Ideas - Living in legal limbo: How states create 'ghost citizens'

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

What do ghost stories capture about the experience of being stateless? IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed speaks with lawyer and scholar Jamie Chai Yun Liew on how states create “ghost citizens” — and how the long aftermath of colonialism still shapes definitions of citizenship today.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

When Jamie Chayun Liu was a young girl, she often heard ghost stories. One of the most memorable stories told to me was of a woman ghost known as Pontianak. I remember this story because my auntie, visiting from Southeast Asia, was shocked to find a small banana tree as a plant flanking our bay window in the kitchen of my childhood home. She warned me that Pontianak likes to live in banana trees and that she is a vengeful spirit that can inflict bad luck on those around her. I never looked at that plant the same way again.

Yuanbi Li Adrian, a scholar in communication and film studies, explains that the Pontianak is widely recognized as the most dreaded supernatural being in Malay folklore and mythology. Often described as a fearsome mythical creature with vampire-like qualities, she is said to have fangs and can only be subdued using a sharp object, which is usually a nail stuck to the back of her neck. Pontianak's story has been told and retold in folklore as that of a beautiful woman who died shortly after giving birth.

In some versions of the story, she died from the shock of hearing that her child was stillborn and then returns from the dead. Jamie is now a lawyer and a professor at the University of Ottawa studying statelessness. The concept of statelessness really refers to a person who does not have citizenship to any country whatsoever. So they don't have any citizenship to any country, period. And during a research trip to Malaysia, Pontianak returned to haunt her. Friends would send me videos where wispy apparitions would be seen to float on a dark highway. The superstitious side of me held a respect for the warnings and stories,

but the scholar in me also started to see a parallel between the lived experiences of stateless persons and Pontianak. I began to believe again, like I did as a child, that ghosts, the living dead, were among us. That trip helped crystallize a new concept, ghost citizens. That trip helped crystallize a new concept, ghost citizens. When I talk about ghost citizens, I'm really referring to the community of people who are within a state that have enduring deep and long connections to that place, whether it's through family, community, business, all kinds of connections. And yet, for mysterious reasons, the state is denying them their claim that they actually are part of that community. On Ideas, my conversation with Jamie Cha-Yun Liu about statelessness, invisibility, and reimagining belonging. My name is Jamie Liu. I am a law professor, lawyer, author, and I'd like to think of myself

as a public intellectual that's trying to help people understand more complicated things that are happening in law that affect mainly marginalized people. Why do you think that's important? I think that some people find the law daunting or outside the scope of their daily lives, but I really want people to understand that it permeates through so many things in terms of how we interact with one another, how we understand who people are and the ways in which they exist. So it's really important for me to demystify the law, demystify its effects and the way it operates in our society. How did you first start thinking about the idea of ghost citizens? It was nearly the end of my field trip in Malaysia. So I went to do some research about statelessness there. And I had written, you know, a very, very rough draft of my first novel. And

it was more of an experiment to see if I could do it. And I was revisiting things that helped me understand my language, my culture as a child, the folk tales that I heard from my parents, my aunts, especially. These were a kind of ghost story, you know, and I kind of thought about the concept of ghost citizen as reinforcing some of those narratives that I heard, but also giving life to the experience and the phenomena of statelessness. So it really came out of memory, it came out of generative thinking about folk stories, ghost stories, but it also is a product of creative writing, of journaling that turned into a novel. The novel Jamie was writing is called Dandelion. It tells the story of a young woman named Lily

who grows up in British Columbia. She knows her father was once stateless, but it's not until after her mother disappears that she learns her mother's status was more precarious than she realized. The story of Pontianak began to shape both the novel and Jamie's work as a scholar of law. Here's a scene from Dandelion, which takes place after Lily's mother disappears. Auntie Duniu took over the house with pleasure. She rearranged things in the kitchen, and when Bea and I protested that mother had put something in its place for a reason, she would snap. Well, she's not here anymore, is she? Auntie fixated on the banana tree in our kitchen. When Uncle Stephen came by, she demanded he get rid of that plant immediately.

Buang hla lasap. Throw that dirty thing away, she ordered. Tu Niu, you are being ridiculous, Uncle Stephen grunted as he lifted the plant. You need to help me. I'm not touching that lasap tang. Garbage can. We don't need to see her anymore. And taking that tree out will guarantee it.

