Living in a world not of our own making
On Abang Adik and the tragedy of statelessness in Malaysia & what fiction may do, differently from journalism, for social justice. (Plus: a companion letter for paid subscribers!)
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
I should say: if you haven’t watched the film and you're planning to, maybe don’t read this yet. I’m not trying to spoil it, but I’m also not trying not to spoil it 😆I didn’t know much about Abang Adik before watching it but for the enthusiastic reviews from fellow Malaysians. (Turns out it’s done pretty well on the global festival circuit too.) But I did get a prior sense about the kind of movie it is when I asked a friend to come with and she said she would wait because she didn’t feel like crying that day. She was right. Reader, when I finally watched it, I cried. Many others were clearing their noses in the dark of the cinema too.
Without going into too much detail, the film directed by Jin Ong is about two men who call themselves brothers—abang means older brother; adik, younger brother. Abang (played by Taiwanese actor Wu Kang-Ren) was born in Malaysia but is stateless, because he doesn’t have a birth certificate, apparently lost in a fire, to prove his provenance.1 Adik (Jack Tan) has a birth certificate, but for whatever reason hasn’t been issued with a national identity card, which makes it difficult for him to access basic necessities: he can’t open a bank account or get a motorcycle license or secure formal employment. Their lives are marked by constant evasion from law enforcement and capricious exploitation by others.
Abang Adik brings together some of the same issues I’ve covered in my journalism: the people caught between borders, the possible errors in the application of the death penalty, the search for redemption. So I received it as something of an onslaught, and it brought to mind again all the people still stuck in the Kafkaesque loop of trying to prove they exist in a system that is wilfully blind to them. The film is about Malaysians who are stateless, but it also nods to those who live by the same cruel logic imposed by the nation-state: the “illegal immigrants” and the refugees, who are also treated as “illegal immigrants because Malaysia doesn’t legally recognize refugees (though, as I wrote before, it takes a “turn a blind eye” approach to their existence here). Abang falls in love with Su, a Chin refugee from Myanmar. But when she receives news that she will be resettled to another country, he sends her off with her family without confessing his love, knowing she will have no future with him in Malaysia. Adik, exploited by others, also exploits those who are more vulnerable than him: he smuggles migrants into the country, telling himself he is doing them a favor, even when they don’t end up with the jobs they are promised and are sold out by another trafficker up the chain, who tips off the police so he can pocket money from both ends.
The film seems to be asking a question I’ve also found myself thinking about as a writer: How do we live in a world not of our own making? In this case, what does someone born into invisibility and poverty, who had no choice in the circumstances of his birth, owes himself and others?
The two brothers have very different worldviews. Abang, who is mute, is always trying to be good, is always trying to will Adik to be good. Adik, on the other hand, has grown deeply cynical and refuses to play by the prevailing rules of our world, even as he succumbs to the logic of its shadow world. Seen in a different way, it’s Abang who comes across as the rebellious one, in his steadfast holding on to hope, to possibility. He is the kind of person we all want to help. He, who does not throw your help back in your face, who shows himself to be grateful. He gives us the license to say: Look, this person deserves your help. Please listen to his story, please donate, please change the law for people like him. We ask victims to remain honest and honorable and steadfast, despite all the injustice in the world that must break their souls.
Adik, on the other hand, tests our patience. We wonder about his unproductive behavior. We wonder why he won’t help himself when we’re trying our best to help him: Just do what you need to, and this will happen for you. And yet, in doing this we would be failing to acknowledge his life’s context and strip him of his agency, since we, too, don’t always do what’s objectively ideal for us, for emotional reasons specific to us. I’m reminded of why the homeless sometimes don’t buy into social programs designed to assist them, because they would then be obliged to live a certain way, when they may have different ideas for their own lives, even if their options are more narrow than that open to you and me.
