My mother contributed to my sense of womanhood: She taught me tenacity, she taught me that I am my own person, she taught me that I had to do for myself.
My mom’s journey to “becoming” a woman: born and brought up in Malaysia until her father’s death when she was 16 when her family moved to India. When she moved to India, she felt othered because of having been raised in Malaysia and being extremely different than the people in Kerala who didn’t like her mini dresses and hadn’t heard a lot of the music that she knew. She was used to many different kinds of people, Chinese, Indian, British. She left India for Montreal at age 22 to marry a man she’d known for two weeks even though she hadn’t finished her undergraduate degree and was close because she just wanted to get away from India.
