“What Are You?”: On Mixed-Race Identity and ‘The Buddhist Bug’

On the opening night of The Buddhist Bug in June 2019 at Wei-Ling Contemporary in Kuala Lumpur, I arrived late.

By seven thirty, the performance artist Anida Yoeu Ali was already in character. Her whole body was encased in a costume that made her look like the titular Buddhist Bug: long and segmented, with her own face at the Bug’s head, wrapped in saffron orange fabric. I took a step backwards as my brain tried to make sense of the spectacle.

She bowed and undulated, moved slowly from side to side. I stood at the entrance with the other latecomers, face to face with the artist’s resolute stare. Afraid to intrude. Finally, a gallery assistant beckoned us in and we entered, heads ducked the way you do when crossing in front of someone here in Malaysia. The Bug fixed us in her gaze, allowing us a slight smile.

Slowly, people ventured forward to interact with The Bug. Some kneeled across from her and matched her bowing and swaying. Others entwined themselves more intimately, nuzzling her face with theirs. Visitors navigated around and through The Bug’s body that extended into the gallery. The space reconfigured into a maze of loops and arches. Following the length of the body—one hundred meters long, I later learned—I found a pair of shifting human legs.

The artist was centering Otherness with this performance—celebrating it, challenging it. I’d been grappling with my own growing discomfort with Otherness, with questions about my identity. And that evening brought everything into a clearer, sharper point.

A month later, Anida Yoeu Ali’s The Buddhist Bug still hummed below the surface of my thoughts when I interviewed a different visual artist who I shall not name. As our time wound down, she, a Chinese Malaysian, asked, “Are you religious?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you mixed?”

Ah. This.

On paper, I am, like my father, Eurasian—a term for people descended from the Europeans who traded and fought with each other for our land. There is no space in official documents to register that my mother is Indian. I didn’t want to tell her any of this. A familiar bitterness was rising inside me. I simply told her, “Yes.”

“What passport do you have?”

My bitterness shifted into anger. “Malaysian,” I said.

Her eyes raked over me in suspicion. I was on assignment, so I kept my face friendly.

Are you mixed? is common. Sometimes it comes in the form of Are you Malaysian/local? Other times, Where are you from? At first, I took her question about my beliefs as anxiety on her part. Her faith was central to her art practice. Maybe she worried my article would be unsympathetic if I wasn’t religious like her. But her question felt different. More hostile. It was just another way to ask me: What are you?

I vowed to never write about her work again.

Even now, I keep returning to her question. Did you know, I’d like to tell her, a quarter of the world’s stolen or missing passports are Malaysian? In part because a Malaysian passport allows you visa-free travel to one-hundred-fifty countries. A friend once pointed out that our passports’ black market desirability may also have to do with the fact that many people can pass for Malaysian.

There is no one way to look Malaysian. We are a mix of dark, light, and in-between skin. There is no “Malaysian nose,” because high and low nose bridges abound. Though most of us are short. Our hair can be curly or kinky, wavy or pin-straight.

How could there be one way to look Malaysian? There are over sixty ethnic groups in Malaysia, reflecting centuries of trade, migration, and colonization. Some Malaysians can trace their family histories to China, India, or Sri Lanka. In Malaysian Borneo, we share land, maritime borders, and facial features to our neighbors in Indonesia and the Philippines.

My friend had a point. Depending on who you ask, it’s a sentiment that borders on naïve: Anyone can be Malaysian.

There is no one way to look Malaysian.

Yet, our idea of who is Malaysian keeps narrowing. To be Malaysian, an idea we inherited from our former British colonizers, is to be Malay, Chinese, or Indian. Just “the essentials.” The rest of the fifty-seven ethnic and sub-ethnic groups blur together in the box called Lain-lain, or Other.

Under this arrangement, the Orang Asal—meaning the original people—of the Peninsula and Malaysian Borneo are Lain-lain in their own country. To go unnamed in your own country is to have your voice ignored and way of life destroyed. It means the seizure of native customary land, higher poverty rates, and malnutrition.

