At a glance, this photograph from 1957, the year of Malaysia’s independence,[i] tells a story of everyday frivolity. A group of women down by the beach, taking a day away from town, on the fringes of what the East India Company once governed as “India”. But a closer look points out something different: these are all men, dressed up, some utterly convincing. On paper, they should not exist, but here they defy the classification schemes of the census. This photograph is one of many inherited by the artist Hoo Fan Chon, who sifts and sorts through them, trying to tease out a story. Among these photos, one face was particularly prominent, and after five years he learned her name: Ava Leong, who named herself for Ava Gardner. In a recent film, I Enjoy Being a Girl (2022), he tells his story this way. 

[…] I chanced upon a collection of studio portraits of a young boy and a woman in an antique shop in George Town, Penang. I eventually discovered that these photographs belonged to Ava Leong, a local female impersonator who passed away in 2018, and I became acquainted with Anita, Ava's lifelong childhood friend.[ii]  

My conversations with Fan Chon provided me with a narrative to make sense of his archive. Returning home after years abroad from a city that refused to belong to me, I became obsessed about the contestations over and reckonings with our identities that were furiously picking up pace around me. In search of lost stories, I picked up stray anecdotes from the poets, filmmakers and writers whose brief paths crossed in this port city, but of all these, I remembered Anita/Ava’s most clearly. My story is only a re-presentation, however, and in a multitude of ways it is really Fan Chon’s tale.  

All this text, to paraphrase Barthes, should be read as if spoken by a character in a book.[iii] 

— —

Alex/Anita (A/A), aged fourteen. Taken in 1948
at the Penang Botanic Gardens. 
 

Fan Chon: I remember the story you told me, when you guys first met at school. It was just that one look, you kind of knew. So, what was the first thing you guys said to each other? 

Alex/Anita: She was sitting in front or behind of me. When the teacher was giving lessons, we’d be sketching women. She was doing the same thing. That’s how I came to know.  

When Fan Chon first began talking to Anita, he tried a theoretical tack, going on about photography as a self-restorative process. He asked questions that she could not answer until he started asking her about herself instead. The sound quality of some recordings is patchy (only later in the process did he start using a higher-end recorder), but there is enough fidelity to maintain her voice for posterity, sprinkled with archaic Malay and northern Hokkien words.  

“At what age did you know that you’re a woman?” he asks. 

Her answer: “1948.”  

The year that a federation came into being, given shape by historians, statesmen, and militarisation. A nation was being created, fashioned into a state; within it, a boy named Alex was becoming a woman called Anita. 

Sometimes pronouns shift and slip, their certainty continuously deferred. And at this juncture, there is not a lot of time left. He is getting older. Life has a routine, Sundays at church. But now the discarded photographs have returned, rescued from their attempted disposal. Perhaps the state of Penang’s most recognisable trade—aside from the lucrative electronics manufactured on its industrial periphery or the property deals brokered over existing and reclaimed land—is in nostalgia, fuelling its cafes, heritage trade, and antique sales. Much of its heirlooms end up in Singapore, I am told. But those which remain may re-tell their stories.  

Fan Chon’s collection of found photographs constitutes an informal archive, which asks us to consider what is worth keeping, what can be monetised, and what must be utterly forgotten. Pierre Nora—as conservative as his conception of memory may be—made a useful observation about archives.[iv] The professional archive is a limited space that must selectively destroy its Borgesian, unending records. Digitisation, fraught with concerns about file formats and continuous maintenance, presents no guarantee of posterity.[v] Meanwhile, the informal archive of collective memory leaves us with ephemeral fragments, but such “unintentional traces” may be regarded “as unmediated testimonies of a former era that can tell a counter-history to the one propagated by the rulers”.[vi]  

The photographs that Fan Chon uncovered were never meant to be remembered. Taken together, they reveal a self in transition. While the state centralised itself in these decolonising decades, legislating identities into being, its subjects refused the tyranny of classification.  

Anita tried to rid herself of Ava’s photographs, only for them to return. Once again, Ava smiles back. 

