Disgust and revulsion stir my memories now I see the child safe and alone in an autoerotic half-sleep, then a sudden weight of an older body, a wet kiss on the lips. I did not open my eyes or cry out. As quickly as that physical intrusion had made itself felt, I understood that I should continue to lie still, eyes closed, that pretended sleep was necessary to ward off a dangerous knowledge I was not supposed to have. An unfamiliar mixture of sensations swarmed within me. As long as I was asleep, I did not know what was happening. As long as I did not know what was happening, it was not happening. But of course I felt that  body as it shifted and rubbed against me. I willed myself not to feel, for then I would have to wake up. But I felt I don't know what. It was secret, not to be shared even with the person who was doing this to me. I could not say it, think it. The kiss was unpleasant, but as that weight moved on me, an odd surge went through my body that was not unpleasurable. Later I saw Feng looking at me secretively, but I did not look back. It was important he receive no sign that I knew what he had done.
     Another hot afternoon. I lay again on the cool floor, hai&fearfiil of what would happen. I wished for that new physical sensation, and at the same time I was steeling myself to endure those horrible lips. I kept my eyes shut tight.This time I felt his breath on my face, the insistent flesh. But he must have heard somebody coming up the stairs, and the weight was removed hurriedly. I never attempted sleeping in the afternoons again. Even today, whenever I meet this cousin, I feel a looming void of contempt for him and for that little gifi who could feel pleasure in his abuse.

     I was afraid of the male body in a way that I wasn't afraid of mine. My body was not a secret to me, but my childhood sexual coriltision led for a long time to resistance and shame about what it might become with a male. Father; and Peng; late-night murmurs, audible through their thin bedroom walls, became part of this shame.
During the weekends I sat listlessly by the doorstep, unwilling to play badminton or hide-and-seek outdoors with my brothers and unwilling to enter the house where Peng was cooking, washing, sewing, or talking with Father in their bedroom. Gloomily I suffered the tropical heat and retold the story of SnowWhite to myseffi I was determined to cast Peng as the wicked stepmother with the poison apple and myself as the much hated stepdaughten All her pillow-talk, I was convinced, were complaints to Father about my behavior, and explained Father; increasing alooffiess and coldness.
     One Saturday, steeped in self-pity; I saw Bak Lye walk down the lane with a bundle in his arms. Bak Lye was a vegetable trader, traveling by lorry to bring in fresh bok choi, long beans, cabbages, chilies, lady; fingers, and brinjats from the farms to the Malacca Central Market. A large, strong man with a missing eye lost in a fight, he was also gentle and sincerely attached to Father for saving hirn from deportation to China during the citizenship legalization movement.Years after his papers had been successfillly ified, he continued to visit our home with giffs of cabbages and bok choi. That morning he brought a puppy he'd found wandering in the market.
     Gone were my brooding fantasies of wicked stepmothers. I immediately claimed the puppy as mine. She was a dirty white mongrel, a no-breed, what Malaysians called a rariab, with small brown patches like muddy stains on her  head and sides. She was smaller and skinnier than myself I loved Pongo because she was so weak. She could hardly stand on her wobbly legs and she whimpered through the night. As soon as I believed Father and Peng were asleep, I sneaked out of my cot and carried her from the open-air interior yard into my bed. Each afternoon, instead of wandering through the Malacca streets, I hurried home to release her from a rope fled to a post in the front verandah. She was soft, warm, a trembling tiny body which I hugged to me the rest of the day
Unhousebroken, she left wet messes throughout the house, and I cheerfblly
mopped up after hen
     A month or so later, arriving home from scho&, I did not see Pongo wag-ging her tail by the verandah. Second Brother came out of the house to say, "Pongo's lost!' I burst into tears.Together we searched the wasteland behind our row of houses, dank and overgrown with bamboo and secondary vegetation, buzzing with mosquitoes. Right by the outhouses giant bluebottle flies car'ommed. We paced up and down the lane, calling and peering into the thick clumps of lallang As the afternoon drew on I borrowed Peng's bicycle and rode with Second Brother Chien to the Central Market, the stalls all shut after the day's sales. Calling her name over and over again, we poked through the empty reed baskets and mounds of garbage before mournftilly returning home.
