Ethnic Entanglements in Southeast Asian SFF
For years now, I’ve been a passionate champion for Southeast Asian speculative fiction—just check out my Strange Horizons essay, “A Spicepunk Manifesto”,[1] in which I praise its creation as a decolonial act. At the same time, I’ve struggled with an imbalance at the heart of this genre, obvious to insiders but otherwise almost invisible.
Simply put, the best-known authors of Southeast Asian SFF aren’t racially representative of the region. We’re ethnically Chinese. I’m talking about celebrated names like Zen Cho and Cassandra Khaw from Malaysia; Pim Wangtechawat and SP Somtow from Thailand; Jes and Cin Wibowo from Indonesia; Isabel Yap and Rin Chupeco from the Philippines; Neon Yang and Wen-yi Lee from Singapore; the editors of the landmark anthology The SEA Is Ours, Joyce Chng and Jaymee Goh—and myself, I guess, though I’m not that big on the celebrity scale. We’re members of a diasporic community, constituting less than 5% of the 700 million-strong population of Southeast Asia,[2] but serving disproportionately as its cultural ambassadors.
One could argue that this isn’t that big of a deal. Southeast Asians constitute a tenth of the world’s population, just under the headcount of all of Europe. We’re desperately underrepresented on the world stage—isn’t it more important for some of us to be in the limelight than to quibble about whom?
Still, it’s a little problematic when a Western reader picks up a copy of, say, The Night Tiger by Chinese Malaysian author Yangsze Choo, and assumes she has deep insider knowledge of the harimau jadian, the weretiger of indigenous Malay legend. Sure, she isn’t utterly disconnected from this heritage, but the dynamic’s comparable to a white South African’s relationship to Zulu culture or a pākehā New Zealander’s with Māori Maori culture.
So, who gets to speak for Southeast Asia? Given our current state of representation, how do we speak about it? And if we agree this isn’t ideal, what the hell do we do?
***
First off, let’s address the whataboutisms. There are non-Chinese Southeast Asians who’ve made it big in Western publishing. Aliette de Bodard and Nghi Vo draw on their Kinh Vietnamese heritage in their Xuya and Singing Hills series;[3] Thea Guanzon does likewise as a Visayan from the Philippines with her Hurricane Wars series, and Hanna Alkaf as a Malay Malaysian with her middle-grade novels. Beyond genre SFF, there’s also magical realists like Eka Kurniawan and Intan Paramaditha, both Javanese from Indonesia, plus Prabda Yoon and Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Thai from Thailand, all making their marks on global literary fiction.
Furthermore, there’s plenty more ethnic diversity in national and regional publishing. According to Philippine authors Dean Francis Alfar, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo Jr. and Charles Tan, there’s no significant pattern of Chinese dominance in their domestic SFF scene.[4] Even in my home country of Singapore—the only Chinese-majority nation in the region, where the term “Chinese privilege” is used as an analogue to white privilege[5]—there’s been an explosion of Malay SFF writers since the 2010s, with folks like Nuraliah Norasid and Farihan Bahron winning recognition and awards for writing in both English and Malay. In his afterword to the anthology Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore, editor Nazry Bahrawi describes “a sustained collective venture among authors of Malay descent in Singapore to experiment with the form productively…. a loose non-organised aliran (movement).”[6] However, he too points out the Chinese Singaporean dominance of the international scene, positioning the collection as a response to the question, “Where are the Malays?”[7]
Second, I think I’d better clarify how the Chinese stand in the complex racial dynamics of Southeast Asia. We’re not foreigners: we’re as authentically representative of our region as Black Americans or Indian Trinidadians are of their own nations, and even appear as characters in early indigenous epic literature like Sulalatus Salatin and Serat Centhini. Nor are we the descendants of colonists (unless you want to quibble about the case of Vietnam six hundred years ago). Our ancestors came largely as blue-collar workers and merchants from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, and many were active in the nationalist struggles against European colonialism.