In the film, a young NGO worker, Jia En, is shown going out of her way to help the two brothers—Adik especially, because he has the better legal case, with an estranged father still alive who can attest to his Malaysian birthright, if only Adik would deign to meet him again. But in one scene, visiting her brother (I think it’s her brother, I haven’t yet been able to rewatch the film), a doctor at a hospital, he tells her to quit doing the work she does, because being among such unsavory people could pose a danger to her. Her brother is meant to stand in for many people who hold such views—which overwhelmingly, in real life, don’t hold much water. Too tragically in this film though, he is proved right.
But whatever Adik’s faults, in the film we get to see another side of him. By showing the intimacy of the relationship between him and Abang (even more affecting when we find out they are not blood brothers), we see a gentler side of him—drawn out by Abang, who loves him, as well as Kak Money, a trans woman who had taken the boys under her wing when they were young and alone in the world. There are many scenes in the film between the two men designed to make you cry, but the one that got me was when they were at Kak Money’s farewell party, before she readies to leave Kuala Lumpur to return to her hometown. In the red cast of the DIY-disco lights of her apartment, Adik, looking to patch up an earlier disagreement with Abang, and seeing in his luminous eyes how bereft he is left by the recent departure of Su, a romance which never had a chance to begin, embraced him on the small living room floor in a slow, shuffling dance.
In real life, most of us would never come to know someone like Adik well enough to see this side of him—even a journalist who “hangs out” with “their "subjects” in hopes of being afforded a glimpse of their inner world, unless, exceptionally, they do it over a sustained period, like Katherine Boo did with Behind the Beautiful Forevers: something none but the most dedicated journalist, with a rock-solid stamina and a willingness to suspend their own lives for a time, would and could afford to do. Because you cannot truly tell their story from their point of view unless they let you witness a part of them they usually keep for their nearest and dearest. And because of such limitations, editors sometimes tire of what can seem like the same story of suffering without a vivid enough “character” to bring it to life. That is the real tragedy: that the same misery attends so many people and we grow desensitized to it, no matter how empathetic we think we are.
But this is a movie, and we get to see this side of Adik. It reminded me again of the gap fiction can fill in telling the stories of those marginalized by state and society: it lets us imagine another person’s emotional reality. We’ve been reading the news, we’re all aware of the ever-deepening inequality that is a feature, not just a byproduct, of our times; there is nothing about the material realities in Abang Adik we don't already know. But a movie, with characters of complexity, can make you feel. It jolted me into pausing, once again, to pay attention to the injustice people like Abang and Adik struggle against. As with so many of the world’s problems, I think it’s not so much new facts or new developments that we need, as the news cycle often demands, but reminders of what we already know, so our hearts don’t stay complacent for too long, so that we are galvanized again to speak or act in support of those who need it, in whatever humble way we can, when the next occasion calls for it.
For most of the film, Abang is a pillar of silent resilience. So when he is finally wrought enough to speak, railing at his own impotence, it comes as a violent confrontation. As he languishes on death row—or the last room, bilik akhir, as we call it in Malaysia—after a freak accident that seemingly forced his hand, a well-meaning Buddhist monk comes to him, urging him not to forgo his meals, telling him he owes it to himself to live well as long as he still lives.2 Abang, who keeps so much of what he feels to himself as the only act of self-possession available to him when so much in the world is denied him, is finally moved to protest his plight. It comes as a thunderous, voiceless indictment of the indifference of the world, watery moans straining out of him as he signs to the monk: He has never chosen anything in this life. “I want to die, I want to die, I want to die,” he says—and then abruptly stops, as if suddenly realizing that even that isn’t up to him to choose. He didn’t choose how he came into this world and he wouldn’t choose how he will leave it.
And it’s with a stark, simple finality that Abang tells the monk, “I want to change my life, but it’s impossible.” This sounds like a clichéd turn of phrase we might sometimes overuse ourselves in more banal circumstances, but in Abang’s case, it’s loaded with literal meaning. And I wonder, how would we ourselves deal with this utter lack of power to decide our own lives? The judges have pronounced him guilty of one thing, and it feels like the world thinks him, and people like him, guilty of other things too.