     Father was already home, and he and Peng were shouting at each other, so I took reffige in Mrs. Lee's house, two doors from ours. "Your mother threw the puppy into the Malacca River," she said. Unbelieving, I sat listening to Father and Peng quarrel. Through my silence I understood Peng loudly declaring in Hoickien that Father's attachment to me was unnatural.What does "unnatural" mean? As I cried, I watched plump good-natured Mrs. Lee look  at me sympathetically "This is what a wicked stepmother iS," I thought, tilling up with satisfied self-pity at the same time that the image of Pongo floating dead on the river ran through my mind. Loud crashes came from our home: Father was throwing dishes on the floor in his Riry. I never wanted to go home.
     A hai£hour after the house grew quiet I did go home; 1 could not sit in Mrs. Lee's front room all night. Sullen, tears rising involuntarily, I sat  wordlessly by myself in our front room. Father and Peng were in their bedroom. Through the walls I could hear them whispering in Hollien. He had forgiven her. 

     Nothing was ever said about the incident. NQ QWQ, ~%& %~'ner,fltce~ a~bout Pongo again. l wept at home for weeks, it seemed, almost continuously I had not cried so much when Mother left.Years later, I could not recall the puppy without tears springing up. The unassuaged grief perhaps had as much to do with Father's betrayal as with the actual loss of a pup. After Peng's accusation I never felt the same way about Fathen I was afraid of touching him. 1 could not bear to be near him. His body which I had loved as a child seemed possessed with a power of revulsion instead. He became a frilly recognized sexual creature to me, and I abhorred his sexuallty The father I had trusted to bathe my young body was as lost to me as poor sick Pongo, who may have been tied in a sack and drowned in the Malacca River, or who may have been abandoned in the Central Market. Every time I passed by the market I looked for dirty white pariahs with brown spots.
     Father; relationship with me grew more strained. When I needed money for school books or school trips, he asked me not to tell Peng about it. At home, he seldom spoke to me except on those occasions when he was driven to hiry by some horrible thing I'd done.Then, as he beat me with the rattan or slapped me, he would complain that I was a bad girl, and more trouble than all my brothers put togethen
     Through this turmoil I persisted in believing that Father loved me. When I was thirteen he bought me a Raleigh bicycle which opened Malacca to me even more. Now I could bike miles up to Kiebang or all the way to St. John; Fort and the far reaches of Bandar Hilir, places I had visited as a child when Father had his Morris Minor but which had remained inaccessible to a mere walken Some afternoons after school, instead of returning home for lunch, I biked to the coffee shop where Father consulted with his clients. He worked on his Royal typewriter in the back room, and his clients bought drinks and food from the coffee shop, an ideal arrangement for everyone. The noodle-stall cook liked me, and each time I came by, Father bought a bowl of fat noodle soup for me which the cook lavished with slivers of chicken and roast pork and fishballs. Eating this delicious lunch in the coffee shop, I felt almost as if Father and I were alone in the world. He gave me his large happy-go4ucky grin and slipped me some coins, which we both knew I was not to tell Peng about. I could count on Father; affection, but only in secret.
     During that year between twelve and thirteen, I found something else to make me happy. At a school concert I had been fired by a ballet performance, by the transformation of sloppy mass into lightness. Ethereal girls in tutus and delicate slippers glided effortlessly on stage. The droop of a neck and its long line with the trunk, arms arching like tender branches, and feet that jettison shapes: as I viewed these arabesques for the first time, I wanted to dance ballet more than anything in my life.Visiting Father in his coffee shop, I begged for ballet lessons, classes of one-hour weekly sessions that cost five dollars a month. "All right$' he said, 'just don't tell Peng about the money"
     I borrowed the tunic-a sleeveless, square-cut white linen frock with a short gathered skirt-from a classmate, and asked Peng to make me a copy It was for school, I lied. I wrote to Mother for a pair of ballet slippers, the first thing I had asked of her from Singapore. For almost two years these weekly classes were the center of my lifr.At night, while my brothers played Monopoly, 1 set out a kitchen chair and using its back as a barre did my pli6s, jete's, and exercises.
     Something about the discipline of the body enmeshed my imagination. The barre enacted an exercise of will over body which served as a physical meditation. I approached every class as if holding my breath to discover how much more I could will my legs and arms to pain and grace. The slightest fraction of an inch, the mere shift of the head, signified the difference between awkwardness and beauty. I was gripped by that difference and commanding my body to perform it.