In The Buddhist Bug: A Creation Mythology, there’s a resistance to this type of essentialization of identity. After the opening of the exhibition, I interviewed the creator Anida Yoeu Ali about its inception. Ali’s family fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1979. Her forced migration to the United States has left her feeling “trapped in the loss of identity.” Ali, like me, is a mixed-heritage Southeast Asian. Her roots extend to Malaysia, and she has faced similar probing questions. Questions that ask “what are you?”

“The question isn’t a realization that I am Cambodian,” she said. “It is a question of, ‘Oh, she really is Cambodian.’ And so here too, in the Malaysian context, the thing people ask is, how is it that you’re a Malaysian?”

Malaysia likes to use its multiculturalism as a selling point. For years, the song “Malaysia Truly Asia” played in airport lounges around the world, playing over a montage of scenery and traditional dances. Our tourism ads are one of the few spaces Orang Asal, usually from Malaysian Borneo, are acknowledged. But Ali’s work was the first time I saw someone mixed-race exploring the nowhere land in which this region’s mixed-race people find themselves.

The closest Malaysian popular culture gets to expressing this topic is in fraught stories about inter-racial romances. There’s Sepet, a famous indie film released in 2005. It’s about a Malay Muslim girl named Orked and her non-Muslim Chinese love interest Jason. There’s a lot of nostalgia for Sepet; people describe it as how Malaysians were or could be. An idyll of harmonious racial harmony, where tensions over our differences are eventually resolved, or a desire to resolve them exists.

It was the first time I saw the way Malaysians speak—code-switching between accents, languages, and dialects—represented in a movie, which adds to its allure as a possible reality. Yet, by the end of Sepet, Jason and Orked are separated by class and community tensions. A future with mixed-race children is foreclosed. Our racial imagination remains stunted.

In Ali’s work, I find an opening of imagination. Alongside Ali’s performance were photographs on either side of the gallery. Prior to this Kuala Lumpur exhibition, Ali spent five years in Phnom Penh, Cambodia—her first time in the country since her family left. There, she staged and documented performances of The Bug. In these photographs, Ali explores the double bind mixed people are faced with.

Mixed people possess both the ability to pass and to destabilize categorization. Over the years, I’ve been mistaken for many things I am not: Latina, Middle Eastern, Filipina. There is a privilege in this. People feel more open to me. There’s a possibility of welcome in my ambiguity. Yet, this same racial mutability also poses a threat. How can you identify a them if it can pass for an us?

In Ali’s work, I find an opening of imagination.

The Bug’s performance highlights its Otherness, while the photographs demonstrate its ability to pass. It is both capable of unsettling a scene with its overtly artificial body and simultaneously reflecting its surroundings. In “Spiral Alley,” every onlooker in the alley gawks at The Bug, yet its body also adapts to the curves of the spiral staircase that hosts its presence. In my favorite, “Reflection #1,” The Bug stands face to face with a bemused woman whose hijab mirrors The Bug’s own head covering. These elements of disruption and camouflage echo throughout the photographs. Sometimes, The Bug stands out amongst the deep greens and browns of rural scenes. In others, it reflects a vivid orange sky or a murky river.

Movement is also a key preoccupation of the work. The Bug is often depicted on the move on Cambodian cyclos and boats, or surrounded by the neon whirl of fairground rides. It journeys through Phnom Penh in the video installation at the gallery, The Buddhist Bug, Into the Night (2015). The frames are alternately sped up and slowed down, adding a frantic energy to the watchful creature’s journey. In the video, she observes young Cambodian women gyrate with older white men who throw their heads back in menacing laughter at a club called Heart of Darkness. In another scene, her body encircles motorbikes parked by late-night food stalls. Throughout, she moves through the city, always looking.

“I was trying to solve—in both this form and the execution of the complete series—this idea of connecting very distant points,” Ali said.

Here, duality comes into play again. The Bug’s segmented body was inspired by a child’s play tunnel Ali was gifted after the birth of her first child. The ability of the play tunnel to expand and contract and its portability—recalling the experience of refugees leaving with only what they can carry—appealed to her. The form’s beginning as a tunnel or conduit resonates. When walking through the installation, I was struck by The Bug’s ability to create space, the curves of its body functioning as a portal into a new world.

