My mother oiled my hair every Sunday.  

She would sit behind me on the cool tiled floor, knees tucked beneath her sari, and part my hair with a toothcomb darkened from years of use. The oil—coconut, sometimes mixed with fenugreek—warmed in a little steel bowl beside her. It smelled of kitchens and temples. She rarely said a word. None were needed. The ritual knew itself.  

I learned, early, there are forms of love that speak only through silence. 

Her hands moved with care. My body stayed still. The silence between us was not strained. It was expected. Polished, like good shoes before church. Outside, the mynahs cried, and motorbikes passed. But inside, everything softened. She smoothed the oil into my scalp with her palms. I watched it trail across the floor tiles and disappear into a crack near the skirting board.  

Later, I would come to understand that silence was more than what we kept inside—it was also shaped around us. Rules governed it. A lineage sustained it. 

In our home, silence disguised itself as respect, loyalty, even self-control. Guests arrived and we stayed quiet. Elders spoke and we nodded. At the rise of men’s voices, ours fell away. My mother called this good upbringing—the discipline of holding your tongue to keep the family safe. 

No one explained safe from what.  

Even then, I sensed the weight of it—that quiet was choreographed, never hollow. My scalp tingled beneath her fingers, less from pain than from the tension of knowing this stillness carried intent. I asked no questions. I already understood enough. 

Years later, I would look back on those Sunday mornings and wonder if she was trying to tell me something—wordless, in the brief pause of her hands on my crown, listening. Perhaps she already knew the world would never ask what happened to girls like us, and so she prepared me instead to survive without answers. 

Oil gave my hair its shine. Silence trained me into obedience. Both were offered as love—though a love that demanded compliance. 

But not everything given in love should be kept.  

*** 

A silence grows up with girls in many parts of Southeast Asia—less reflection or reverence than instruction. Taught, reinforced, rewarded, it begins in the family home and soon spreads into classrooms, temples, and the law. 

Girls are praised for their quietness—well brought up, never making a fuss. A soft-spoken, modest, reserved daughter is considered safe. But the one who speaks directly, asks too many questions, or names what should remain unspoken becomes a risk. 

In Malaysia, we call this budi bahasa—politeness. The idea, in theory, is respect. In practice, however, it hardens into a code for obedience, especially when layered with gender, age, and religion. 

Children are not to speak unless spoken to. Girls, even more so. In many households, even today, daughters are taught to carry their emotions like folded linen: clean, contained, and out of sight.  

The silence is not only personal. It is structural. According to national statistics, the majority of child sexual abuse cases in Malaysia occur within the family or close community. Fewer than one in ten are reported. Survivors who speak are often met with disbelief, shame, or outright blame. Police ask what the girl was wearing. Families plead for privacy. Churches pray. A mother weeps quietly in the kitchen—less for what happened than for what might be said. 

In such an environment, silence is more than a symptom of trauma—it evolves into survival itself, spoken as a language, practiced as a skill, carried like a shield, and remembered as a scar. 

Silence is reinforced by institutions that privilege harmony over justice. Religious leaders preach forgiveness before truth. Schools discourage “emotional disruption.” The law still relies on testimony that can be discredited if the survivor does not recall her trauma in a linear, composed manner. In courtrooms, the burden of proof falls heavier on the silenced.  

And yet, the silence is rarely named for what it is: cultural discipline, a mechanism that keeps power undisturbed, a social contract that protects perpetrators while grooming victims for lifelong deference. 

Did you know that silence is not always imposed; sometimes it is inherited? When daughters are taught by women who were never allowed to speak, it can feel like a gift—offering peace, securing love. But passed down through generations, that same silence hardens into doctrine, punishing the voice before it ever rises. 

In the homes I knew, there were things that could be whispered but never written. Names that could be acknowledged with a glance but never with breath. A girl could be touched, harmed, undone—and still be told that the family name must be guarded, father and brother preserved, community left untouched. She is warned her story might bring shame, her voice might cause damage. 

As if the damage had not already been done.  

This silence is neither ancient nor inevitable. Constructed, it can also be dismantled—yet only once we name it for what it is: a system that does not protect the vulnerable, but rather protects power by teaching girls to bury their truths beneath layers of grace.  

*** 

There was a hallway in the house where no one paused. It held old photos, rosary beads, a spray of faded artificial orchids, and a framed wedding portrait whose glass was cracked down the middle. My mother never spoke of the crack. She dusted around it.  

We were a family that knew how to avoid the obvious.  

Some truths weren’t buried—they were simply never named. A child could live her entire life inside a house built of them. She might learn to walk carefully, measure silence, tighten her mouth without instruction. The unspoken taught her more than anything ever said aloud. 