     My first ballet teacher was the wife of a planten Mrs. Stead, it was rumored, had danced at the Sadler Wells. Her classes were held at the convent hall after regular school. Plainly dressed, stern, and reserved, she commanded our frill attention at every meeting. She was a classicist who concentrated meticulously on barre work and a few exercises in improvisational dance movements. Each hour was a marvel of total control on her part.The hall held no mirrors to allow us to observe and correct our postures and movements; her eyes were the mirrors for the twenty girls in the Grade One class, catching our mistakes and reflecting an ideal of physical form. it seemed as if no degree of an out-turned ankle, half-inch push into a plie', or a slight diversion of a shoulder escaped her reproval. A newcomer, I did my barre exercises behind the best students, using their bodies and stretches as models.
When Mrs. Stead's husband was transferred, another teacher took her place, a redhead who was more interested in jazz dance. It was said that she had been a chorus gifi in a cabaret somewhere in the West. Although determined to continue, I lost my pure pleasure in the discipline of the barre, for she paid litde attention to our form. Without those authorizing mirrors of discipline, I could flop my knees and sit down into a plie', and it didn't matten She set us skipping and swirling in gay gypsy dances. We were supposed to invent different combinations of jett&s and pas-de~deux. When she left a few months later, Malacca was without a ballet teacher for a couple of years and that ended my ballet passion.

     After Peng came to live with us, Father was pleased with me only when my report card indicated that 1 had come out first in the class. Like all English-language schools in Ma]aya, the convent ranked its pupils by exam performance. Of two hundred girls in Standard Five, the top fifty were grouped in Five A and had the best teachers, the second tier in Five B, and so forth. In this hierarchy, the lowest achieving girls in the A class were already judged as weak. At the end of the school yean an A class girl could be demoted to B class, or a B class girl could move up.      Generally, however, pupilsremained tracked at the same level. Father's joy came in my achieving first in class. Even if I had received seven out of eight possible A's, coming in second brought a frown, and it was unthirikable I should rank lower than second.When my report card showed me as first in class, the smile he gave was rare and uniquely mine. I longed desperately to make him happy with me, and I dreaded his disapproval.
     Gradually, even as I began to find classes dreary, examinations became more and more important. In Mrs.Tan's Standard Five geography exam, I stared at the question,What is the name for large sand hills? I knew the answer, it was at the edge of my consciousness, but a sudden freeze had stalled all my resources. In my desk, howeve~ I had a novel about a shipwreck in Tunisia, where the young heroine was kidhapped by her Tuareg knight. In that novel, I knew the word for those sand hills had appeared. But I could not recall the word, although I knew the plot so well. Cautiously, I pulled the novel from the desk and turned its pages. But Mrs. Tan, with the peculiar alertness of the convent teachers to any form of cheating, reached for the novel from behind me.
     Sleepless weeks followed when I worried about how to explain to Father the zero I had received for cheating in geography I envisioned the mad red flash in his eye, the cane's swish, and particularly my grief at his disappointment. Worrying, I plotted a way to deceive Fathen Going without food during recess, I saved enough money to buy another report card, as the grade books that tracked our triannual academic results were called.When Mrs.Tan gave me the little red booklet with its shameflil zero, I carefrilly traced into the new report card every subject and numerical date in the old one. Then, copying Mrs.Tan's inscriptions, I added a four before the zero, giving myself a forty out of fifty Fortunately, even with the zero for geography I was ranked second in the class, and did not have to lie about that.
     Father signed my counterfeit with a frown because I had not been ranked first. Later that night I carefrilly traced his signature into the real report card and returned it to Mrs.Tan. I trusted my instincts that when Father signed the report card the next year, he would not recheck the past grades. Father, after all, lived only in the present. Regrets were unknown to him, and such a man would never turn back a page to read what was past. As for me, I kept the counterfeit tablet concealed among my books and papers, and it has followed me to the United States, a concrete sign of my precocious and desperate curiring in trading for my father's love.

