Where The Mirrors Are

“There are not too few books for marginalised young people… Good literature expands your mind. It doesn’t have the ‘job’ of being a mirror.” — Meg Rosoff

I used to have several small cousins back in Malaysia (now they’re several slightly less small cousins in Singapore). Almost every school holiday, I’d take a trip up north to pay my relatives a visit; we’d end up going to their place for dinner at least once, because my Auntie J is a damned good cook. Every meal we had there would have pasta in it; Auntie J spent several years in New York, and grew to love Western food. She’d make aglio olio, or penne with thick, creamy cheese, and serve it up in large trays which we’d all dig into, catenary strands of cheese linking our plates. Afterwards, while the grown-ups watched sports on the TV, us kids would traipse upstairs to watch one of the DVDs Auntie J had around the house.

My little cousins absolutely loved Star Wars. Not the good ones either; their favourite episode was Episode I, because someone got cut in half at the end. They’d squish themselves into a ball on the edge of the couch when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gonn Jinn started battling Darth Maul, and leap off in joy when Obi-Wan, overcoming the death of his master, bisected his enemy with a stroke of his lightsaber. Two of my cousin brothers would always re-enact that scene later, with whatever they had to hand, pretending to be either the heroic Jedi who saved the day or the evil, red-skinned Sith who was defeated at the end.

I, myself, was a major fan of Star Wars, but unlike my cousins I never pretended to be someone already on screen. My characters were either from entirely made-up scenarios, or else extras in the pivotal scenes of the movies. I never felt comfortable playing a character that already existed, because unlike my cousins I somehow realised that no matter how much I wanted to, I could never be like them. It wasn’t just Star Wars, either; I inserted myself into places I could not find myself. I sketched an entire Harry Potter character out in my head, an “exchange student” who used a slightly different kind of magic from the rest of Hogwarts. I took the roles of villains in Static Shock and the Justice League animated series, two favourites of mine. I imagined myself as a new James Bond, reincarnated into a white man’s body to serve the Queen of England.

I’ve already written about wanting to be white. I’m well-versed in that. It wasn’t until 2013 when I started thinking about, well, being non-white. I remember I was at a library with a friend. We were reading old comics and bumming around the National Library when a staff member announced that a bunch of speculative fiction writers would be holding a panel of some sort. I was like “Hey, let’s go,” and we ended up in a room with several ethnically Asian writers, including the Hugo Award-winning Chinese-American writer Ken Liu and Singaporean speculative fiction writer June Yang. I listened to them speak; I think it was Ken who mentioned the issue of culture in writing, and the challenges of writing from outside the mainstream, white experience in the USA. It struck a kind of chord in me, whitewashed as I was back then; till that point, my only response to the overwhelming whiteness of the English-language markets for fiction had been to adopt the pen name “Robert [surname]”, to be more saleable. The local markets for popular English fiction were crowded with both white Westerners and Singaporeans who had English names, and I assumed I would have to fit in. At the end of it all, I asked Ken a question, “Wouldn’t it be easier to sell fiction if you made your characters white?”

I recall he said he didn’t see the point. I guess I was lucky I received the nice response I did; it’s an incredibly naive question. I guess back then I’d just given up on seeing myself in the mirrors of books, television and film; there might occasionally be people like me, but I used to understand it wasn’t the norm.

That sucks.

I refuse to understand this. I absolutely refuse to understand the idea that we don’t deserve mirrors because fuck yeah, we do. The thing about us is that we, all of us, have reflections. There are as many different reflections as there are people, and in what version of the world is someone not entitled to their own face (or something close to it)?

So I say books are mirrors, televisions are mirrors and the big screens are mirrors. These are the mirrors we have. These are the stories we put ourselves into, the heroes (or villains) we love and dream about being in our spare time, but the hard truth is, some of these mirrors aren’t really meant for us. And that sucks.

I eventually got out of that phase, just so you know. I started reading and writing more diversely. I’ve got a short story coming out in Rosarium Publishing’s anthology, The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia. It’s cool, it’s brutal and it’s been reviewed by Publishers Weekly as one of the anthology’s “three central pieces”, possibly “worth considering for any year’s best anthology.” It’s also about a young, disabled Singaporean schoolgirl, who runs a spider-fighting ring for extra pocket money.

Perhaps it would be better if we could all have stories like this. Perhaps it would be better if we could all see ourselves, or people like us, in the mirror.

Robert Liow is a Chinese-Malaysian writer from Singapore, currently living in London.