— —

​​​Studio portrait of Ava Leong, taken in 1954​​ 

I saw Anita only once when she briefly returned to the public gaze. She managed a high kick despite being over eighty. Behind her, her story was played out on screen, a life recut and encapsulated in disembodied recordings and photographs. I did not get the chance to speak to her then—indeed, an enthusiastic crowd had gathered around, and it did not seem right for me to interrupt. She died two years later as the pandemic was winding down, time thrown out of joint. All I knew of her was in mediated form.

Ava & Anita by the beach, circa early 1950s 

Alex/Anita: I was fifteen or sixteen. This was the first photo. It was Ava’s idea anyway. 

Fan Chon: Do you remember how much was it?  

Alex/Anita: Maybe Ava paid for me, I don’t remember. Only one pose, first trial. 

Fan Chon: So, your virgin photo studio experience was given to this Silverlite Studio in Penang. […] Did he [the photographer] ask why you two boys want to dress up as girls? 

Alex/Anita: No, he never said that. But we were young. We were only children. 

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the writer Munshi Abdullah of Melaka, having imbibed the progressive worldview of Christian missionaries despite remaining a staunch Muslim, observed the development of a daguerreotype with amazement, particularly how “bayangnya timbul dan tenggelam”.[vii] His observation refers to the shadowy, floating quality of the emergent images upon their copperplate backing. Fast-forward a century and mistresses posed in studios for fake wedding photographs with real-life stakes: these doubled as a form of insurance to ensure their financial security. But for Alex and Ava, such studios provided a space to become the women that they sketched out in school together, under the shadow of the cross. Outraged, some of Alex’s fellow church-goers would see his mother, demanding to know what he was doing around Ava. Although she came to his defence, it was still necessary to defend himself.  

“He’s my classmate and we are good friends,” he remembered explaining.  

“Hermaphrodite!” a cousin had snapped upon learning about her dancing in public.  

Anita’s brother cycled up to her and her friends where they waited for the bus, teasingly calling out about their ​​“wall paint”, on account of the thickness of their makeup. But now, there was no hiding who she had become. To hell with being a man.

Ava and Anita at the Sun Valley, Tanjung Tokong, 1957 

The photography sessions engendered Anita’s performances to come. The photo studio is not concerned with mimesis; as Fan Chon saw it, this was a space for self-restoration, to be who you truly are—or who you want to be. It was an expensive activity for the boys: indeed, Ava had to cover Alex’s costs. Among the members of their community—exactly what this community identifies as remains up for debate, given that some members underwent a full transition while others were only occasionally “transgressive”—they invented a tradition of exchanging photographs inscribed with messages between themselves. The photos were a sort of currency, social capital reified into photo paper, memories of each other materially inscribed upon them. But Anita, not wishing to hold on to these manifestations of memory, disposed of them after learning of the deaths of their subjects.  

For Ava, these photographs were very much part of who she was, and not a mere obsession. She lived for the camera while Anita lived for the crowd. She endured the whole works, painstakingly applying her “wall paint”, preening for hours in front of a mirror, surrounded by prints of herself. They mapped various spectra: from boy to woman, from black-and-white to full colour, from the spring of youth to the rites of adulthood. And where the results were inadequate—say, for example, that their foreheads still looked a little too masculine—touch-ups could be done afterwards. A fringe painted in where one was needed, the same way that poor families had jewellery delicately painted in for posterity. She kept them jealously even in the old-age home, older but still haughty. 
 

Studio portrait of Anita and Ava, undated but possibly the 1970s
 

Even now, with Anita still front and centre, there remains an inherent bias in the way their memories circulate. Looking just at this series of photographs, the memory of Ava is more persistent. Comparatively, there are much fewer photographs of Anita, the imbalance of youth persisting even late in life. Perhaps there was a sense of schadenfreude the one time that Anita won the “Golden Girl” award. Ava, who was secretly there against her partner’s wishes, misheard the name being called out over at the Cinta Club. Both went onstage together, and the master of ceremonies insisted that there had been a mistake. In the photograph, Ava’s disgruntlement is clear, and despite Anita’s embarrassment, I suspect that she was thrilled by this outcome. Here was a visual narrative of redemption, following the many jealousies between them, the many points when she felt that Ava had much more money and privilege, with no need to work—how soft her hands were—cycling from one lover to another. From the aristocrat whom they met while eyeing a film poster, to the jeweller who frowned upon Ava’s stage performances and preferred her kept up. 