One room stayed locked, even when empty. A chair sat unused. A cousin stopped appearing at birthdays. When guests asked, someone shifted the subject. Stories reshaped themselves around absence. Those silences were intentional—inherited, refined over generations like recipes passed down without ink. 

Sometimes the girl felt it in her bones—tension arriving before the person did. Footsteps from her father carried a different cadence; her mother’s breath, a heavier weight. Words weren’t needed for her to sense something was wrong. And when that happened, the rule was always the same: carry it quietly, avoid attention, spare the family embarrassment, never make it worse. 

In families like mine, love is offered in food, money left on the table, or errands run without complaint. But when harm enters the room, love becomes something else. It becomes management. Damage control. The girl is never questioned about what happened. Instead, she is told to keep it unspoken. 

The girl is told: avoid bringing shame, protect her mother’s health, keep the family intact. Any words that might make it harder for others to breathe, must be left unspoken. 

She learns the art of protecting those who did not protect her.  

In that same hallway, I once noticed a photograph with a face removed—cut away by neat, deliberate scissors. It sat on the shelf for years, as though effacement might make memory obedient. But memory is never obedient. It shifts, seeps, names itself—even when we do not. 

Daughters may inherit gold, or recipes, or silence so thorough that even their grief cannot speak its own name. 

*** 

Mothers are often the first to teach their daughters how to survive silence.  

It begins gently—through glances, small corrections, the soft pressure of a hand on the shoulder when a question is asked too boldly. Later, it becomes something firmer: a warning, a sermon, a withheld tenderness. In homes like mine, silence is passed down with quiet, unquestioning love. That is what makes it so difficult to refuse.  

A girl learns early that a “good daughter” is agreeable. Polite. Modest. She does not raise her voice, especially not against her elders. Naming things that make others uncomfortable is forbidden. If something terrible happens, she must be strong enough to bear it—and quiet enough to avoid burdening others. 

Such lessons are rarely spoken aloud, nor do they need to be. They are absorbed through ritual and rhythm—clothes folded with care, certain gazes deliberately avoided, a mother’s mouth tightening when a neighbour’s scandal is mentioned. A girl learns what may be voiced by studying her mother’s silences more closely than her father’s rules. 

For many women in Malaysia, obedience is not merely expected—it is sanctified. Religious institutions elevate endurance as virtue. In Catholic churches, women are taught to forgive as Christ forgave, without condition. In Hindu households, women are praised for their patience, their strength to remain even when wronged. The mythology of the long-suffering woman is everywhere—woven through scripture, printed in schoolbooks, repeated in the stories our mothers tell about their own mothers. 

But what is framed as forgiveness often functions as silencing. Survivors are not asked what they need—only what they can let go of. A girl’s pain is treated as secondary. What matters more are reconciliation, the restoration of family honour, and the demand that she move on quietly. 

When a daughter discloses abuse, the confrontation reaches beyond the abuser. What falls under threat is the myth itself—the illusion of an intact family, of suffering made purposeful, of silence preserved as safety. 

This is where maternal complicity often begins—born of fear rather than cruelty. A mother may genuinely believe she is protecting her daughter by downplaying the harm. She may have survived by doing the same. In protecting the family name, she believes she is protecting the future. But in doing so, she offers her daughter the same silence that failed her.  

I watched women lower their eyes in the presence of men who had harmed others. Aunties whispered, “Don’t make a scene,” when someone spoke too loudly at a family gathering. A mother warned her daughter to be careful how she dressed around an uncle, yet never asked why such caution was necessary. 

It is easy to blame the men who commit harm. But it is harder, and more important, to question the systems that protect them. These systems are upheld not only by law and religion, but by the quiet collaboration of those who believe they have no choice—people who, in trying to keep their daughters safe, pass on the very silence that puts them at risk. 

There is no easy resolution here. Loving a mother who could not protect you means inhabiting a fracture. Understanding her silence is never the same as forgiving it. Yet recognition matters—especially for those of us who have chosen to break the pattern. Silence does not end by itself; someone has to speak. 

In families like mine, obedience is confused with peace. But peace built on silence is no peace at all. What emerges instead is fear dressed in fine clothing, damage carefully left undisturbed, pain recast as tradition. 

And daughters are not born to carry that burden forever.  

*** 

To speak is to change the shape of the room.  

Most daughters learn, early, to fold themselves into the room’s corners—agreeable, quiet, curved inward. When one finally begins to speak—truly speak—it no longer matters whether the voice is soft or fierce. The air tightens. Something old begins to tremble. 