After independence, however, Chinese Southeast Asians became scapegoats of xenophobic movements—witness the anti-Chinese massacres in Malaysia in 1969 and in Indonesia in 1965 and 1998; also the mass expulsions from Vietnam in the 1970s and 80s. Consequently, there’s a culture of insecurity and vigilance that’s emerged, even in my home country of Singapore.[8] We’ve developed a mania for capital accumulation, higher education, the fostering of ties with other members of the Chinese diaspora, all so we can be protected or emigrate in case of violence. We’ve toxically embraced the racist moniker, “Jews of the Orient”, coined for us by Vajiravudh, King of Siam.[9]
At the same time, many have also chosen the route of assimilation. In the Philippines and Thailand, the Chinese have intermarried and blended their cultures so much with native populations that it’s often hard to distinguish who’s whom. In Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, descendants of earlier waves of Chinese immigration have distinguished themselves as Peranakans, celebrating their syncretized culture as evidence of their national belonging. A few of us have even proven their loyalty by becoming prominent scholars of local history, such as Hsu Yun Tsiao of Singapore, Ong Hok Kam of Indonesia, Khoo Kay Kim of Malaysia.
All this means the Chinese of Southeast Asia are disproportionately wealthy, educated, proficient in English, knowledgeable about heritage and connected to global communities. These are privileges that arose out of trauma, and they’re by no means consistent throughout the community. But they’re privileges nonetheless, and they’ve translated handily into advantages in global SFF publishing.
Third—and yes, I’m still trying to impose numerical order on this section of my essay—the marginalization of non-Chinese voices leads to some thorny questions about how and what we write. Crucially, how do issues of cultural appropriation weigh against cultural representation?
The “stay in your lane” approach to avoiding appropriation doesn’t work so well in the current Southeast Asian SFF scene. Sure, it can yield great books like Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride and Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, both of which are specifically based on the histories and customs of the Chinese Malaysian community. Yet it also invites a withdrawal from regional representation. Sue Lynn Tan’s Daughter of the Moon Goddess and Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun are set in fantastical versions of imperial China, and they’re wonderful works—but it’s only from the back matter that one may learn the authors are of Chinese Malaysian descent.
Chinese Southeast Asians do not need to confine ourselves to telling ghetto-ised stories. We are, as I said, authentic citizens within our own nations, and have a right to draw on our common cultural touchstones. Consider the case of the pontianak: an iconic vampiress of Malay horror. Despite her origins in indigenous folklore, she’s part of a shared cosmopolitan tradition of storytelling: her first cinematic appearances, in films like Pontianak (1957) and Anak Pontianak (1958), were made respectively by Indian director BN Rao and Filipino director Ramon Estella, under Chinese production houses Cathay and Shaw Brothers. Today she’s still believed in and feared by diverse communities across Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Indonesia.
This is why it was relatively uncontroversial for Zen Cho to write “The House of the Aunts”, featuring a family of ethnically Chinese pontianaks. Notably, she pays homage to the Malay lore of the pontianak in her story—that they’re created when women die during pregnancy; that they can be tamed with a nail in the back of their necks—and she features a major Malay character in the story, Ridzual, her protagonist’s love interest. She’s able to provide her own perspective on the pontianak legend without erasing Malayness.
Compare this to Yangsze Choo’s aforementioned novel, The Night Tiger. My quarrel with it isn’t that it draws on Malay legends of the weretiger, but that it does so without any Malay major characters—a phenomenon I’ve snarkily called yellow-washing: an analogue of whitewashing, when our multiethnic societies are portrayed as completely, or almost completely, Chinese.[10] By foregrounding Chinese and white characters’ perspectives with global readers, the author’s rendering the Malay population—the source culture for her legend, and the majority race of Malaysia—almost invisible.
Fortunately, Southeast Asian SFF authors tend to affirm rather than erase our region's ethnic diversity.[11] Jes and Cin Wibowo’s Lunar Boy features a cast of mostly dark-skinned characters of indigenous Indonesian heritage, with the love interest Noah as its only prominent Chinese Indonesian character. Neon Yang’s Tensorate series, though full of Chinese and Japanese-coded cultural elements, features the Indian-coded rebel Thennjay and the Malay-coded investigator Sariman. Non-Chinese authors do this too: Hanna Alkaf’s The Girl and the Ghost pairs the Malay schoolgirl protagonist Suraya with a Chinese best friend, Jing Wei.