     Those anicious weeks showed me that cheating was not a successflil way to achieve the results that would win me Father's love. Yet I could not study the way that my classmates did. The daily schoolwork was too dreaditil, the store of library books too enticing, the noisy play of my brothers and their friends too distracting, and my misery with Peng too msistent. Instead, I developed a method of preparing for exams that saw me into the university
while I did the minimum homework to avoid my teachers' ire, I took the time to collect diverse, curious materials on the class topics. Because there was no money for supplementary texts, study resources, exam guides, and other aids which my classmates depended on, I borrowed these books. Proudly I rationalized that no one would mind loaning her book for a short time; thus, it became a fixed point with me to borrow each book for just one night. Whenever I was permitted to borrow a text, I stayed up all night transcribing it into note form, and returned it prompdy the next morning, confident that I had extracted from it every idea that was useftil. I went through the shelves of libraries looking for sources on the Ottoman Empire, for example, or the
     Great Continental Rift Valley Pieces of information surfaced everywhere, I in newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, and heavy tomes with tides like That Was India, and Chinese Civilization. At the end of the school year, I had gathered stacks of notes on 'I I each exam subject. By the time I was taking the 0 and A level exams, I
had perfected this system of solitary study, which later threatened to harden into autodidacticism. An this knowledge-gathering was interspersed through the years with the drift of pleasurable reading, late weekend dances, the delirium of motorbikes, and continuous poverty the last of which gave particular practical urgency to
my studies. By the time I was eleven, a dreadfiii sense of disaster would come ti over me a week before every examination period. I saw the cheapness of apnessofmyN home most keeuly then: the vulgar linoleum that covered the living-room floor with square patterns and embossed floral swirls in each center, already  alreadyuglyIII when new, now pitted and shredded so that its black tarry underside tracked across the gold and silver squares; the scuffed walls that hadn't been painted  tbeenpaintedinN years; the splintered unmatched chairs and stools wedged against the dining table, and the old kitchen cupboard blotched with peeling stain, stolid stuff that one had to squeeze through in order to get to the bathroom or the outhouse. I never saw these scrufk and scars except during the week before examinations. Then, as if the ouly thing between this poverty and myself was that A grade, I
set myself to work to escape from my home with an intensity I have seldom felt j\i~ later in life.
     In the week before exams, each evening, after everyone had left the cramped kitchen, 1 spread my papers and books on the linoleum that covered the splintered wooden table. Beginning with the very first topic and reviewing all the lessons for the year, I organized the information I had gathered into pat-terns and arguments. Sometimes, if there was a lot of material, I worked right through the night to five or six in the morning, and then washed up for school.  A week's worth of all-night study was usually sufficient to earn me A's.
     The truly brilliant students, it was rumored, were bad exam takers. Children of wealthy or professional parents, they were chauffeured to piano classes, sheltered, and so paitftiilly shy that they could only peep from the fringes at our manic games and sparring. Teachers boasted of these students' sensitivity, but faced with the pressure of regurgitating information in the form of five essay responses per three hours to an unexpected battery of questions, they froze like mousedeer in the headlights of killing cars.
     I could not understand their failure. My own necessity-to move out of the range of the grinding millstone of poverty-was like a miniaturized engine implanted in my body, that I was fearless in the face of exams. What I feared was poverty. Exams were a challenge I enjoyed, and that this challenge could lead me out of hungen shame, ugliness, and deprivation was a wonder-ful mystery to me.

     The national standard examinations were set by British teachers and profrssors and administered from Cambridge University. Even the University of Malaya exams, which were graded by local lecturers, were scrutinized by famous Oxford or Cambridge dons.The state apparatus that administered these examinations globally operated through the threat and process of mass extinction of subjects. With so many thousands seeking "distinctions)' the British term for A grades, only a few could be admitted into the elite circle of the distinctive. Beginning with the Standard Six exam at age eleven, continuing with the Lower Certificate Exam at fourteen, proceeding to the Senior Cambridge Exam at age sixteen, and concluding with the Higher Senior Cambridge exam at eighteen, masses of schoolchildren in the British empire faced a uniform life story composed of acronyms-LCE, SCE, HSC-that would be comic in a Swiftian satire if it hadn't been so violently oppressive to our childhood.
     One could easily read the damage of colonial education in the children, for failures dropped out of school at each gated moat. At eleven, some girls returned to the rubber estates to help their parents. Others left at fourteen to train as nurses' aides or to work as salesclerks. At sixteen and seventeen, many went to teachers' training colleges to staff the elementary schools. Many more married or stayed home waiting for marriage. From all the state schools, from the cohort of thousands living in Malacca who were six going on seven or already seven in the year 1951, only about sixty students remained from the years of exam slaughter to enter the Arts and Science Lower Sixth Form. And from that sixty; perhaps only fifteen entered the University of Malaya in 1964.