— —

Ava and Anita as wedding hostesses, undated but possibly the 1990s 
 

Has Anita received some redemption through this narrative? Can she be rehabilitated and included into the stories that we tell ourselves about Malaysia? Can a slur be reappropriated in empowering terms, or does it remain an act of violence, a marker of Otherness?[viii] Can she map her narrative onto the contemporary (read: western) version of the queer success story?  

[E]merging narratives of “global queering” […] are often organized around a coherent or “respectable” sexual identity such as the middle-class gay or lesbian household or consumer base. […] the world is calibrated by geographic and national distinctions constituting a global spread with a familiar Western political agenda for all sexual minorities: from oppression to liberation, from backwater invisibility to defined, modern sexual identity.[ix] 

A hegemonic (white) western model of queerness imposes itself upon (coloured) gendered and sexual minorities, demanding conformity with a dominant model of neoliberal individualism and success. What happens when someone does not fit into this model? And does trying to tell a story of individual empowerment reduce the very real, very vague spaces in which Anita lived into a mere setting?  

Can we even affix a label to her? Sometimes, she referred to herself as a woman, other times as a man. Anita imagined the revulsion that some men might feel at being taken in by the illusion that she was a woman, and how they might turn to violence if misled. Strains of the same vicious fear and disgust of the transperson permeate contemporary texts, even among the subversive independent local publishers. Being transgressive is not synonymous with being progressive. 

Anita remembers trying to prostitute herself in one of Kuala Lumpur’s notorious neighbourhoods, nicknamed “Belakang Mati”, where men went cruising—but eventually backing out. Incidentally, this was one of the worst-hit areas in the complex and vicious 1969 riots.[x] She felt scared. Not only did this run counter to her Catholic upbringing, but the threat of violence remained salient. Ava, meanwhile, was lucky enough to have a patron and financial resources. Ava did not need to turn to sex work, but still went ahead anyway on that night in Chow Kit. Even under these circumstances, sexual relationships remained policed along heteronormative lines—the fear of homosexuality inherited from the departed colonial regime persisted.[xi] After all, its prohibition is one of heterosexuality’s defining operations.[xii]  

Anita met a soldier once, part of a contingent booked into a hotel—he was a handsome man, she remembered. But here there were limits, where exploration was only permitted above the waist. Maybe this ambiguity was intentional. Perhaps it gave clients a license to feel “normal” or “straight”, and as for Anita, she could feel appreciated and admired for being a woman. As an old friend of Anita remarked bluntly in an interview, it was “abhorrent” for two men to be together. And drag itself may be regarded as a form of resolution, a way of constructing heteronormativity even while exposing and “renouncing the possibility of homosexuality”.[xiii] Yet to some degree, it was possible to maintain the illusion of heteronormativity. 

Perhaps we need to pause to dispel a myth that the mid-century, before the dakwah movements, the religious rejection of crony capitalism and extraordinary corruption, Malaya—here also including Singapore—was a more permissive place which accepted sexual and gendered minorities as they were. This is not quite so: a genealogy of purity had already been espoused in campaigns against yellow culture in the independent Chinese schools.[xiv] These extended into the post-socialist People’s Action Party’s policies, complete with state-sanctioned haircuts, and a direct translation into the Barisan Nasional’s campaign against “budaya kuning”, setting boundaries within which it was impossible to be queer, which official eyes saw as decadent and immoral. Queerness had to be disguised in heteronormative terms. The distinction between gender and sexuality was blurred, and for queer individuals, being simply tolerated was a godsend. But tolerance is still a far way off from inclusivity. 