Does this spirit of anti-racism in storytelling correlate with a desire for a more racially varied slate of writers? My belief is that it does. Harking back to the anthology The SEA Is Ours: despite the fact that both editors Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng were of Chinese descent, nine of the twelve chosen contributors were non-Chinese, including Filipina Kate Osias, Indonesian Ivanna Mendels and—making their début—Vietnamese-American Nghi Vo. It’s part of why we choose to call ourselves Southeast Asian writers, rather than splitting ourselves into national or ethnic sub-groups. We’re bound together by a belief in that diversity is strength.
So there’s already will for change, even among the most privileged of us.
How do we actually make it happen?
***
Let’s say you’re a literary agent, a publisher, an editor or a festival organiser. You’re in an unusual position of power. Beyond simply platforming BIPOC authors, you can make a conscious decision to include non-Chinese Southeast Asian writers—folks like Anselma Prihandita from Indonesia, Kathrina Mohd Daud from Brunei, Vida Cruz and Joel Donato Ching Jacob from the Philippines, Tunku Halim and Golda Mowe from Malaysia, Suffian Hakim and Manish Melwani from Singapore, not to mention writers from the wider diaspora like Hoa Pham from Australia and Salinee Goldberg from the USA. (It’s genuinely strange that Filipinos constitute the largest Southeast Asian diasporic community in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, yet number so few in globally published SFF.)
If you’re a non-Chinese Southeast Asian SFF writer yourself, there’s a good chance you know the struggle better than I do, and that any advice I clumsily dispense will be patronising and/or misguided. What I will say is that it’s incredibly valuable to be part of an international SFF community, whether it’s through writing courses, convention meet-ups, or just making lots of friends on social media; that although querying for agents is hell, there’s loads of journals out there that are genuinely interested in representing diverse authors, like Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, khōréō and more; also that Western readers may, unfortunately, want quite different things from the readers within your own nation (there is, alas, considerable overlap between self-representation and exotica); and that if institutions won’t work for you, you can often start them yourselves: your own writing group, your own anthology, your own journal. And yeah, I know I’m part of the problem too. I’m willing to listen to hear how I can do better.
And if you’re a Chinese Southeast Asian writer, as I am… well, I understand if you’ve mixed feelings about this essay. In an ideal world, advocating for more opportunities for others wouldn’t mean fewer opportunities for ourselves, but I’ve a horrible premonition some agent or editor will misinterpret my message and blithely decide to boycott our writing. It’s bollocks, and runs counter to my mission of getting more recognition for all of Southeast Asian SFF. Still, it’s a risk I’m willing to take. Our missing voices need to be acknowledged. Plus, I’m plain tired of us being misunderstood as just a slightly spicier variant of China.
So I’m asking us to be a little more conscious about inclusivity and exclusivity. If we want to form communities based on our Chinese diasporic identity,[12] that’s cool, but we can be transparent about that—a fine example would be Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology, edited by Charles Tan and featuring authors such as Isabel Yap, Paolo Chikiamco and Rin Chupeco. If we’re thinking in terms of Southeast Asia, however, or any one of the multiethnic nations within, we need to consider who’s being left out of the conversation and how it’s possible to respectfully bring them in, by befriending them, reading them, promoting them, just as we’d do for any of our respected peers.
If you’ve the will and the talent, you might even want to try translation. One big reason why more Southeast Asian authors haven’t broken into global publishing is that many of us are writing in local languages; many of us are fluent enough to be a bridge between them and the Anglophone world. Chinese Indonesian author Tiffany Tsao, once known for her Oddfits SFF series, now devotes much of her time to translating Indonesian language works by her countryfolk, such as Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, who uses occasional speculative elements to shine a light on his life as a queer man from the Batak minority. I’ve made a stab at this myself, with an extremely amateur translation of Singaporean Malay language author Hassan Hasaa’ree Ali’s “Schizosinga”.[13] Yet there’s also a danger here of taking opportunities away from non-Chinese translators, similar to global debates over white translators and translators of colour.[14] As it turns out, there aren’t easy ethical workarounds for privilege.
There’s a line I wrote in “A Spicepunk Manifesto”, arguing that part of the “punk” of this regional movement should be “to ensure that if Southeast Asian authors are to prosper, then we must prosper together.” It’s a utopian ideal, and it extends to so many more topics than race—eventually we’ve gotta address inequities of class, gender, nationality, religion, disability status, immigration status and more.
But as a Chinese Singaporean in the scene, race feels like as good a place as any to start. I want to hear more stories by Southeast Asians who don’t look the same as myself or my biological family. And I want the whole damn world to hear these stories too.
