You talk like an ang mo.
      I am seven when I learn of my accent. A classmate from Sunday School – a girl with heavy, knowing eyes – obligingly informs me of that all-important fact. Soft fingernails scratch and pull, ripping grey masking tape off the church floor. It is dusk, and on the other side of Scripture-embossed windows the sky is an emulsion of day and night. The tiles are a bluish confusion, flecked with black and the marks of many feet. I say something (anything) and she replies:
      You really do have an accent.

*

      I was five when I learned to read. I still remember how we went through Peter and Jane readers; how “Pat looks on” stuck in my head like a dissonant sneeze; how the pages held pictures of blond children under an English sky. I remember reading out loud. Mine seemedthe only natural voice in the world.
      I remember hiding Peter and Jane’s marvellous life down the back of our sagging sofa, and my disappointment when that didn’t deter the lesson (my mother made me retrieve it). She read too, her voice embodying to me all that a voice should be. It had no obtrusive accent, either of sunrise or sunset, and the words became clouds in a tranquil sky.

*

      Oh my god, she talks like a white person.
      I am the newest addition to the zoo. I am on display here at my friend’s dining table, watching a small plastic ball roll past the grille. My friend makes no comment, or if she does, it doesn’t help. She’s not the one needling me this time: it’s a church friend of hers, a girl whose face is blurred smooth. The whole ride back (we had come from a captainball tourney) she burst out in periodic wonder at my accent. God has blessed her with fresh gossip (I met this girl – ya, Chinese girl – and she talked like an ang mo!) and she can’t believe her good fortune.
      I would like to blast that little plastic ball all the way to hell and back. After, of course, I have ripped this girl’s head off her shoulders and made her eat it. I am tired of her fascinated contempt and I want to prove I am Malaysian. I want to prove I am on the other side of the fence –I am not a white tiger. So I am stupid, and I watch that ball roll away and I say, hoping for something, hoping without knowing why, without thinking – sudah hilang. And I got something, didn’t I?

*

      My mother told me that when she reads she hears a voice in her head narrating. That made me listen to the voice in my head when I read: who is it? I have never been able to hold it long enough to dissect with forceps and scalpel and microscope. Once I am awareof listening, it simmers away and I hear my own voice instead. The two are not the same.
      The voice I’ve heard in the few seconds before I take over is characterized by the absence of sound. Perhaps it speaks silence – perhaps sound and silence are the same, and silence is an unknowable sound. Whatever it may be, the voice in my head is empty. It speaks calmly, measuredly, invoking the cool, powdered authority of an empire. But even when it accepts emotion, it remains separate. It embodies both, and none; it walks a perpetual border and is equal parts light and dark.

*

      Banana.
      Technically I’m not. Technically I’m human, a half-grown Homo sapiens. Technically bananas are fruit. Technically there’s no way I could be a banana. But technically doesn’t get you anything except high IQ and big brain and smart, which are all insults, in case you were wondering.
      In this world (a youth group lounge) banana means a Chinese person (or of Chinese descent, but such distinctions are void) who can’t speak Chinese but can speak English. Yellow outside, white inside. (No matter that we all bleed the same.) You can escape bananafication, of course. There are ways to be only partially shamed. You must be remorseful about your bananahood; you must be trying to turn your guts yellow. You must shove vowels into your throat, pronounce time like taing, let your jaw hang open at the end of sentences to punctuate them with a guttural ma, lift an exclamation with an obvious lah, pepper everything with a storm of ba and bo jio and cheh and wor. If you do this right, you’ll be only half-bananafied, and isn’t that lovely?
      I speak the way I spoke as a child, in perfect cold-accented sentences. I am a banana, a pet freak. My peel is tainted with great splashes of colour.
      How long before the banana rots?

*

      This voice is wholly accentless. I can’t hear it, and in thesacred emptiness I can’t hear the way tradition bends words. There is nothing to incriminate it. Every time I hush myself to hear this other self, my voice superimposes itself over the quiet. I hear myself reading out loud. I hear my accent.
      I’ve come to equate the way I speak with where I belong. The people I meet don’t sound like me. Their voices are filled (like mine) with traces of some place in the world. Often I don’t understand what they’re saying. It’s just sound, sound I hear but cannot listen to. I have to go slowly, carefully, reading the lines and the lines behind the lines. I am afraid to dip into the wells of transfigured sound. I do not want the colours of a thousand cultures to pour out of my mouth every time I open it.
      I know who I am – the insubstantial speaker conjuring worlds bursting into two-toned fireworks against a festival sky. I am the absence between sound; the hollow ring of a cup just washed; the afterimage of lightning; the infinite nothing of space. If I am not, I am, and I can never erase enough to exist. I will live on as hypothesis, and perhaps one day the experiments will finish.

*

      You really do have an accent.
      I say I don’t. She says I do. I can only express what words can hold, and the words deny themselves with their foreign sound. Outside the sky streaks, a violent painting composed of shadows and space. I am not afraid of day becoming night, or night becoming day. I only wish there was more time in between.