     Unlike my classmates, I never thought of exams as mere regurgitation of information. I imagined a long table of examiners, neither men nor women, but all English, reading these hundreds of thousands of essays pouring in from the British Empire. It wouldn't matter to them which essay was written by a headinaster's son in Ireland, a washerwoman's daughter in Hong Kong, a goatherder's child from the Kenyan mountains, or a bankrupt petition writer's laughter in Malacca. These readers formed a formidable audience, for, reading as fast and tediously as they had to, only a different voice could reach them through those fortress walls of exam booklets.
     I thought of that voice as the voice of the mind, but a distinct mind, one at ease with information but not burdened by it, a mind that worked with rules and patterns but that manipulated them playflilly or deviously or adroitly rather than repeating them. It was a mind that collected and arranged. Sometimes the collection was impressive enough; sometimes the arrangement was surprising or fresh. Because the mind was frill and confident, it could suggest that what it said was inadequate, that something else eluded it. The memorization of information was never mere data collection, as many of my classmates believed. The selection of "facts" to memorize was itself a painstaking, necessary; and formative preparation for the final task of analysis
and presentation.
     Entering the exam hall, my mind overflowed with dates, names, maps, diagrams, statistics, titles, quotations, citations, all those unarguable details, discreet pieces of knowledge that together construct academic facticiry
Students had been known to copy these information tags onto their shirt cuffs jill, or their palms, on tiny torn pieces of paper slipped into their socks. The hundreds of memorized items that zipped about in my head as the proctor placed the exam question sheet on my desk could not be put down on such imperfect receivers. From one or more nights of cramming I was confident that I held as much data as I would need for three hours of essay writing. What preoccupied me instead was how to shape my answers so that the long table of bored cynical superior readers would sit up a little straighter and say with a sigh, "Well, here's someone who's interesting:'           Being interesting was the difficult part. These readers were not to be condescended to, like my neighbors who loved an easy laugh. I hoped that if I could write my essay as a singular subject, then my faceless nameless paper would rise to claim that it-Ifflignified. At the same time, every one of my classmates also wanted desperately to claim a subject status; and read individually, with care, their essays could be seen to speak eloquently The misspellings, ungrammatical syntax, labored sentences, and dull prose testified not to a lack of schooling but to lives and experiences mismatched to the well-oiled machinery of the English4anguage essay The irony was not that my companions were uninteresting or unlearned, but that what they learned was sofar removed from their senses that the learning remained separate, unvivitied, and undigested: many of them did regurgitate class notes, lectures, and globs of memorized passages for the exams, an undifferentiated vomit of words, dates, ideas, and scrambled facts.

     As I grew older, the exams became more onerous, requiring more and ed more all-night study sessions. When I was fourteen, a classmate boasted of pills that her older brother took to keep him awake for craning sessions and agreed to get me a supply The bottle held a warning that the pills shouldn't be taken if one suffered from heart palpitations, goiter, and a host of other Aflients.  The medical name of the drug made no impression on me; only the claims that the drug led to alertness and energy Later I knew that these were amphetairnes eli that kept me buzzing from 10 PM. to seven in the morning. I took these pills only for all-night study sessions for the m4or exams, and the one bottle lasted fir me until I entered the university Then, in Kuala Lumpur, I entered a Chinese  pharmacy with the mystery bottle in hand, and discovered that the pills, imported from a busy pharmaceutical trade with Thailand, were inexpensively available without a doctor's prescription. 
     Through these exam-haunted years, we frequently heard rumors of stu -dl dents dying of heart failure or "brain fever$' but it did not occur to me tha the amphetamines I swallowed were related to these fatalities. I finally under stood how physically damaging my study habits were when, in my final year, in my push to be the first student to achieve a First Class in English in the university; I set out to study a full five weeks before the exams. Staying up fai with friends in the English seminar room from 8 flM. to 7 A.M., like the,I took an amphetamine pill each night.After one grueling night of studying theAugustans and attempting to figure out how Jane Austen was and was not an   of Augustan, on my way back to the residence hall for breakfast, I fainted in the corridon Summoned by my friends, Second Brother, then a tutor in history and no longer subjected to punitive exams, took me back to the hall on his Honda motorbike, lectured me on my health, forbade any more pills, and later dl; brought bottles of essence of chicken to build up my strength. During those five weeks I had lost almost twenty pounds. I was never tempted to take  amphetamines again, perhaps because that was the last British-style exam I had to sit for, perhaps because, coming to the United States two years later, I moved to an elite selection system that would never approach the colonial all system for monstrous repressiveness. 
