own insecurities and aspirations onto Johnny. In the end, no one truly knows who Johnny was. He simply becomes a construction made from other people’s memories of him.

That idea made me think about the people in my own life. How much do I really know my parents? I know them as my parents, but who were they before I existed? Who were they before they met each other? What were their fears, disappointments and ambitions when they were growing up? What about my grandparents and my ancestors? I will never know any of these things, but eventually I learned about my ancestors through family stories, oral history, genealogy and scattered historical accounts.

Recently, I followed a long discussion on Facebook concerning two of my ancestors, Panglima Nakhoda Budin “Gerasi” and the anti-colonial fighter, Aji Apai Limpa. The accusation was about the practice of taking heads during the era of ngayau (head hunting). The discussion became increasingly tangled, moving through questions of warfare, adat (customary law), historical context and how acts committed in another century should be understood today.

Much of the discussion itself did not interest me. After a while, it seemed to become disagreement for the sake of disagreement. But it led me to this question: how much can any of us really know about people who died generations before we were born?

We certainly can learn about them through oral traditions, family accounts and colonial records. We can also learn about the social structure and adat that shaped their world. We can distinguish between warfare and murder, between the norms of an earlier society and modern legal categories.

We must keep in mind that historical context and evidence are important before pronouncing any moral judgement. We don’t have the complete picture of the past, but that does not mean every interpretation is equally convincing.

At the same time, The Harmony Silk Factory reminded me how easily we construct people from fragments. As a direct descendant of Budin and Aji, I naturally want my ancestors to be honourable. But I also recognise that family pride can shape the way descendants interpret the past, just as assumptions, inherited stories and modern perspectives can shape other interpretations. A colonial official may interpret Iban warfare through assumptions formed somewhere in Great Britain. A modern reader may judge the actions of my ancestors entirely through twenty-first-century perspectives. Even the details of family stories can change depending on who tells them.

And I am not exempt from this. I have my own emotional investment in these people. They belong to my family history and I want to understand them fairly. Naturally, I feel offended when they are reduced to crude stories about violence or headhunting.

However, I don’t deny that family pride can also become a lens. Perhaps the best I can do is remain curious, keep asking questions, keep reading, keep learning from those who are qualified, understand the historical world in which these people lived and accept uncertainty where certainty no longer exists. And resist the temptation to put labels on complicated human beings.

I think that may be what affected me most about The Harmony Silk Factory. No character remains fixed once another person begins telling their story. In another person’s eyes, Johnny is a gangster, husband, father, businessman, survivor, traitor, protector and coward. Snow is a wife, daughter, lover, diarist, observer and intellectual. Peter has his own secrets. Mamoru writes a memoir that totally ignores his involvement with the Kempeitai and turns his experience in Malaya into something pleasant. Everyone constructs a version of the past they can live with.

And maybe we all do this too. We remember our parents according to how they treated us. We remember our ancestors through genealogies and stories that survived because someone considered them worth telling. But what about everything that disappeared? Who did they love? What frightened them? What did they regret? What things did they enjoy doing?

History often preserves the dramatic things like wars, migrations, marriages and conflicts. But a human life is mostly made from ordinary things. We inherit what survives and build a person from it because traces do remain. It’s melancholy and oddly beautiful too.

One day, the same thing will happen to us. Our children, descendants, friends may inherit photographs, social media posts, messages, objects we once touched and stories told by people who knew us. They will construct us from those fragments. They may get some things right or wrong. But we will no longer be around to correct them. That’s what The Harmony Silk Factory ultimately left me thinking about. We spend our lives trying to understand the dead from what they left behind while slowly becoming the fragments from which somebody else will one day try to understand us.

Painting an Iban Woman in Ngepan Indu Iban | Between Chaos and Colour

I have been working on this mixed media painting for the past ten days. It is of an Iban woman wearing a traditional costume called “ngepan indu Iban.” The piece has elements such as the sugu tinggi headpiece, the marik empang or tangu worn across the shoulders, the selampai crossing the chest, the tumpa on the arms, and the lampit around the waist. Instead of creating an accurate historical painting, I wanted to reinterpret these traditional elements in my visual language of doodle patterns, flowing lines, and brilliant colors.

