I alter my accent to sound more Malaysian—clipping my words, adopting a singsong manner and peppering my sentences with affectations once commonplace in my parlance: ‘wei’, ‘lah’, ‘mah’. But it doesn’t convince the Malaysian acquaintance I’m talking to at a mutual friend’s wedding; there are Australian echoes to every word I utter, the vowels too rounded, the consonants too sharp. He looks at me askance when I say I attended Malaysian public schools from Year 3 to Form 5 (the equivalent of Year 11). But my fate as an interloper is sealed when we start talking about Indian weddings—a ritual I tell him I want to partake in, when the time is right—and I confess that I don’t know how to tie a sari. He doesn’t say this, but the imputation is obvious from his furrowed brows: why would I choose to partake in a Malaysian-Indian celebration when I’m the furthest thing from being either Malaysian or Indian?

I’m unable to fully inhabit either my Australian or my Malaysian voice because, in reality, I’m neither. My tattered passport may be clad in the bright red sheath of the country of my birth, but more than half my life has been spent oscillating between Sydney and Melbourne. The Australian accent was both the first and the last that I acquired, but the ten years I spent in Malaysia during the most formative period of my upbringing have irrevocably changed how I conceive of myself and how I sound—my pronunciation of certain words will always be corrected by well-meaning Australians.