     Finals week itself was a blur of repetition: I wrote in cramped W( handwriting arguments that I had held with myself through those long sleepless nights-arguments on the nature of alienation for Malaysian writers;whyYeats revised certain poems and what the revisions signified for his opus; what Pope had learned from Dryden's Dundad; why Jane Austen should not be read as an Augustan.

     What did all these arguments prove beyond gettihg me a First Class Honors? Thinking back through the cultural imperialism of British colonial education, I regret the loss of the potential Malaysian intellectual in that preco-cious child and young adult. Of all the essays I wrote through my years as a child and student in Malaysia, only that one question on the alienation of the Malaysian writer remains resonant, communally embedded, and historically useflil. Everything else had been desiderata, lavishly, excessively non sequiturs.
     My classmates were perhaps even more ground down than I. For ten or eleven months of the year, I wandered, strayed, malingered, daydreamed, read novels, danced, ran around, got into trouble, climbed trees, biked, followed boys flirtively with my eyes, gossiped and screamed with my girlfriends. Others, the studious students-pale gifis with watery spirits who stood helplessly on the sidelines while the game was played~tayed home after school. In a dim although overpowering way, we all understood our families' and communities' hopes. Thus those wretched grinds whose childhoods were lost to school texts; thus the amphetamines that my classmates and I surreptitiously took during the exam cramming period; thus the parents' unquestioning silence as their children studied all night, grew wan, lost weight, threw up, died of "brain fever"' or hanged themselves. In my years maneuvering through the maze of exam requirements, despite the frequent incidents of mental breakdowns, heart failures, suicides, and other calamities due to exam stress, I never heard a complaint uttered against the educational system itself The lost children and their bereaved parents entered a dimension of nonimagination. The hegemony of British colonial education was so total that even those who questioned it as advocates of Chinese4anguage and Malay-Islam-centered education were not heard by the general population.
     The Malaysian Chinese adapted to colonial education with a ferocious ease that speaks for its historical affinity with the Imperial Examinations in China and for the community's ambition to self-rule. Rather than being money-grubbing sojourners with no attachment to the country to which they had immigrated, a stereotype that British administrators fostered about the Malaysian Chinese, these Malaysians invested their desire for country affiliation in their children's English education. From these cohorts were to come the teachers, nurses, doctors, dentists, court clerks, and officials who would assume the underlying governance of the country. Exam success was therefore not merely a matter of material and professional mobility. In a colonized setting it was one of the few routes to civic power that the British permitted. While one might not necessarily become rich through garnering A's, one would be admitted higher and higher up the ascending spiral of elite training, into the outer reception room of administrative servitude. At the same time, the inevitable grind of the process usually resulted in obedient administrators, dogmatists of the objective and impersonal through whom the Colonial Office would speak transparently Colonial education set out to produce not leaders but intermediaries, those strange people who are both good order-takers and good order-givers. It set out to teach assent, not dissidence. It would work well were everyone to agree on what laws and orders to submit to.
     But Malaysia was never a homogenous society, and colonial education failed in preparing Malay Muslim royalty and peasants-the rayat~hinese miners and Coniucianist urban tradespeople, Tamil Hindu plantation workers, Pakistani merchants, Eurasian Catholic fishermen and lower4evel flinctionaries, and diverse people and occupations in between, for democratic self-governance. Or rather, the elite it trained was irrelevant to the new and contingent circumstances of independence, in which race, religion, language, and gender-four glaring sites totally ignored in British colonial education-shaped the emergence of the Malaysian nation-state.

