Got this Bahasa Melayu translation (published by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka) of “Water Margin” for RM30 at the recent PBAKL.

That title’s, quite literally: “Tale of The Water’s Edge”.

It paints a Song China full of mountain bandits and roadside inns and martial-arts masters kneeling to each other. I am slowly making my way through it, because its classical style is leisurely and prone to poetic asides. Also it’s in BM, which I don’t read as quickly as I do English.

+

This BM translation is probably the only way I’ll read “Water Margin”.

For most of my childhood, I wanted to be white. I was annoyingly Sinophobic, and refused to learn Chinese. This antagonism was reciprocated. Because You Are Chinese, How Can You Not Speak Chinese? (Race Traitor.)

On one hand: Chinese ethno-superiority. On the other: Anglophone class privilege.

So it’s fraught. I can’t read “Water Margin” in Mandarin, because I don’t know the language. Reading an English translation feels bad and wrong.

BM is not a comfortable option, either -- and the position of Malayness presents its own frictions, vis a vis whiteness and Chineseness -- but it offers me a back door, a way in.

+

Inexpertly translated, from the BM:

' Lu Zhishen stared at them both, and asked: “You miscreants! Are your heads as hard as this pine tree?”

You won't get my money then.

I have a love-hate relationship with my Chineseness.

On the one hand, already many generations having lived diasporically from China, I still maintain a sense of the pull in terms of an awareness of the gravitational field that is Communist China's behemoth global imperial presence. It is a pull that I find myself often resenting, because of the somewhat triggering experience of being with people who are culturally from Mainland China... Their personalities significantly conditioned by an aggressive and sometimes violent authoritarianism, at the same time so many being the almost slave manufacturing labour force for global capitalism... these bring back an ancestral memory of having once left or fled precisely those sorts of experiences of life and pain.

Yet, of course, that is as much an "ancestral story" as it is also a telling of my own story... having left Malaysia for Singapore, and then the USA, because of my own experiences of stifling political/national cultures.

Yet it is not that the USA was ultimately my salvation either (unsustainable though the pleasure of participating in Empire was for the while that I could taste its sweetest, ripest, psychedelic fruit...). 

I moved to Australia, and find still: The Will to Move is a will that may be, in significant part, independent of the actual “worthiness” of the conditions that precipitate or condition this will.