Those old ghost stories are making you paranoid. I'm not paranoid, La. I told you time and time again that she was Pontianak. Her hair was too perfect. She always looked too sweetly at my brother. When she lost my brother's only son, I know she died. You were not there, Stephen. I saw the blood drain from her face. We've been living with a ghost all this time, and now she has gone back to where she belongs. I've been telling Aloy that he's much better off without

her. Our only worry is whether the girls are of this world or not. Mom is not a ghost, Bee shouted. The two projects grew alongside each other, the novel Dandelion and a nonfiction book called Ghost Citizens. So as you said, you like to demystify. I wonder if you could explain what the difference is or how you define the specific category of ghost citizens. When there are so many millions of people who are stateless, tell me specifically what ghost citizens means. Yeah, so I'll start from the very global idea that for your listeners who may not know, there are millions of stateless people in the world and that the concept of statelessness really refers to a person who does not have citizenship to any country whatsoever. So they don't have

any citizenship to any country, period. Even though they might be living in a country or might be residing for a long period of time within a country, they might still not have citizenship. So ghost citizens are a smaller subset of that larger group of stateless people, people who believe that they are citizens of a country that they are living in, that have longstanding, deep, genuine ties to that country, whether it's through their family living there for many generations, whether it's because they have children who were born there, parents who were born there, whether it's because they have children who were born there, parents who were born there, whether it's because they have employment, community support, all kinds of

different links that, you know, anchor them to the place that they consider home. But for whatever reason, the state that they're within does not recognize them as a citizen or is denying them the legal proof or evidence or document that substantiates this fact. For Jamie, ghost citizenship is not a static state of being. She also uses the term to refer to an active process, how stateless people become and remain stateless. So ghost citizens are ghost citizens for in two ways. The first is that they are being ghosted. You know, a lot of young people might relate to this in the dating world. So someone doesn't return your calls or texts. You know, the state is simply not responding to

people's applications for citizenship or claims that they are citizens. And so they're completely ignoring them, denying them access to the status of citizen. So what I mean is they could be going to a government counter or registrar to apply for citizenship and encountering people or saying, you know, you don't look like you're Canadian or you don't look like you're Malaysian, that kind of interaction. And so they're conferring ghost citizenship on them. Like, you look like you're from this country. We're going to find you legally as a citizen of another country. For example, the Philippines, Thailand, China. It could happen in the courtrooms, in legal decisions, in troubling trends that are arising through legal decisions in the courts and in pronouncements where people might not actually be citizens of other countries

and yet the courts are making speculative findings based on no evidence whatsoever that the mere opportunity to obtain citizenship elsewhere makes you a citizen of that other country and is enough of a legal fact to avoid looking at the merits of a case of whether or not someone is a citizen of the country that they are claiming to be. So that's how I look at the whole concept of ghost citizens. It's first that ghosting effect that the states are denying, but also this kind of secondary practice that states are starting to do more often, which is to tell people, you're not a citizen here, you're a citizen of a foreign country, despite any lack of evidence, document, or confirmation from a foreign state that they are a citizen of another state.

And then, you know, the third kind of thread that I, you know, pulled through my research is just the experience of being stateless. For some people, it does feel like a ghost-like experience, like they're in purgatory, that they've experienced an administrative death, and that they're living their lives in limbo, waiting for something to change so that they can begin living again. In my conversations with stateless persons, they have communicated their feelings of invisibility in a variety of ways that invoke ghost-like imagery. For example, one stateless person told me, I found out I was stateless when I was around 18 years old

when I wanted to apply for a bank account, when I was sick and went to the hospital, and I realized, this is statelessness. I can't go anywhere. I can't do anything. I'm invisible. Another stateless person poignantly reflects, it's been difficult without status. I'm still young. It feels like I'm missing out, that I'm missing out on life.

People are living and going on without me. One stateless person provides, when my documents were taken away, I felt lost. Missing the documents has meant I feel like I am a missing person. One advocate for stateless persons told me that even the legal decisions are not there for us to see. A lot of decisions are not public. It's like this problem doesn't exist. Another advocate told me that, unfortunately, people do just give up. They are not in the records. They are nowhere. They just disappear.

