Look at the new cover of Stateless Stranger. Forget the title for a second. Look at the dotted line.
Four glowing dots. Johor Bahru. Penang. The Flight. Chicago.
That’s not design. That’s my life.
Johor Bahru — 1996. Born stateless.
I was born in the south of Malaysia, across the causeway from Singapore. I took my first breath on Malaysian soil, and Malaysia said I don’t exist. No birth certificate. No IC. No papers. I was a ghost with a heartbeat.
Penang — 700 kilometers north.
When the money was gone and my father was gone, my mother did what a woman named Mercy does. She picked up three boys and moved us from the very bottom of the peninsula to the very top. Seven hundred kilometers. I was four. I don’t remember being carried, but I know I was, because I’m here.
We landed in Bagan Dalam, Butterworth. The mainland side. The side where refugees end up. I grew up invisible there. No school. No hospital. Bullied in my own street for a name I didn’t choose. At eight years old, the UN gave me a card that said I exist. It changed almost nothing, except now they could see me.
It was also in Penang, in a foster home in Kepala Batas, that somebody finally taught me how to pray. I was born Muslim, but nobody had sat me down and shown me wudu, the takbeer, Al-Fatihah. The house that fed me taught me to stand before Allah. I never forgot that.
The Flight — 2018. KLIA to Istanbul.
One dot for the night I left everything I’d ever known with a one-way ticket and a heart hammering against my ribs. Istanbul in between. Then the long water. Then a new country.
Chicago — Apartment 3N.
The last dot glows the brightest, because it’s where the pen finally moved. In a small apartment in Chicago, on a phone, with zero formal education and English as my fifth language, I wrote the book you’re holding. The boy who didn’t exist until he was eight now has his name on Amazon around the world.
So when you look at this cover, understand: the map is the message. Every dot is a place that tried to end the story. Every dot is a place the story survived.
They said I was nothing. Allah said I was something. I chose to believe Allah.
Stateless Stranger is available now in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. Read more →