At first, I thought this painting would simply take a few days. But after a while, it just became part of my routine. And life kept interfering in between coloring little sections and drawing patterns. My car broke down and I had to have it fixed at the mechanic’s. One of my molars chipped after I accidentally chewed on a tiny piece of chicken bone, so I had to go to an emergency dentist appointment. There was still housework, my son’s schoolwork, and the usual weariness that comes with adulthood. Some days I just worked on the painting for an hour or two. And there were other days when I sat with it late into the night, hours after everyone went to bed. Even so, I kept returning to it.

After a while, the painting stopped feeling like just an art project. It became an exercise in finishing something. I tend to jump around between ideas too fast and I find it hard to finish them. But this time I worked on one artwork for ten days straight until it was finished.

And I wanted the picture to be alive and not historical or “museumy.” Perhaps that’s why I tend to choose vivid, vibrant colors rather than subtle earth tones. I wanted the background to feel crowded and flowing behind her. Some designs were influenced by traditional themes and others were instinctual throughout the process itself.

There was one point during the painting process when I really feared I’d botched the whole thing. The patterns on the selampai were meant to be golden yellow, but I layered the wrong colors together and it turned into murky bronze. I tried to fix it with acrylic paint and regretted it instantly. I remember looking at it in utter frustration, totally convinced that I had messed up the painting after days of work. Finally, I walked away from it, let it dry, came back later, and repaired it painstakingly, layer by layer. Looking back, that mistake turned out to be part of the process. I thought those sections turned out great, but they weren’t the main lesson. The actual lesson was that I didn’t ditch the work halfway through.

The finished artwork was created using mixed media materials such as colored pencils, markers, acrylic paint, fine liners, and gel pen highlights. I mostly used non-archival materials, but I actually liked working with them instead of waiting for things to be perfect. In the end, the painting reflects the ten days it took to finish it: color, frustration, interruptions, patience, and finally getting it done.

Creating Ngayau | An Iban Headhunting Zine

A few weeks ago I started putting together the first physical prototype of Ngayau, a small zine that explores Iban headhunting through drawings and short notes. At first it was just pencil drawings scattered on my desk. These drawings were of warriors and handwritten notes of research I made regarding the subject. At some point these materials began to form a real booklet.

There’s satisfaction after seeing your own work in booklet form for the first time. A PDF on a screen may looks good but it feels temporary and obviously untouchable. But after the pages are printed and folded and cut and glued together, the work suddenly has weight. It becomes a tangible thing that you can put on a shelf, forget for years, and rediscover again.

I wanted Ngayau to feel simple and homemade. Not shiny or over-designed. The process itself was messier than I had thought. I adjusted margins repeatedly, reprinted pages after noticing tiny alignment issues, and spent hours arranging drawings beside explanatory texts. My desk gradually disappeared under graphite drawings, patterned layouts, failed prints, paper trimmings, and coffee mugs.

Some of the drawings were made years before the zine was even in my mind. Seeing them all at once hit me more than I thought, like pieces from different times of my life had finally met. What interests me most about this subject is not violence for the sake of spectacle. I am more fascinated by the worldview surrounding it, grieving rituals, spiritual beliefs, protection, courage, sorrow, memory, and the way Iban culture interpreted the interaction between the living and the unseen world.

Modern discussions about Iban headhunting often reduce it to a caricature. The Ibans of old are seen as savage, primitive, and brutal. But history is rarely simple. The more I explore and create, the more I see how much ritual, spirituality, and community importance were embedded in activities that outsiders typically dismiss as shock value. This zine is not an attempt to glorify the past. My goal is to see it as it is without dismissing it as barbaric, understand the reasons behind this practice, and finally pass the knowledge to others. I felt content when I had finished the prototype. It felt like coming home to something that was meant to be held and shared after sitting in my mind for months.