So when we talk about 10 million stateless people, do you have any sense how many of them are what you might describe as ghost citizens? I think a significant portion. It's really hard to know for certain because, you know, the statistics rely on governments to count people. And there's a couple of problems with that. You know, some states don't want to acknowledge that a problem like this exists within their border. You know, other places, stateless persons are actually detained and some are deported to countries they've never been to before.

So a lot of stateless people don't want to be known to the state until they are sure that they can apply for citizenship or want to take that risk. So it's really the figures and the numbers, the stats are really a mystery. We don't really know for certain how many there are, but I would say a significant portion of stateless people are already within countries that they consider their own. And the problem is that they're facing issues with getting citizenship and being recognized as kin, as family, as community members. Yeah. As you mentioned, we have heard of cases. I mean, I remember hearing in the UK about, you know, people who are being deported to Afghanistan who had no direct connection to that country. I'm curious how common it is for courts here in Canada to conjure up ghost citizenship

elsewhere to deny someone's status or protection in this country. Yeah, I think it is more common than people might realize. There is a very, very famous case that involved an individual named Dipan Bhutlakoti. He is, by all normal conceptions of citizenship, a Canadian. He was born on Canadian soil, but he was criminalized and got in trouble with the law. became, he was criminalized and got in trouble with the law. And as a result of that, it caught the attention of Canada Border Services Agency. They reviewed his citizenship status and claimed that his parents were diplomats at the time that he was born. And Canadian citizenship law excludes people who were born under diplomatic status in Canada from obtaining Canadian citizenship. His parents were, in fact, domestics or, from what I understand, cleaners for

a diplomat. So the diplomatic status is quite tenuous to begin with. But the timing of it is also very uncertain. However, you know, our legal system did take it as fact that they were diplomats. And as a result, he was deemed stateless, you know. But the Canadian government didn't believe and didn't make that legal finding he was stateless. They simply stated that he was not a citizen of Canada. And they also commented that he had the opportunity to obtain citizenship in India by virtue of his parents' home country and their citizenship there. It's unclear whether his parents still have citizenship in India.

You know, and of note in this case is that the Canadian government and the courts were aware that the Indian government was contacted. They were asked to confirm Dipan Bhutlakoti's status. They confirmed he was not a citizen of India and that they had no claim over him. And despite this, Canada still deemed Dipan not a Canadian citizen. And he still lives in Canada today in limbo without any citizenship whatsoever

and has very little access to the normal things that we take for granted in life, such as obtaining a job and having any normal ways in which we can plan ahead for the future. So this is a very prominent case that's been in the public for some time. But yeah, this is a very good example of where the Canadian courts and the Canadian government have created a case of a stateless individual. What does that say about how the law, like our legal system, that this kind of speculation is allowed in the courtroom?

Like, what does that say about a society that permits that to happen? Yeah, and you know, for me as a lawyer and a legal scholar, I found this extremely troubling. You know, for me as a lawyer and a legal scholar, I found this extremely troubling. Many of us are aware and understand that there are burdens and standards of proof in the legal system meant to protect people. And to understand that when legal findings are made, they're based on something. They're substantiated on evidence. They have a foundational base of confirmation or corroboration. I mean, there's entire courses in law schools surrounding what kinds of evidence can be proffered. And yet, in this kind of setting, we see in, you know, either citizenship applications or in immigration proceedings, the courts are really playing fast and loose with the

evidence rules. You know, in many of the cases that I've studied, there is nothing but mere speculation. And it's speculation that could really change someone's life. Completely, completely. It is life-changing. It renders someone without a home, like that you are legally made homeless through this speculative finding. Like that you are legally made homeless through this speculative finding. And, you know, if you kind of want to flip it, they say, well, the burden is on the person to prove that they're stateless. And what that really means is that, you just need to go to the countries where the courts have identified that you potentially could have a claim for citizenship. But, you know, my research really shows how difficult it is to apply for citizenship and that even though on paper and in the law on text, you might qualify for citizenship, it doesn't mean you will actually get it because there's so many problems with processing. You know, I think Canadians understand watching the news, the difficulties that migrants themselves go through in terms of immigration applications and processing. And if you can imagine someone going through that in a citizenship context in different parts of the world, that is a challenge in and of itself. And yet courts are taking this kind of speculative, future-looking, prospective process as a given, and therefore finding that someone is a citizen.