Great thanks to Daryl Qilin Yam, Nazry Bahrawi, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo Jr., Dean Francis Alfar and Charles Tan for their insights and advice on this essay.
Ng Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean writer, researcher and activist with a keen interest in Southeast Asian history, literature and myth. He is the author of the SFF collection Lion City and formerly co-organised IndigNation: Singapore’s Pride Season and the Southeast Asian Queer Cultural Festival. His website is ngyisheng.com.
Notes
[1] Ng Yi-Sheng, “A Spicepunk Manifesto: Towards a Critical Movement of Southeast Asian Heritage-Based SFF.” Strange Horizons.29 August 2022. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/a-spicepunk-manifesto-towards-a-critical-movement-of-southeast-asian-heritage-based-sff/
[2] It’s tricky to get clear numbers, but Leo Suryadinata calculates 26.872 million Chinese Southeast Asians using statistics from 2010 and earlier. Divided by a total Southeast Asian population in 2010 of 593 million, that puts our percentage around 4.53%. Leo Suryadinata, “A Rising China Affects Ethnic Identities in Southeast Asia.” ISEAS Perspective: Issue 2021, No. 74.
[3] Kinh writers like De Bodard and Vo may still be said to reap the benefits of light-skinned privilege, but I fear I don’t have the cultural knowledge to properly discuss this topic.
[4] Tan clarifies that many Philippine writers are of partial Chinese descent but are not raised with Chinese culture, and also notes the tendency of those raised with Chinese culture to be beneficiaries of class and wealth privilege. Significantly, he states, “there aren't a lot of Philippine science fiction and fantasy that deal with specific Filipino-Chinese concerns.” Email correspondence, 29 October 2024.
[5] For more on Chinese privilege in Singapore, see “Chinese Privilege, Gender and Intersectionality in Singapore: A Conversation between Adeline Koh and Sangeetha Thanapal.” Boundary 2. 4 March 2015. https://www.boundary2.org/2015/03/chinese-privilege-gender-and-intersectionality-in-singapore-a-conversation-between-adeline-koh-and-sangeetha-thanapal/
[6] Nazry Bahrawi. “Malays Speculating Futures.” Singa Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore. Ed. Nazry Bahrawi. Ethos Books: 2021. P184.
[7] Bahrawi. p. 175.
[8] This is true even in Singapore, where paranoia persists about being a Chinese-majority nation surrounded by mostly Malay Muslim neighbours. Furthermore, there’ve been patterns of discrimination within the Chinese community: the government has historically been dominated by Anglophone Chinese who’ve disenfranchised Sinophone political and intellectual movements. See Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli. The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Pasts. NUS Press, 2008.
[9] I’ve been unable to access a copy of the infamous essay myself, which was published in 1914 in both English and Thai. However, it’s cited in numerous texts, e.g. Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.Verso, 2006. P. 100.
[10] In a Singaporean context, the most prominent example of yellow-washing in genre fiction is in the field of romance rather than SFF. Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians and its film adaptation portray Singapore as an almost wholly Chinese country, where the most prominent non-Chinese characters of Asian descent are servants and South Asian security guards. See Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Lily Kuo. “Where are the brown people? Crazy Rich Asians draws tepid response in Singapore.” The Guardian. 21 August 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/21/where-are-the-brown-people-crazy-rich-asians-draws-tepid-response-in-singapore
[11] Readers may notice I haven’t accused Chinese Southeast Asians of racism. It’s definitely true that racism and colourism exists in the community, especially in Singapore, where Chinese like myself are the majority. But in the rest of Southeast Asia, the minority status of the Chinese, and the high variation in the degree of their cultural assimilation, makes the issue more complicated, since it doesn’t overlap clearly with hegemonic state power.
[12] There are in fact academics specifically studying the literature of Chinese Southeast Asians, much of it on the SFF spectrum. See Brian Bernards. Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature. NUS Press, 2016.
[13] Hassan Hasaa’ree Ali, “Schizosinga”. Singapore Unbound. November 3, 2023. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2023/11/3/schizosinga
[14] See Alex Marshall. “Amanda Gorman’s Poetry United Critics. It’s Dividing Translators.”The New York Times.26 March, 2021.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/books/amanda-gorman-hill-we-climb-translation.html