It’s one where you have the freedom to release your inhibitions and play with a giant bug. “It’s a witness to a kind of magic,” Ali said of the performance’s ability to coax people into its make-believe. It’s a sly invitation to participate in a conversation Ali wants to have: Why is The Bug Buddhist? Isn’t her head covering Muslim? Where is she going? Is she looking for something? If so, what?

These questions open up more interesting possibilities than the ones we reinforce when we ask “what are you?”

What am I? Human, I have wanted to say many times. Of the probing questions that mixed-race or racially ambiguous people face, Ali said, “[There’s] a little bit of that sort of dagger . . . and essentialization of certain identities.”

All over the world, our idea of who belongs within a border continues to shrink. In Malaysia, the race-based political party United Malays National Organization (UMNO) maintained power for sixty-one years in part by sowing the idea of ungrateful invading non-Malays. In 2018, the Malaysian population voted them out, largely because of unbridled corruption. However, a growing number of Malaysians are tired of the race-based parties that led Malaysia after the end of British colonial period in 1957.

In the newly-independent Malaysia, race-based parties were seen as the only way to represent each community’s interests. In the twenty-first century, racial representation has seemed less important than good governance. In 2018, our former Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is Malay, was alleged to have embezzled 700 million USD from 1MDB, a state investment fund, while he was in office. Though he was not alone. Corruption is not exclusive to any one race or ethnic group. What’s the point of racial representation when all it means is that someone who looks like you can steal from state coffers?

The 2018 election marked our first tentative steps towards ending race-based politics. The Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition, a name that translates to Alliance of Hope, included two non-race based parties, Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR, the People’s Justice Party) and the Democratic Action Party (DAP).

About two years later, this fragile hope of healing divisive racial politics has been shattered. In February 2020, eleven Members of Parliament from PKR defected to join forces with a faction of BERSATU, one of two race-based parties within PH. They, with support from UMNO and PAS—an Islamic party headed by a man who once said Muslims would go to hell if they voted for non-Muslims—formed Perikatan Nasional, or National Alliance, an ethnonationalist-Islamist alliance.

If the word “pendatang” had been used with alarming frequency to describe Chinese and Indian Malaysians before, it has only gotten worse since Perikatan Nasional formed. You can translate “pendatang” into “immigrant” or “migrant,” but its origin—the verb “datang,” which means “arrival”—carries ugly connotations. It implies incursion. More akin to the word “settler.” Now, Malay supremacists feel emboldened to say loudly: “Malaysia belongs to the Malays.”

How many centuries more do you have to live in a place before the line between them and us dissolves? How many wars do you have to fight and survive, how many acts of kindness to someone of a different race, before you can be an us? That’s what many people in Malaysia are asking, as they list the sacrifices and contributions of their ancestors on Twitter and Facebook.

I refuse. I will not beg to live in my own country.

I will not beg to live in my own country.

As Southeast Asians, we are witness to an ongoing genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar. The Myanmar state refuses to even say “Rohingya.” Instead, the term “Bengali” is used, an allusion to the migration of Muslims from colonial India to Myanmar—then Burma during British rule. Settler, not citizen. From there, not here.

The first stage of genocide is classification. Genocide Watch notes that states with classifications that create an “us vs. them” dynamic, and notably, one without mixed categories is “most likely to have genocide.” No matter someone’s protestations that they bear no malice when they ask “what are you?”, I understand that we are entering dangerous territory. When someone asks me this question, I see myself from their perspective: Lain-lain, Other. Not human.

The question feels more pointed now. What are you? Are you one of us or one of them? I fear I have no satisfactory answer.

For Ali, The Buddhist Bug is “a kind of embracing of an otherness, a strangeness even,” that mixed people are viewed with. “I’m sure you’ve experienced it,” she said. At that moment, I felt a prick of tears. She said, “Maybe we’re just limited through language that we can’t really ask in any other way that feels more generous.”

I felt seen at that moment in a way I rarely am. Part of an ‘us’ unmoored from any border. Perhaps I should be content with that.

Yet, I hope, even now as the chorus to go back to some imagined country of origin rings louder, that a different country is possible. That we might be more generous in imagining who belongs here. That people might start to ask different questions of each other instead of what are you?

Perhaps: How are you? What do you love? What are your dreams? Do you need anything? How can we help?

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