been very little attention paid to this phenomena and very little criticism raised with regards to the standards and burdens of proof that we live up to in other legal contexts. And in the meantime, are those people protected in any way in any other legal or international legal setting? I mean, are there protections that are guaranteed through international law for stateless people? it has a caveat. And that caveat's always that the state has a prerogative right to decide who is allowed within its territory, within its borders. And so that right to nationality really is dampened by this kind of veto power on the part of states to say who belongs and who's allowed to come within our borders. Is it possible those two ideas can ever be reconciled? No, I don't think so,

because the state always has the trump card, so to speak. And so I think, you know, one of the things that I put forward in my research is that the human rights framework has really been ineffective in this arena, and that stateless people really can't turn to the notion of rights to really resolve their cases. And so I think while there's a lot of admirable work going into tweaking nationality laws and calling on states to sign international conventions, that can only take us so far. There has to be more of a wholesale review over how we understand citizenship and whether or not we actually want to lean or rely on state recognition as a way to structure our communities. On Ideas, you're listening to my conversation with Jamie Chai-Yun Liu about statelessness

and her book, Go Citizens. You can find Ideas wherever you get your podcasts. And on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on US Public Radio, and on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

Hey there, I'm David Common Ayyad. we'll be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. For years, lawyer Jamie Chay-Yun Liu has been consumed with the subject of statelessness.

How the law renders people stateless, what it means to move through the world unclaimed by any state, and how statelessness could prompt all of us to reimagine community, citizenship, and belonging. Those questions have taken her to many places, including a village called Kampong Ayer. In the dark and murky waters of the Brunei River sits Kampong Ayer. My father grew up in a neighboring water village that no longer exists, and Kampong Ayer is where my family takes me to bear witness to where we are from. My father has no love for his childhood home.

This cannot be blamed on the lack of charm or community in the village that exists today. Born in Brunei, my father was stateless. It was this lack of citizenship that led my father to migrate to Canada. His rootlessness in Brunei, however, led me back to Asia to try to understand why. How could someone be born into a country and not have citizenship? How could the proboscis monkeys, swinging from the trees above the water village, feel more at home than he did?

My father is the inspiration behind all of this research. He was born stateless in a country called Brunei. It's on a very tiny country on the island of Borneo. And it was a former British colony. And, you know, the law at that time when he was born, which still persists today, denies citizenship to anyone who is of Chinese descent. And so my dad was stateless for a good portion of his life. It was only in his 20s when he applied to a number of different countries

to try to leave and obtain more secure status elsewhere. His story is that he applied to Japan, Australia, United States, and Canada, and Canada was the first to respond. And so he migrated to Canada in the 70s as an economic migrant because at the time he would not have qualified for refugee protection, but there was no other pathway. And then he sponsored my mother, and I was born in Canada. And when I was growing up, I had thought my dad's migration story to Canada was unusual.

I thought it was unique. my dad's migration story to Canada was unusual. I thought it was unique. I did not realize until I was a lawyer when I came across several cases involving stateless persons. Some of them were Palestinian, some of them were from Asia, and some of them were from Africa. So there was, you know, a couple of people that I had represented in my legal practice who were stateless. So I began to see statelessness in different contexts. And then as a legal scholar, I was, you know, confronted with writing people studying this phenomenon. And I was curious as to how could it be that my father was stateless? How is it that people are stateless today?

