AN ART PROJECT BY HOO FAN CHON
TEXT BY WILLIAM THAM
The photograph displayed on this issue’s cover, as well as the ones featured in these pages, were found by artist Hoo Fan Chon in an antique shop in George Town, in Malaysia. In doing research, he traced back the photos’ owner, Ava, and got to know about her through multiple meetings with her lifetime friend, Anita. The following text is written by William Tham and was originally published in Portside Review in 2023. It describes the ways through which Fan Chon revived this memory through both Ava’s photos and Anita’s words and how their gender identity escapes definitions and demarcations.
At a glance, this photograph from 1957, the year of Malaysia’s independence, 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 a different story: in their revelry, its subjects defy the gendered 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.”
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.
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 monetized, and what must be utterly forgotten. Pierre Nora—as conservative as his conception of memory may be—made a useful observation about archives (“Between Memory and History,” 1989). The professional archive is a limited space that must selectively destroy its Borgesian, unending records. Digitization, fraught with concerns about file formats and continuous maintenance, presents no guarantee of posterity. Meanwhile, the informal archive of collective memory only leaves us with ephemeral fragments.
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.
(end of the first excerpt)
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? 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.” (Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens, 2013).
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. 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. After all, its prohibition is one of heterosexuality’s defining operations.
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.” 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. 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 unrecognized 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. ■