For a long time, drag remained an avenue where they could perform being women. Drag held an appeal that cut across many lines, “racial” and socioeconomic alike. Europeans based there did it too, as did some aristocrats and the scions of rich families. It was very much an open secret as to who was part of the crowd, although not necessarily to their families—some of whom only posthumously learned of their sons’ performances. The members of Anita’s troupe, the Wax Follies, played their stage roles as Francis Yip, Diana Ross, Marilyn Monroe and (once in Anita’s case) Judy Garland, complete with risqué performances in state-owned venues. Once they performed daringly in front of the chief minister, getting by with a telling-off afterwards for being “naughty”. Anita remembers meeting him at a social function, asking ever so politely how they be addressed.  

Offstage, however, Anita could not officially exist. She was unrecognised on paper, where the identification cards demanded that she choose a “sex”. Not least as a government servant—she still received a pension even years afterwards—and this led to missed opportunities. As other Follies left for Europe to undergo their respective operations, to become women and marry men, Anita remained at work as a technician in a school laboratory, fending off the students who begged that she leak examination tips, filching the concave lenses from the supplies which proved perfect for preening: plucking out stray hairs to hide the tell-tale signs of beards and moustaches.  

Did her colleagues or students know about her double life? Probably, especially when Alex once showed up at work with his hair permed, much to their gossip. Curiously, his desperate students waited for him at Ava’s house. But Alex’s fear of losing his salary and pension kept him grounded. Anita remained in a liminal space, bifurcated between two worlds.

— —

 On stage with the Wax Follies

Mention P. Ramlee, the all-round entertainer, cultural symbol of mid-century Malaya, and a mythic image comes into mind, of “landscapes of rain and breeze under the banana and coconut trees in the kampung, […] one of the sanguine, positive images of the period even as the Cold War played out with devastating effect across Asia.”[xv] In one song, he flippantly sings about an envious wife and a clandestine romance with the office secretary, inviting the listening men to pay attention to his story—the tale of the charming husband. 

Mari, mari, tuan dengar ini cerita, 
Perempuan sangat mudah cemburu buta, 
Kalau lakinya orang muda, 
Dia so jealous tidak percaya […]  

Gather around lads, and hear my story, 
Ladies, you see, get envious easily, 
If her dear man’s really just a boy, 
Wait till you see her crazy jealousy […] 

Some decades down the line, Anita Sarawak took this old number and adapted it to tell the other side of the story, from the perspective of the cheated wife. 

Mari, mari, tuan dengar ini cerita, 
Perempuan tidak semua cemburu buta, 
Kalau suaminya asyik bergaya, 
Dia so jealous tidak percaya […] 

Gather around gents, now here’s my story, 
Not all ladies get envious easily, 
But if her old man’s really a dandy, 
Wait till you see her angry jealousy […] 

In addition to giving it a more rock-and-roll twist, she turned it devastatingly revisionist: a female counterpoint to the husband’s teasing, if condescendingly playful, tone. “Dengar ini Cerita” was one of the numbers that the Follies lip-synched to at the Hilton on one of their performances in Kuala Lumpur. And Anita Sarawak was there, watching the Follies, and her namesake, up on stage.  

This was a part of Anita’s world—not Ava’s, whose jeweller boyfriend forbade her from performing womanhood onstage, even if in an exaggerated, painted version. Ideas travelled: the Follies traced a link to a group from the Philippines called the Paper Dolls, who had come over to the island. Not only did they buy the Dolls’ costumes from them upon their departure, but they also picked up the tricks of the trade: keeping sponges around their hips, padding under their stockings to accentuate the curviness of their figures.  

This lost world of entertainment was something that I only learned about second-hand. My grandfather once operated a failed restaurant in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown, where a star attraction, the striptease star Rose Chan, once performed in a decidedly family-friendly way. She only sang, even then so tamely that the kids could hang around and be privy to the gossip floating about. Later, they would gravitate to the amusement parks, the nearest being at Bukit Bintang, within walking distance from the grim gates of Pudu Prison, in this carnivalesque mingling of personal and political functions.  

