Without realising it, I became a shapeshifter.
When I was about three years old, my mother would babysit an Australian girl just a little older than me. At that time, my first language was still Cantonese; it was only at kindergarten and school that English would gradually take over. When the other girl was in our house, my mother would still talk to me in Cantonese. But I would turn to the other girl and translate into English for her benefit: “My mum says we can have a snack now!”
Throughout my adolescence, I continued to hone my code-switching abilities. When I attended dinners with aunties and uncles, I’d fall, to my own surprise, into a Malaysian accent. My posture would change – humble shoulders, nodding head, lowered chin. I’d even find myself ordering dishes in Cantonese, my mouth bypassing my brain to find shapes I thought I’d long forgotten.
At work, I wore a different skin. I did my eyeliner to accentuate my double eyelids. I tied my hair, dyed with L’Oreal Chestnut Brown, into a classy ponytail. I drew myself tall in silk blouses and pleated slacks. My voice changed, lost all trace of slang and accent, became professional and neutral and blandly pleasant to the ear. I listened earnestly to my bosses, trying to figure out the hidden language behind their words: what they wanted from me, how I could impress them, how I could transform into one of them.
Even with different groups of friends, I found that I dialled up and down my degrees of foreignness, femininity, pleasantness, sarcasm, assertiveness, sympathy. I did it involuntarily and unconsciously, just as you might pitch your voice higher to speak to a child.
After a while, the shapeshifting became exhausting. I began to feel as though I had multiple selves within me, but none of them were genuine. If I’d spent my entire life wearing different skins in a desperate attempt to blend in, how could I possibly know who I was? Did I even deserve to have a true self?
I dialled up and down my degrees of foreignness, femininity, pleasantness, sarcasm, assertiveness, sympathy
But recently, I’ve had a small, personal epiphany. I’ve decided to try not viewing my diasporic heritage as a crutch, as a limitation to be overcome. What if my shapeshifting isn’t a weakness after all, but a superpower?
I realised that my shapeshifting has given me a gentle sensitivity, an ability to transport myself into another person’s skin. In my work as a psychiatrist, I find myself connecting, gently and easily, with people from diverse backgrounds. I’d previously dismissed myself as too soft-hearted, but now my perspective is changing: empathy, too, can be a superpower.
My family’s history of migration – from China to Malaysia, in the early 20th century, and from Malaysia to Australia, in the late eighties – had always filled me with a sense of multiple alternate realities. Throughout my childhood, we travelled back to Malaysia once every few years to visit our extended family. I’d listen to my cousins conversing easily with my grandparents in Chinese, the phrases flying over my head. I’d watch the local schoolkids leaping off the bus in their blue and white uniforms, jumping over the open drains next to the road, chatting in a mixture of dialects.
I’d cast furtive glances at the girls working in restaurants and shops – their slender brown limbs, their open faces, the way they moved comfortably in the humid air. They could be me, if we’d stayed. During these travels, I felt the world cleave open. I saw a massive tree of alternate timelines, alternate futures, branching out from a point in my past – and I wrote myself into each branch.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, given these alternate selves and alternate futures, that I was drawn to speculative fiction. Like many other diasporic kids, I found refuge and escape in the sprawling, wondrous worlds of science fiction and fantasy stories. I found a second home in the local library, devouring Tamora Pierce, Isobelle Carmody, KA Applegate, Megan Whalen Turner, Jonathan Stroud, CS Lewis – anything that was on the shelves.
It wasn’t long before I turned my hand to writing my own adventures. In these made-up realms, I felt something indescribable. My ordinary, anxiety-provoking reality vanished. I felt boundless and pioneering, thrilled by infinite possibilities.
Speculative fiction allows for the expression of powerful emotions and themes. Now that I’ve been writing speculative fiction for a few years, I’ve realised that many of my characters are digital, bionic or alien in some way, but this doesn’t negate their deeply human qualities. My characters grapple with parts of themselves that feel strange and unfamiliar. They brush up against a society that doesn’t fully trust or accept them. Their stories are a way to explore themes like letting go of an old version of yourself and making peace with a new, hybrid identity.
Wearing different skins, grappling with a constantly changing and sometimes frightening world, understanding your life as tenuous and subject to the smallest shifts of fate, writing yourself into alternate futures, and finding deep divisions and gaps within yourself – these are familiar feelings for those of us who shift back and forth across multiple cultures. For me, speculative fiction is a playground where I can use hypotheticals, technology and imagination to explore these ideas.
Grace Chan is a writer and doctor. Her debut novel is out now through Affirm Press.