And why? Why is this status created and maintained? And that led me down a very long journey that I'm still on in trying to sort out how is it that this phenomenon exists and the troubling existence that people have to endure as a result of it. Yeah. I want to press you a bit more on the idea of how his experience, your father's specific experience, kind of changed or shaped the way that you think about not just citizenship and people's status as citizens, but about law and about belonging even. Yeah. My dad always was one of, he was an unusual person because a lot of people in my family didn't talk about, you know, the past trauma of being stateless. But my father

was very open about talking about it with me because he wanted me to realize how lucky I was. And certainly I do recognize that now after having gone back home. And in fact, it's kind of ironic. My dad was actually quite upset with me. And, you know, he said, I brought you to Canada so you wouldn't have to go back. So I remember going back and doing research. But it made me appreciate what he had done because, you know, had my father not taken those risks or even put that application in, my life would be very different today. put that application in, my life would be very different today. And I think about how there are children right now who can't go to school in the same part of the world that my dad was from, children who can't do simple things like join sports teams and travel with them to tournaments,

and then more serious repercussions. Some children can't access healthcare, don't have housing, are detained when they become teenagers simply for a routine traffic stop or whatever, just because they don't have the appropriate identification. So, you know, for me, my dad accentuated, for him, he describes it as luck, you know, but I think for me, I view his move to Canada as one of resistance that he wasn't going to accept that, you know, but he was also lucky in the sense that Canada did accept his application. And I think it's one of those things that it's important to recognize that it was, I guess, eye opening to see people with the exact same last name as me. Like I remember doing research and a lawyer bringing out this file and saying, you know, this could be you. Look at the last name on this file. And in fact, you recount an experience where in your travels, you were held up or seen as an example of what could happen when a child is given a chance and is and does have belonging. I was wondering what that was like for you to be kind of seen as, as, you know, the happy ending to having citizenship and belonging.

Yeah, it was very eye-opening for me because, you know, that was a way I revealed my dad's former status as a stateless person to connect with the people that I was interviewing with. And it allowed me to connect with them. And in turn, they opened up more about their own story. But I remember very clearly a lawyer saying to me, she was just flabbergasted. She's like, wow, just a generation ago, your dad was stateless. And look at what you've become. You've become a lawyer and a law professor. Now you're back home talking about this issue and advocating for the very people that your dad was, you know, part of that community. And, you know, it was very touching for me to hear that. And I think

very gratifying when I told my father the story about how that I haven't forgotten what he's gone through in that and to give back to people who are still in that limbo. Did that make it more okay that you had gone back? Yeah, he has very mixed feelings. I think, you know, that's the other thing about being a formerly stateless person. I think it never leaves you, you know, and I've kind of written about it in my writing, but it's made me understand my dad's behavior a little bit more. And he, this is a little bit personal, but sometimes, you know, I am perplexed by things. And he'll probably, I'll tell him about this interview, and I'll be

very excited to say, I met Nala Ayed. And he'll just be like, you know, I really don't think you should be talking to the media. He's very afraid of bringing attention to himself, and is constantly thinking about the ways in which we could lose security and comfort in our lives. And I think that will always be with him and his fear for me that I could lose that and experience that part of his life, I think is an enduring legacy of being a stateless person because you just have understood the precarity of what status could give you and how it might easily be taken away because it is the state that ultimately confers that status, right? And, you know, many legal scholars have started to talk about the slippery and thin

status of citizenship, you know, and that citizenship is not as permanent as it used to be. And so in some ways, I do think my dad is alert and alive to that, the reality that you can't always count on states, the law, to create permanence and certainty for you, right? In her novel, Dandelion, Jamie explores the long afterlife of statelessness and how it continues to shape the character of a father who was once stateless. In one scene, his anxiety about how precarious citizenship is flares after his Canadian-born daughter, Lily,

is slow to register her own child for a birth certificate. Lily, this is no laughing matter. You need to get her birth certificate right away. It's her life. It's proof she is Canadian, that she belongs here. Honestly, Dad, there's no rush. It's not a big deal here. Dad shifted closer to me in his chair, as if I needed to hear him better.

It is a big deal. It may not seem like a big deal to you because you were born here. You don't know what it's like not to have any status. Don't ever take it for granted. Laws could change tomorrow, and then people born here may not be able to get citizenship. That is the reality. Nothing is certain. Dad, I'm a lawyer. I should know. The government isn't going to change laws that drastically. I'm very disappointed to hear you say that, Father Huff. You're always telling

me that the laws are changing all the time for your clients, and it's hard to keep track of everything. That the government is finding ways to restrict people from getting status, and you're afraid people won't be able to stay here. Yes, that's true, but it doesn't affect people like us, Dad. Don't think you're immune to this, Lily. It could happen to people like us too. Didn't you tell me about that young man who lost his Canadian citizenship? Yes, Dad, but that was under very different circumstances. Just go do it. Go and get her birth certificate for me, father begged. There's nothing worse than being without citizenship. It's like being homeless. It's like you aren't human. You

