May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPI). To mark the occasion, we're excited to introduce you to some members of the Biblio Lotus Team! This blog post is by Sydney G., Joel D. Valdez Main Library.
I’m writing a picture book to teach the numbers 1 to 10 in Iban, an Indigenous language of Malaysia. One of my heritage languages, when I’m comfortable enough to claim it. My latest draft starts like this:
I’m going to the market today. Can you help me fill a basket?
The basket gets filled with fruits and veggies: one durian, two bundles of ferns, three bitter melons, six sour eggplants, seven little bananas about half the size of the ones you find in stores here. I don’t even like half the things on my list, but I pretend like I do, because these are the foods that get sold in the open-air market, the ones my cousins cook for whoever walks through the front doors of their houses, ingredients my mom still uses if she can find them here at Lee Lee's and the Grant-Stone. They are lauk, things that go with rice, because rice is so important that it’s not even mentioned as part of a meal; you just know it’ll be there. I don’t really like rice. I joke that I’m a bad Asian because of that. It’s easier than saying it’s because I can barely string together a sentence in my mom’s language, because I don’t know how to be Iban or really why I should even want to, given that I'm effectively a white American happy to live in Arizona forever. I sometimes say that too, but it makes me cry.
I’ll save my childhood identity pains for a future memoir. Here, I want to share why I’m writing a book about counting. It’s because of a picture book I found in my first month of work at the Main library, Mommy Sayang by Rosana Sullivan. I was grabbing random books for display and flipped through this one because the cover looked interesting. Something seemed strangely familiar about the whole thing - spiraling floral patterns in the background, the drape of the mom's skirt, the title - and then I saw the word kampung and realized it was set in Malaysia.
Malaysia! I'd never read a picture book about Malaysia before. I didn't know they existed. Those floral patterns were the ones I've seen my mom wearing my whole life, on the kain she now uses to carry around my baby girl. I burst into tears. I cried again on camera at a training about Bilingual Storytime given by the lovely Xelena González, dreaming of the day I could read a book in English and Iban. My colleague Hassael C. gave me a box of tissues. (Thanks, Hassa!) The family in Sullivan’s story is Malay, not Iban, but that didn't matter. I felt so seen.
Working in the Children's section, I soon found more beautiful books:
- Sumo Colors by Sanae Ishida
- The Baby Learns series by Beverly Blacksheep (Diné)
- A is for Anemone: A First West Coast Alphabet by Lucky Budd and Roy Henry Vickers (Tsimshian, Haida and Heiltsuk)
Little by little, I realized that there was no reason that the perishingly short list of Iban picture books - I didn't find one until my last visit to Kuching in 2023, Nama Berita? by Natasha Binya Nanta – couldn’t be longer. I could write what I wanted to read. I want to share my very own Iban books with my daughter, so that she knows she comes from a proud line of farmers and headhunters, and I want kids in the rural longhouses to have more books in their own language, but first and foremost, I want these for myself. Maybe they'll ease the ache in my heart, maybe they won't. But I can write them anyway.
My personal basket is full of unappetizing things. There's guilt and shame for not growing up speaking Iban when that was largely outside of my control. For one thing, Malaysia was a British colony, so my mom has always spoken fluent English. Sticking out like a sore white thumb in Malaysia, unable to follow my family’s lively conversations, too unsure of myself to protest “I’m Iban!” when, twenty years ago, a woman in the market saw me and exclaimed “Orang putih!” (A white person!) Awkwardly insisting on my invisible Southeast Asianness in America to prove that I’m not 100% white, when my brother got heavily bullied for being more visibly mixed. Numbness when I learn about another tradition that I didn’t grow up with, so it doesn’t mean anything to me (although maybe opening all the drawers and windows really would have made giving birth easier for me!). Still thinking to this day that if only I was multilingual, I would know who I am.
There's plenty of delicious things too. Relief when I asked if I could wear a sugu tinggi, a silver flower crown, with my western-style wedding dress and my mom said, "Of course. It’s a mixed European and Asian style. You're mixed." Pride when I wove a prickly pear design - I do so love the Sonoran Desert - using the techniques that my ini, my mom's mom, used to use. Excitement at the thought of sharing stories about Malaysia with my baby girl. Gratitude to the library, for giving me a space to keep exploring my identity, which I don't think I'll ever finish doing.
But the book will be done soon. One day, I hope my daughter will read it aloud with me, in Iban.
Saharitu, aku ngagai makit. Ulih nuan nulung aku ngisi bakul?
Maybe I won’t stumble over the words so much by then, or maybe I still will. That won’t matter. Near the end of the book, the basket is full of colorful jungle foods – bakul tu udah penuh. It’s also full of love.
Take a look at this Malay-language Youtube Documentary about the Iban weaving and dyeing process. Fun fact! The male weaver is the author's uncle-in-law's brother, and there's a bonus "blink and you'll miss it" cameo of the author's ini at 5:57 (in the green shirt).
