But the actual reality of being queer in Malaysia comes with an incredibly heavy price. Being a pengkid in my all-girls secondary school came with a whiff of illicit danger that could seem exciting and daring to teenagers within an extremely conservative heterosexual milieu, who were just becoming aware of their own sexuality, and who didn’t see boys of their own age on a daily basis. In a Malay-Muslim majority country like Malaysia, gender identity and sexuality are heavily policed and criminalised. The first thing the ghost said to Jess was:Ī pengkid refers to a “tomboy,” or a girl exhibiting what others perceive as a masculine appearance or masculine traits, and exists as a code for the word that no one wants to say: lesbian. Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister opens with two lines that are likely to strike a familiar sense of dread among Malaysians of a certain generation, especially those of us who went to secondary school in the 1990s:
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