can't do anything. You're nothing to anyone. Please, I had to live like that for a good part of my life and I don't ever want my grandchild to live even one day being stateless. In Go Citizens, Jamie focuses on statelessness and citizenship in Canada and in Malaysia, the country where her mother was born. Initially, she thought she might study statelessness in Brunei, where her father was born and declared stateless. Brunei is not a democratic state. It is not very open, and people were very fearful of talking openly about this. And so, you know, I had family and friends and connections in Malaysia, and in fact, you know, one of my research partners at the time, Eric Paulson, was working with Lawyers for Liberty and they had a very strong campaign to assist stateless people. And when he heard about my family history, he actually said, you should come here and study statelessness here because there's a very open community and a vibrant advocacy community on this issue. And even today, you know, the Malaysian government is tabling amendments to the constitution that could create more statelessness

in fact. And so there is a very, very vibrant community of advocates, but also more troubling a huge population of stateless persons there, you know, uncertain as to the number. But when I was there, I had no trouble finding stateless people to talk to and more troubling parents who hadn't told their children that they were stateless that I talked to in my research. And what do you think makes Malaysia a useful case study for understanding specifically how people become stateless in former British colonies? former British colonies. Yeah, Malaysia and Canada are very similar in the sense that they both are products of British colonization. And the British colonizing framework divided and categorized people according to race and ethnicity. And these kinds of ideas about identity and race permeated through not only the ways in which society was structured, but laws on who was eligible for citizenship. And when Malaysia became an independent state, its constitution reinforced and reproduced these ideas of dominant and minority groups,

and who was able to get certain kinds of benefits and including citizenship. And so my research into this area really reinforces the notion that citizenship law is not it's not neutral. It really is a vestige of colonization and especially in British colonies you see these ideas of race and indigeneity being reproduced in law, and people might not be aware of that. You write about a specific group of stateless people in Malaysia who worked on plantations or were descendant from people who worked on plantations. Can you talk about what that tells you about how the legacy of colonialism continues to shape citizenship in countries like Malaysia and Canada. Yeah, I think, you know, in British colonies, they relied a lot on labor to

develop certain economic and industrial endeavors. And plantations were very much a huge project of the British Empire in various places all around the world. And the plantations in Malaysia are no different. They relied on the migration of people from various parts of the world to live and work on plantations. But when Malaysia became an independent state, some of these communities in the plantations remained in rural settings and never got proper documentation or never went through the system whereby they were then made into Malaysian citizens officially. And so over the generations, you see families who come from plantation communities without documentation, without proof that they were in Malaysia before Malaysia became an independent

state. And so there's a huge group of stateless people simply because they don't have the documentation to show that their family or their generational link to the times in which they were working and living on plantations to substantiate their claim today. You also trace some of the common ways that people become stateless in Malaysia, for example, being born out of wedlock to a non-Malaysian mother. What can we learn from that about how important gender is in shaping citizenship? Yeah, I think this is a very, very common feature of post-British colonial states where citizenship is really tied to the father

and ensuring that the father is able to give their inheritance through citizenship to their children. But women were not seen as proper vehicles by which citizenship could be transferred. And I think for me, what was troubling about this in the Malaysian context is that women were often seen as wayward, deviant. If they weren't married to their husbands, they were not considered part of the community. And therefore, children who are born in these kinds of circumstances would not be able to benefit in the same way. And it goes back to the, you know, ideas about the place of women in society and their ability to own property, their ability to have agency over their own lives. And it's a troubling feature in many citizenship laws around the world, not just Malaysia. So it's a very gendered aspect and one that I think, you know, I try to lean on throughout the book when I use kind of motifs around the fact that the ghost that's in the courtroom or sitting on the government counter is really the ghost of the foreign woman.