In this neighbourhood, the division between life and death, between what was permitted and what was not, were spatially bonded. Such amusement parks were part of the terrain in which Ava and Anita lived—it was where Ava met patrons, where they performed for the cameras or the crowds. Even if the avowed goal of such parks was to make money, they constituted a civic space of sorts, very much like our (sub)urban shopping malls. Perhaps it is only fitting that the prison has been demolished and replaced by a supposedly haunted mall. From the vantage point of the present, we are now permitted a saccharine, restorative nostalgia—longing for the lost cinemas, the erstwhile amusement parks. The Great World Park, where a studio once prominently displayed their photographs, is gone now. But once, within these walls was a space for transformation and transgression.  

Beneath these dazzling illusions, what was there? Men playfully subverting gendered conventions, or performers anxious to become the performed? The self’s emergence is also a performative act, reiterated for posterity and transformation.xvi Alex was not content to put womanhood behind at the end of the night. She was not just a character on the stage. But his attempt to leave and to undergo the transition like the other Follies would not pan out when his request for early retirement was rejected. “TIDAK LULUS.” A sister cried nightly at the prospect of his departure, and while her mother had accepted who she was, she was aging. It would be impossible to leave and become Anita. 

— —

Ava at the old age home, 1999 

Fan Chon: Have you ever dreamt of Ava? 

Alex/Anita: I did a couple of times, but I forgot. Sometimes you can’t remember your dreams. 

What does it mean to be part of a whole, to be intertwined not necessarily in body, but in soul and public memory? As a perpetual double act, an intertwined helix? The way that Fan Chon first presented the project created a linked Ava-and-Anita, Ava resurrected and re-presented through Anita’s stories. Yes, Anita lived with Ava as a part of her, from school to old age, but theirs was by no means an uncomplicated, flawless relationship. The conversations, and indeed the collected photographs themselves, now seemed permeated by melancholy. 

Fan Chon produced and directed his documentary film after Anita’s passing, pieced together from his audio recordings and archival materials. There is a scene towards the end where he and Anita comment upon clips from various films, particularly their showy musical numbers. The cinema—the Cathay, Odeon, Capitol, names repeated like a mantra—was very much part of their lives, celluloid musical dreams imported from Hollywood, where they learned their moves and numbers.[xvii] In the last scene, Nancy Kwan, playing Linda Low in Flower Drum Song, wrapped in only a towel, admires herself in reflection and prances on screen. It does not matter that Kwan does not actually sing, but she performs the requisite motions anyway. She can “enjoy being a girl”. This song lent itself to his film’s eventual title, one of the legacies that Anita left to him after she, like Ava, passed away in turn.  

But what does one do with such an inheritance? It then becomes a question of how to tell this story, and whether it is ethical to do so. Anita had given him her blessing, but it was also a story of Ava’s last days. The dividing point between auto/biography and fiction is a thin one[xviii]—at what point does telling someone else’s story become an act of invention, the detective’s work and personal involvement informing the final product?  

Alex/Anita: When she ended up at the old age home, she returned most of my pictures. She didn’t want them anymore. So, I just took them.  

Fan Chon: Because she didn’t want to keep too many things? 

Alex/Anita: Yeah, I think so. When she moved to the old age home, I didn’t go there very often. […] I went to see him a couple of times. After that, I stopped going. […] he was okay [there]. At first, he wanted a room all to herself. It was quite expensive. Then they moved her to a twin room. Later on, quadruple. 

Fan Chon: You miss her, no? 

Alex/Anita: Yeah… 

Is it possible for a sequence of photos, linked by a tenuous connective tissue of fragments of interviews and a decade of memory work, to capture these joint lives lived? ​​​​This is also a story of the transience of time, the certainty of death. The passing of friends necessarily entailed the disposal of Anita’s photographs, the technologies of memory sacrificed accordingly. The photograph is a reminder of our mortality, even as much as it seemingly provides permanence, colourised and as vibrant as intended. A material artefact awaiting its interpreter. 