     Most of the time I was not a scholar but a willffil child for whom rock-and-roll was an introduction to teenage sexuality. After the solipsistic body that ballet affirmed, I found a small pleasure in the church socials to which my Catholic neighbors brought me. There, on Saturday evenings, in the public room attached to Saint Peter's Church, boys and girls fox-trotted and quick-stepped to such lugubrious American music as "A Summer Place" and "Red Sails in the Sunset!' Rosie, three years older than I, took me with her to these socials. I was a naive chaperone who, admiring the circle of her boyfriends, hardly understood the nuances of her ffirtations. Sometimes, a beau waiting in line for Rosie would take pity on me and swing me onto the dance floon But later that year, after I had seen Elvis Presley in the movie Jauhouse Rock) the fox trot was no longer a pleasure. I practiced jitter-bugging to my brothers' amusement, and was overcome with gratitude when Byron, a Eurasian acquaintance, taught me the simple two-step hip-swaying swing that is still popular today Rock-and-roll made public and almost respectable a kind of abandon for-bidden to good Malaysian daughters. Westerners who cannot understand why rock-and-roll would have been banned in Maoist China have not lived in a non-Western body While sex as intercourse may or may not be repressed in many Asian societies, the body itsei{ especially the female body, is socialized to be nonexpressive of its sexuality In Malacca in the 1950s, this deliberate non-expressiveness, valued as "modesty" and inculcated through humiliation and familial and public shame, was so naturalized that minor transgressions like a short skirt or a glimpse of breasts could damage a girl; reputation. Even today, especially in Muslim-dominated Malaysia, the muscular male body may be revealed shirtless on the beach or on a construction site; tawny male legs may stride everywhere, clad in khaki school-shorts. But the woman covers herself and moves demurely, so that her body will not speak before the male voyeun At fourteen and fifteen, I moved easily from wearing my brothers' shorts and shirts~hiefly because I had so frw clothes (!)eng sewed about three skirt and blouse sets for me for Chinese New Year to last the year)-to the open physicality of rock-and-rofl. For other Malaysians too, Elvis in a black-and-white striped prison uniform snaking down the jailhouse stairs was an instant icon, not to independence but to freedom. Independence, we British colonized subjects knew, meant responsibility; you had to be taught to be independent. Freedom, our bodies discovered, signified pleasure, a forgetting of social responsibility in the irruption of the sensuous to the surface. Of course there is something ludicrous about nice weli-behaved Asian children suddenly twitching skinny hips and jiggling absent breasts. The percussive drums and orgasmic rocking and rolling, the suggestive lyrics and gestures of Bill Haley and His Comets, Chubby Checker, and similar American pop singers effected a visceral Westernization of Asia that years of reading Shakespeare's plays had not achieved.

     Every cultural change is signified through and on the body Involuntarily the body displays, like a multidimensional, multisensorial screen, the effects of complicated movements across the social keyboard. And, conversely, bodies are players, passionate amateurs, mobile, and nubile, and culture is the scene in which their continuous, promiscuous, nervous performances unfold. My Westernization took place in my body As a young woman I wanted movement:
     the freedom of the traveler, the solipsism of the engine, the frenzy of speed, that single intensity inseparable from dangen I was drawn to motorbikes the way I was drawn to fast music. For a frw months I went around with some young men, necessary accessories to those gleaming black and silver machines whose giant beetle-bodies lured me like pheromones.

     Victor's Suzuki 250 was the leanest and newest. Settling into the passenger seat, I felt the engine kick off between my thighs. Its steady throb changed to a scream as Victor pumped the gas pedal. The air streamed past and, as Victor, the Suzuki, and I leaned into a turn, I whispered into Victor's ear, "Faster, faster!" The dark night rushed past, howling, and we were perfectly still, perfectly quiet, before the power of an enormous world speeding through space, with something very dark just below us, tracking us. Then we burst into noise, and Victor throffled the engine, and we slowed down, stunned by the force of the wind and that sickemng darkness that was just beghining to dissipate.

    Night after night, I visited the street where the boys and their motorbikes congregated. Robert's Norton 500 was my favorite machine. Built like a patriarch, it was twice as fast asvictor's Japanese motorbike. It rode like a house, steady, heavy; and stable, its engine pounding in a low bass. In my memory; it sounds nothing so much as Sarastro invoking Isis and Osiris, rumbling, deep, wholly male and priesdy. Mounted behind Robert, who was years older than Victor and not given to steep corner maneuvers, my teenage feet dan~g many inches off the ground, I knew the Norton was the undisputed prince among the Hondas, Suzukis, and Vespas. But safe mature Robert would never race. I caressed the Norton's curved belly, admired its high handles, and laughed at Robert's caution.
Soon, even the Suzuki boys found me too wild. After a while they reflised to race their motorbikes fasten Bored, I returned to rock-and-roll. At least there I could tell my body how fast to move.