may 13

So many people are posting about May 13, this being the 41st anniversary, and with the exception of Jha and Tariq it's all very 'why can't we come together now?' sort of things. It's really odd language for me, particularly because I don't know what my mum was doing at the time, I don't know if any of my family were caught up in it. I do know how they feel, sort of, (penang was going to secede, you know, mostly sums up how they talk about any of this stuff) but I don't really know. Not really.

I'm not going to post about this, because today I just don't feel like I can. But Jha has organised a May 13 Blogswarm. You should head over and read - there's some good stuff there.

And also, this is a link I got from E a long time ago: Creating identity at the fringe

One particular sentence from the movie struck me to the core of my very being: a young Chinese man living in Malaysia tells a young Malay woman living in Malaysia "I wonder if sometimes people like you understand how hard it is for the rest of us. It's like loving someone who doesn't love you back." The irony was that after all these years of my ambivalent feelings about being Malaysian - it took a Malay woman filmmaker to articulate succinctly exactly how many of us feel about being Malaysian.

This is sometimes how I feel, and this is always what I think on this day, anniversary of this thing that happened years before I was born.