What is a Lemambang? The Iban Ritual Bard

The Iban lemambang is a ritual bard who recites long, sacred chants or invocations at ceremonies or rituals. These chants are the stories of ancestors, deities, and the unseen realm. They are preserved through memory and passed down from one generation to the next.

The role of a lemambang takes years to learn. Each verse must be remembered with care and precision. During a ritual, the lemambang guides the ceremony through these chants that become part of the process that bridges the seen and the unseen. In some cases, papan turai was used as a guide. They are wooden boards carved to help the lemambang remember the sequence of their chants. These papan turai are memory aids, reinforcing what has previously been taught and internalized.

I drew this while working on a zine about Iban headhunting and its cultural origins. As I moved from one page to the next, I realized the zine was also about those who passed the knowledge forward. One of those figures was the group of people known as the lemambang. I wanted to place him (who represents this group) among the pages to acknowledge their big contribution as the guardian of Iban culture and heritage.

This way of preserving knowledge is different from how we learn today. It depends on discipline, repetition, and memory rather than written records. It also depends on a faith and trust that what is handed down will be remembered and passed on accurately.

Today the number of lemambang is getting smaller. The number of people who are learning to become lemambang is dwindling, and much of this knowledge is at risk of being lost with time. What remains are fragments, memories, and the efforts of those who persist in holding on to them. Writing and illustrating this page is a small way for me to honor them.

Here’s a video of a group of lemambang chanting during Gawai Antu or Festival of the Dead.

The Tortoise Who Broke Its Shell | A Classic Iban Folktale

In the old days, it is said that the tortoise was not small like it is today. It was very large back then. If it stood up, it would be almost as tall as a person. It had a smooth, polished shell, unlike the patterned or segmented one we see now. The tortoise was also quite smart and could talk well, but it had one bad trait: it liked to make fun of and trick other animals. Because of this, its wicked nature often got it into problems.

At one time, a long drought struck the land. Plants in the forest dried out and could hardly grow. The animals struggled to find food because many trees had withered or died. The tortoise had the worst time since it moved so slowly. It got thinner, its stomach shrank, and its eyes got dull because it was so thirsty. It gave in to fate and thought its end was near since it was so weak. It crept slowly in search of water, using up the last of its strength while it waited for death.

The tortoise crawled for a long time before reaching a small river. It drank as much as it could because it was so thirsty, and then it fell asleep from being so tired. It looked like it was already dead since its body was motionless and its eyes were closed. A short time later, a flock of birds came to bathe in the river. The tortoise could still hear the commotion around it, even though it was feeble. It pretended to be dead. Unfortunately, at that moment, it had to fart. It attempted to hold it in to keep up the charade. But the longer it kept it, the more it wanted to let it out, and finally it did so with a loud bang.

The explosion stirred the river water and caused the tortoise to flip onto its back. The birds were startled. They turned and saw the tortoise on its back and assumed it had died.

“Oh, how pitiful. The tortoise is dead and didn’t get to fly with us high up into the sky to visit the King of the Sky,” the birds lamented, and the tortoise could hear them clearly.

The birds then prepared to leave. The tortoise quickly got up and decided to go with them to visit the King of the Sky. It opened its eyes wide, gathered all of its might, and crawled as swiftly as it could toward the group. When it reached them, it expressed its wish to follow them into the sky.

“We don’t know how to bring you along because you don’t have wings,” the birds said.

“Oh, it’s not that difficult,” said the tortoise. “Each of you can donate a feather so I can build wings and fly.”

“We refuse to give you our feathers because you are known as a liar. We do not want to be deceived by you,” one of the birds replied.

“Hah! All of you are stupid and narrow-minded,” the tortoise said. “There are many kinds of tortoises. There are deceitful tortoises, hard-shelled tortoises, spiny tortoises, hermit tortoises. In your eyes, what kind of tortoise am I? I am not a deceitful tortoise,” it continued.