IN MEMORY OF ALEX / ANITA

(b. 1934, d. 24 November 2021)

Author’s notes:

[i] Hari ini Dalam Sejarah, Pengisytiharan Kemerdekaan Persekutuan Tanah Melayu 31/08/1957, https://hariinidalamsejarah.com/peristiwa/detail/4110-pengisytiharan-kemerdekaan-persekutuan-tanah-melayu.html. 

[ii] This excerpt, and many other details here, are taken from his film, I Enjoy Being a Girl (2022)—in many ways, this essay is very much a creative engagement with Fan Chon’s work. See a description at https://freedomfilm.my/festival/film/i-enjoy-being-a-girl/. 

[iii] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes (University of California Press, 1994). 

[iv] Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Memoire," Representations 26 (1989): pp. 7–24. 

[v] Abstracted from a discussion by Eef Vermeij of the International Institute of Social History at the Malaysia Design Archive, Feb. 23, 2023. 

[vi] Jakob Burckhardt, qtd in Aleida Assmann, "The Dynamics of Cultural Memory between Remembering and Forgetting." In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, (pp. 97-107). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co, 2008, p. 98. 

[vii] Quoted in “Bayangnya itu Timbul Tenggelam: Photographic Cultures in Malaysia”, an exhibition held at the Ilham Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Jul. 21–May 9, 2021, curated by K. Azril Ismail, Hoo Fan Chon, and Simon Soon.

[viii] While the term “mak nyah” has conventionally been used to describe the transgendered community, the sociologist Alicia Izharuddin from the National University of Singapore notes that the neutral term “TG” is more popular among some members of the community today. Research presented at “Trans-motherhood on the edge: Competing necro and biopolitics in the lives of transgender mothers,” “Who Are You, Malaysia? Representations of Malaysia's Past, Present and Future after 60 Years of Nationhood,” the Malaysia and Singapore Society of Australia (MASSA) 2023 conference, July 8, 2023, New Era University College. 

[ix] Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (New York University Press, 2013), p. 98.  

[x] Although the events of 13 May are often remembered as a “racial” riot, which subsequently saw the introduction of affirmative action policies, the riots should more accurately be conceived of in terms of class—which in turn was mapped onto ethnic divisions stemming from the colonial period. As Meredith L. Weiss writes, “[t]hese clashes are best understood as between Malay and Chinese “have-nots,” in a system of persistent interethnic inequality” (p. 13). See. "Legacies of the Cold War in Malaysia: Anything but Communism." Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 50, no. 4, 2020, pp. 511-29, doi:10.1080/00472336.2019.1709128. 

[xi] Lim, Brown, pp. 93–94. 

[xii] Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford UP, 1997), p. 139. 

[xiii] Butler, Psychic, p. 146.  

[xiv] See for example Beiyu Zhang, “Staging Chinese Student Activism in Cold War Singapore: Performing Chineseness and Embodying the Malayan Nation, 1950s–60s,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 53, no. 4 (2022): pp. 786–806. 

[xv] Show, Ying Xin. "Introduction." Revisiting Malaya: Uncovering Historical and Political Thoughts in Nusantara, edited by Ying Xin Show and Guat Peng Ngoi (pp. 1-14), SIRD, 2020, p.1.  

[xvi] Performativity has become a useful framework for understanding not just gender, but also other aspects of our lived experiences, including the entanglements between gender, “race”, politics and spatiality. See some discussions in Michael R. Glass & Reuben Rose-Redwood (eds.), Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space (Routledge, 2014). 

[xvii] For a brief introduction to film and cinema culture in Malay(si)a, see Caleb Hern-Ee Goh and Su Lyn Koay, “The Celluloid Looking Glass: Changing Perspectives of Malaya Through Film,” New Naratif, 2019, https://newnaratif.com/the-celluloid-looking-glass-changing-perspectives-of-malaya-through-film/. 

[xviii] Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford UP, 2010), p. 523.