One day, when Abang is sitting in his cell waiting for the day of his hanging to arrive, a boy, a vision of his younger self, comes to visit. Mutely, the boy picks up a small flat comb and strokes it through Abang’s hair, the way we saw Abang do it himself earlier in a mirror before getting his headshots taken at a photo shop for his citizenship application—a painfully hopeful scene. Here is a man who, in the face of forces that sought to negate his very being, still took care to put himself in order so he could better face the world. There is something about the gesture itself that feels so vulnerable to me.3 And when the boy combs his hair, it feels like he is comforting his adult self, absolving him of his sins, real and assumed, returning him to his innocence once more.
In a companion letter: I was very moved by Abang Adik but found a part of its plot a little forced. Thinking about how it worked the death penalty into its story made me think about how to write a piece of short fiction I started a long time ago but never finished—I’m trying to finish it! 😅—and a tip George Saunders offers on how to liberate oneself from the pressure of “Plot!” and “Theme!”
Reality check:
Notes on the perpetuation of statelessness in Malaysia
1./ Abang Adik resonates a lot here at present. Many children born to Malaysian mothers have been unable to obtain citizenship, whereas those born to Malaysian fathers face no such hurdles. Some of these children have been able to inherit their foreign father’s nationality, but some others, due to special circumstances (say, if the father is undocumented himself), have not, rendering them stateless. Read more on this in a piece I wrote for Foreign Policy during the pandemic.
2./ Last year, the Malaysian government finally announced that it would remove a sexist clause in the constitution to allow any Malaysian “parent”, not just “father”, to pass on their citizenship to their children. However, as part of the same package of reforms, it also introduced other changes regulating access to citizenship, which would be detrimental to other categories of children, such as the stateless. Iqbal Fatkhi has a great video explainer at Cilisos.
3./ Chen Yih Wen, a journo friend, wrote a piece for New Naratif sometime ago about Wong Kueng Hui, a stateless man born in Sabah, and his long legal pursuit —since he was twelve years old; he’s now approaching thirty—for citizenship in Malaysia. It’s paywalled, but you can listen to the accompanying podcast to learn more. Luckily, his story had a happy ending last year.
From KL,
E.
Footnotes
I’m not entirely sure if Adik in the film has a real birth certificate or if it’s forged, but in any case, even if one has a legit birth certificate in Malaysia, one can still have difficulties applying for a national identity card. The story of Muhammad Aldridge John Bilones shows this.
I have met Buddhist monks who offer solace to death row prisoners and who help agitate for their pardons or for the abolition of the death penalty, and they are doing necessary work. But in the context of the film, this bit of advice to “live well” while you’re still living feels painfully ironic, when those on death row, unlike other prisoners, are usually not allowed to continue pursuing their studies or hobbies, since, the logic goes, they are going to die anyway—even though some of them end up waiting years and years for the day of their hanging to arrive. From a story I wrote years ago about a death row inmate:
Before he was sentenced to death in 2009, when there was still a glimmer of hope that he would rejoin society, he was allowed to study — he took his SPM and passed, but failed his STPM; he was allowed out in the sun to play sepak takraw or football with the other inmates; and he was allowed to work in prison — “I used to be a tailor and a carpenter.” But then, all his “privileges” were taken away, and he was persona non grata, as far as the system was concerned. He had wanted to re-sit his STPM, but he wasn’t allowed to. From the authorities’ point of view, if you were going to be hanged anyway, what was the point?
W.C., who watched this film with me, said he found the monk’s advice to be emblematic of our collective hypocrisy: how it is only in someone’s most wretched hour that they are offered a kindness of little utility, when they were not previously afforded the slightest mercy. Where was the help Abang so sorely needed before he was convicted, when it could have made a real difference to his life? I thought this was an apt observation. Do we only take notice, are we only moved to help, when people are suffering in extremis? Are we only capable of token kindness?
There is something about men combing their hair, not in a vain Johnny Bravo way, but in a Does this look okay? kind of way. It’s a gesture that strikes me as endearing, maybe because I’ve also seen my father do it, and it’s one of the ways I see him, someone who has provided for me and protected me, as vulnerable 💛