The birds fell silent upon hearing its words. They looked at one another and discussed among themselves. In the end, each agreed to contribute one feather to build wings for the tortoise. Even the larger birds such as the peacock, hornbill, eagle, and rhinoceros hornbill agreed. When the wings were completed, they all flew to visit the King of the Sky.

After a long journey, they finally arrived in the realm of the King of the Sky. At that time, the King was hosting a grand gawai festival. The tortoise and the group of birds cleaned themselves in preparation to attend the feast. While they were getting ready, they could smell the rich aroma of delicious food.

Seeing this, the tortoise whispered to itself, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had anything good to eat. I thought I would starve to death during this drought. But I know I’ll live if I get to eat the food at the feast.”

Once they were ready, they lined up to enter the house of the King of the Sky. But before they went up, the tortoise announced, “According to local custom, before entering the house here, guests must change their names to new ones.”

The birds believed that the tortoise was knowledgeable because it had been to many places. They all agreed to change their names, including the tortoise. Various names were chosen. The tortoise announced right away, “My new name is… ‘All of You.’ From now until we return, all of you must call me by my new name: All of You.”

Then they all went into the house, with the tortoise in the lead. When they arrived, they were invited to sit in the ruai. The King of the Sky invited the tortoise to sit in the center, assuming it was the leader of the group. Once everyone was comfortable in their seats, all kinds of food were served. The King of the Sky delivered a speech before the guests started eating to say how happy he was to have visitors from far away. When he was done, he asked them to eat. But the tortoise spoke up before anyone could begin.

“Your Majesty, before anyone eats, since our group is quite large, who do you intend to give this food to?”

“Oh! This food is served for all of you,” replied the King of the Sky.

Hearing the words “all of you,” the tortoise turned to the birds.

“Did you all hear what the King said? Don’t say I have bad intentions,” said the tortoise. “I do want all of you to eat, but the King said this food is only for me because my new name is ‘All of You,'” it added.

The tortoise started to eat right away. It devoured the food greedily because it hadn’t had anything delicious to eat throughout the drought. The birds could only look on in shock as the tortoise enjoyed the feast. Only after it was completely full did it invite the birds to eat the leftovers. However, they refused because they were outraged that they had been lied to. The Eagle was the only one who was willing to eat the scraps, while the others would rather be hungry than humiliated. They were so angry that they ripped off all the feathers that made the tortoise’s wings and flew away, leaving the tortoise and the Eagle behind.

Seeing the birds abandon it, the tortoise panicked. It had lost all of its feathers, save for the Eagle’s. When the Eagle finished eating, it too flew away. Before it left, the tortoise begged the Eagle to alert its dear friend, the Mousedeer, to make a big soft bed for it to land on when it jumped from the sky.

When the Eagle landed, it delivered the message. The Mousedeer immediately called all the creatures in the forest when it heard it. They worked together to make a place to land. But sadly, instead of a mattress, they made a mound of stones because the Eagle delivered the wrong message.

Once everything was ready, the tortoise leapt from the sky. Without wings, it fell rapidly and crashed onto the pile of stones. The sound of the impact was deafening. Hearing it, the Mousedeer rushed over and found the tortoise’s shell shattered into pieces. The tortoise lay unconscious. The Mousedeer cried when it saw this, thinking that the tortoise was beyond help. After crying, it gathered the scattered pieces of shell and carried the tortoise home for treatment.

At home, the Mousedeer sought help from the Lizard Shaman to heal the tortoise. That evening, the shaman conducted a ritual in which he used his wisdom to put the fractured shell back together. But not all of the pieces could be found since they had broken too finely. It took a long time, but the shell was finally reassembled.

The rebuilt shell was a lot smaller than the original. The tortoise itself became smaller because of this. This is why tortoises are smaller now and not as big as they used to be. Their shells are no longer smooth as they once were. Instead, they are patterned and segmented, as if they were put together.

Note:

I translated and adapted this story into Malay (shared on Threads) and English (here on my blog), based on the Iban version originally shared by Gregory Nyanggau Mawar on the Iban Cultural Heritage website.