By: Michelle Young, Co-Editor-in-Chief 

Memories of Home is a vivid and tender zine written and illustrated by SFU alum, Kelly Chia. It explores identity, and interrogates the dominant narratives that outline history. The zine’s opening is striking: “I am Malaysian-Chinese. There is so much this hyphen is carrying.” Memories of Home also features colourful hand-drawn illustrations of durian, starfruit, the Tambuakar (a water dragon), and more. Chia writes, “Home in the sense I’ve been exploring in this zine, is the stories we continue to tell, to listen to, and to learn from.” Memories of Home is filled with emotion, imagery, and crafted with care. The Peak sat down with Chia to learn more about her work. 

This interview has been edited for concision. 

Can you tell me more about what it means to you to be “Malaysian-Chinese” and how you view your identity in the context of being part of the diaspora? 

It’s really interesting to hyphenate my identities to explain who I am. Like, when I’m speaking in Chinese, there isn’t that sort of nuance. But because I’m speaking in English, the most succinct way I can summarize my identity is by using “Malaysian-Chinese.” I feel like I have to explain a bit more when I use this term because I’m not Malay. I’m Chinese, born in Malaysia. 

I was also living in Singapore for a number of years before I migrated to Turtle Island. I wanted to explore a bit more about what that meant to me — it was a lot of conflicting feelings because I haven’t lived there in such a long time. Having political opinions about Malaysia and Singapore feels difficult because I don’t feel like I have as much knowledge as I need. I also don’t have the lived experience that I would have had if I were raised as an adult in Malaysia. 

Sometimes, there’s an outpouring of love I feel towards where I came from”

— Kelly Chia, author of Memories of Home

“That I can’t otherwise express, except in writing. Memories is a way to say, “This is the way I’m engaging with my countries.” I’m entering my home through my memories.  

What inspired you to create this zine and what was the process of creation like? 

Among my small friend group of artists, they invited me to join a zine group. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while because of the qualities that make a zine great: it’s affordable, it’s often made by one person, and a way to connect with your community. I’ve sort of been burnt out of writing over the last few years. It was about Malaysia and Singapore specifically because the original prompt was “folklore,” and I remembered a lot of stories growing up. Ironically, the original folklore part is contained to a two-page spread. As I started writing it, I had a lot more to say. 

It’s always challenging to write about diasporic experiences, because like I said, I haven’t lived in Malaysia and Singapore for a while. Whenever I’m talking about Singapore, I feel like I have to talk about the nuances of it being a strong economy. It’s a great country for its size, but it also has a very militant governance and you can’t talk about one without the other. I don’t have those same feelings about Malaysia because I was six when I left the country. Though, I was also pretty young when I moved out of Singapore. 

As an immigrant, when you’re discussing your own experiences, you’re like, “Am I making my countries, am I reducing them for someone else’s experience? Am I compartmentalising these very complicated and nuanced histories just to be like, ‘Hey, this is the place I came from?’”

As a creative person, I think you always worry about whether you’re being authentic or packaging your authenticity. 

You wrote about complex feelings on how your education covered Singapore’s Japanese occupation in-depth, but didn’t discuss pre-colonial history. Can you tell me more about what particular aspects of history you’d like others to engage in?

This is tough, because as a Chinese person growing up in Singapore, it’s a lot of acknowledging that I’m Hakka. I don’t speak Mandarin as well as I speak Hakka, but other dialects get subsumed into you having to learn Mandarin in schools. There’s this perspective that Chinese history and immigration feel the most important, even though it’s not what’s said, it just feels like it’s “economically important” to learn Mandarin.

I had a few friends who were from Myanmar, or who were Filipino, and there was no option for them to learn Tagalog or other of their so-called mother tongue languages in school, so oftentimes they’d be assigned to learn Chinese instead.

So much of what dominates my thought of the history of Singapore has to do with the Japanese occupation, that even the founding story feels almost mythical — it’s very real. In the zine, I mention that the founding story includes a slim mention of Sang Nila Utama and primarily focuses on Singapore after Sir Raffles comes and sets up a post, but that there’s 500 years of respectable history prior to this, when Utama named Singapore “Singapura.” I had to step back and reexamine my privilege and history, to be like, “I never learned this part.” 

There’s a narrative that our national history starts in 1819, when in 1299 we already had years and years of trading history and it would be cool to elevate it to the same amount of importance.  

Having graduated with a Bachelor’s in English, and also being a previous Peak Editor-in-Chief, how did your experiences at SFU inform your work?

I feel like what I enjoyed most about working at The Peak was that SFU stopped being just a building, but became communities I connected with. A lot of my work was informed by speaking with the fellow people around me. A lot of these experiences, and thinking about what’s important when you put out a work that other people are going to read, plays a lot into how I write. It’s been a long time since I felt that writing was just for me. Working at a small news publication, knowing who can read it, who might be impacted by it, has infinitely impacted how I approach my work. I always hope that they either feel seen by it, or can engage with it in a way that makes sense to them. Overall, I would say my SFU experiences made me more community minded.

Read Memories of Home at heyzine.com.