1. Know Thyself

It’s important to be honest with yourself, my shrink says at the end of one of our sessions—even if you don’t want to tell me everything. I sense a note of frustration in her voice. In previous meetings we’ve mentioned the inscription on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, Know Thyself, which is, after all, why I’m here, talking about how my past has shaped who I am. It’s about understanding, she says, not judging. I make a weak joke—I’m Asian, I was brought up being judged. She doesn’t laugh, merely offers a tight smile before writing some notes.

At university I had met dozens of young British people who had spent a year travelling after finishing high school in order to find themselves, often in India and Thailand—places where they assumed they would find some sort of enlightenment, perhaps not in the universal Buddhist sense but in a more intimate manner; a pathway to connect with their true selves. They gravitate towards me to tell me about their experiences, assuming that, being Asian, I have some sort of inner clarity and innate understanding of spirituality. Like most people, especially in the Western world, they have come to believe that truth and knowledge of the self are inseparable; each is a necessary condition for the other to exist; and together, they produce the means for us to live harmoniously with others. But what if the opposite was true: that knowing who you are requires you to be deceitful, and that this very deceit is a prerequisite for living within your society?

I want to tell my shrink about a moment from my childhood that I remember clearly—not an especially remarkable incident, because there were numerous other occasions like it. I just happen to remember this one, but for some reason, I can’t find a way to bring up the subject.

We are on a bus, my mother and I, speaking about something banal—what we need to buy at the market, how to organise our day, that sort of thing. It’s one of those months when money is tight, my father is away trying to find work, and at home my mother is tense and uncommunicative, stretched thin by having to do the housework and raise the children on her own. This is not unusual, we have grown accustomed to periods like this, when a veil of stress settles silently over the household. My mother is troubled, and describing a list of things we need to buy, calculating how much each item will cost. She is speaking to me in Hokkien, our southern Chinese dialect, inherited from her parents and their parents before them. Maybe she is a bit more agitated than usual, because her voice is occasionally raised, and as sometimes happens in these situations, I become self-conscious, even slightly embarrassed. She asks me a question and I nod, preferring not to speak—because we are in a public space, where the national language is Malay, and we know that to speak in our language is to mark ourselves as different, and not just different, but dangerous. I am ten, twelve years old, I can’t remember exactly—but old enough, now, to realise what it means to be born in an immigrant family.