The cost of that trembling is rarely visible from the outside. It arrives in layers—missed invitations, silence answering silence, mothers who no longer call. For some of us, speaking means exile—less a matter of physical distance than something slower: belonging stripped away, affection quietly withdrawn. 

When I left, no one called it leaving. There was neither grand announcement nor suitcase waiting at the door. Only gentle withdrawal—my name fading from group chats, birthdays passing without mention, questions that never came. I stopped going home. The house went on without me. 

This is the cost—never rage or revenge or public disowning, but distance. Clean, quiet, irreversible. 

Sometimes, I imagine what would have happened had I stayed—smiling through the silences, lowering my voice at the right times, swallowing the unease in my body. My seat at the table would have remained, their comfort preserved. But I would have dissolved myself—one apology at a time. 

Even among the well-meaning, the discomfort is palpable. People prefer healing that is tidy, past tense, not messy. But trauma does not arrive in straight lines. It curls and stutters. Some days it is loud. Other days it is just a tension behind the eyes; a breath you forget you’re holding. You do not explain it, because you’ve learned most people aren’t really asking. They just want to know you’re “doing better.”  

And you are. But better isn’t the same as reconciled.  

Speaking does not bring freedom. What it offers instead is faithfulness—anchored in the self, in truth, in the child who once needed someone to say: Yes. I see it too. Such words create a different kind of loyalty, one that runs against what was taught: no longer allegiance to the family image, but devotion to the part that survived. 

There is loneliness in this kind of speech. People fall away. Certainty slips. The illusion that everything can be mended dissolves. Yet in its place comes something sturdier—voice that does not falter, silence chosen rather than inherited. 

And maybe that’s the point. Speaking is not only an act of self-preservation. It is resistance—on behalf of those who never could, anyone still learning how, and the ones denied the chance altogether. 

When people ask about my family, I tell them this: I come from a long line of quiet women. I am simply the first who refused to stay quiet.  

                                                                        ***  

Some silences are broken with a scream. Others with a sentence spoken quietly, for the first time, without apology.  

For me, neither scream nor declaration began the change. A single word written down—one I had never spoken aloud—came first. Then another followed. A sentence appeared, unfamiliar, like trying on a new kind of skin. The voice didn’t arrive all at once; instead, it surfaced in fragments: lines in a notebook, conversations cut short, stories I refused to flatten for someone else’s comfort. 

Sometimes, voice is mistaken for volume. Mine did not grow louder—it grew deeper, taking root, gaining clarity, no longer asking for permission. 

I did not find peace in speaking. What I found was presence—living inside my own body without bracing, entering a room without scanning for danger, sitting alone and feeling, at last, that being whole was not a betrayal. 

There is grief in this too. Possibilities that never arrived. A girl I might have become if someone had asked the right questions earlier. But grief is not the opposite of healing. It is part of it. Some days, I still carry the weight of things I never got to say. But I carry them in my own hands now—no longer in someone else’s name. 

This voice—whatever it has become—is not just mine. It belongs to every girl who was taught to keep quiet. Every daughter who learned how to shrink before she learned how to speak. Every woman who walked away from the story she was written into and decided to write her own instead.  

I don’t speak because I am brave. I speak because I was silent for too long. Because silence, when inherited without question, becomes a kind of burial. And I would rather live—awkwardly, honestly, audibly—than lie still in someone else’s version of the truth.  

Sometimes I still think of the hair oil. The way it warmed between her palms. How her hands smoothed it through my scalp, careful, quiet, controlled. I used to think she was blessing me. Now I know she was preparing me—for a world that would not ask questions. For a silence I was expected to protect.  

But the silence ends with me.  

What remains is neither noise, vengeance, nor rage—only voice. Clear. Steady. Unapologetic. A new kind of inheritance. 

But stories like mine cannot exist in isolation.  

If we are to dismantle the systems that keep girls quiet—whether in family homes, religious spaces, courtrooms, or classrooms—we must begin with a new kind of attention: listening differently, believing otherwise, recognising that silence can masquerade as peace and that obedience is often no choice at all. 

We need to ask better questions. Of our families, faiths and institutions. Why are we still protecting the image of safety instead of building real safety? Why are survivors still told to forgive before they are allowed to speak?  

Change rarely rises from a single voice. It gathers strength when silence becomes unbearable to everyone—when the burden is no longer carried only by those who once lived inside it. 

Those who have remained silent—I hope you know your story still matters. Complicity, too, can be questioned; there is still time to ask why. And for anyone listening—truly listening—begin by making space for what was once unspeakable. 

Let us unlearn the silence.  

And may we inherit something else—voice.