You know, this fear that's being evoked by the fact that a woman's coming in and like a weed is shedding her seeds across the land and invading. Most of the ghost stories in your book are about women. Yeah. And it's on purpose because I think these women are feared. You know, their wombs are vessels that carry in things that are to be feared in some ways. And I think, you know, in Canada, we have troubling discourses and discussions around birth tourism, for example. And I really abhor that term. But non-resident mothers who happen to give birth in Canada have been vilified and have been labeled as people who are trying to obtain a passport for their

babies. And yet there's very little research and data on that. And so I'm really fascinated with how women have been vilified, demonized, and even seen as, you know, these vampire-like creatures who invade our territory and spread their seeds. And, you know, maybe it's, you know, the imagination gone wild, but that's how I view the ways in which foreign women are depicted in these various contexts in very common ways. I'd love to discuss one of those cases, or one of the specific cases that you write about in one of your chapters. Her name is Roiza Bint Abdullah. How did she become stateless?

She was stateless by circumstance. She was adopted by a family, and she doesn't know much about her birth parents. She suspects that her mother was Filipino and had come to Malaysia to work. When she gave birth to her, she put her up for adoption, and she was adopted by two Malaysian citizens. But her adopted parents' citizenship status wasn't enough to guarantee Roiza's citizenship, because her biological mother

was not known to be a Malaysian citizen. She learned she was stateless when she was quite young because she was asked to provide some documentation to continue to attend school, and it was discovered that she didn't have the documentation, at which point a teacher put her in touch with a paralegal who was working with stateless children. And the paralegal then tried to assist her in applying for citizenship. That application sat in the system for eight years. When I met her, that application had not been decided yet. And she talked about how she had all these dreams to go to university, to travel and do all these things that normal teenagers or young people wanted to do. But she was really uncertain. When her parents passed away, she moved in with her aunt. And

because she couldn't get a job or go to school, she did odd jobs around the house and the community for her aunt. How difficult. Wow. While I was in Malaysia, you know, I met up with her quite frequently. She would show up at the federal court, you know, while I was in Malaysia, there was a prominent stateless case that was going up at the apex court, kind of like our Supreme Court in Canada. And I remember seeing her there and was surprised and said, oh, why are you here? And she's like, well, this decision could really change the outcome of my life. And she was really

disappointed that day because the hearing was postponed for a number of procedural reasons. At the time, she was 20 and she was going to turn 21 the year after. And I knew that if she didn't get citizenship by the time she was 21, she may the year after. And I knew that if she didn't get citizenship by the time she was 21, she may never get citizenship because in Malaysia, there is one provision in the constitution that does allow people to ask for discretion on the part of the home minister to give citizenship to children under the age of 21 who are stateless. At the hearing, I also learned that she received a decision from the government of her eight-year application that she was denied. And then thereafter, I had heard she resubmitted a new application. I learned when I returned to Canada that she was able to get citizenship right before or on her 21st birthday. And that was through an intense public campaign on her part. through an intense public campaign on her part.

But there is an aspect here that requires a performance of loyalty and assimilation. Yeah. I think there's two things. The first thing is that Roysa was a perfect case for the government to be seen as benevolent, as resolving a singular case of statelessness, you know, allowed the state to say, this is not a systemic problem, but when we do see cases like this, we will respond. And I think Roysa was an ideal case for the government to give citizenship. A, she was an ideal straight A student. You know, she was depicted in the media as someone who could contribute to our society. And then secondly, you know, Royce was a person who could present herself as a Malay. She spoke Malay. She knew the Malay customs. But more importantly, she was a devout Muslim woman. She wore the hijab. She presented herself

as a devout woman. So, you know, in that sense, she was, I would say, seen as a safe candidate to enter into the society that Malaysia had wanted to build. And so she fits into this performance that I think the structures, the citizenship structures and the dominant culture there asks for people in order to obtain citizenship. What did that kind of requirement of performing citizenship and belonging mean for your dad, for your father? Yeah, you know, when I was watching Roisa and when she became a citizen, it dawned on me that all of these pieces fit together. And it made me reflect on the ways in which my father moves through his life and society and the ways in which he asks me to do the same. With a little bit of fear where he performs assimilation.

You know, he is really proud of speaking English with, you know, no grammatical errors. He tries to speak without an accent. He tries to dress and move through society like anyone in the dominant group would. It made me realize what kinds of things I might have lost in my language and culture as a result of that, because he was so fearful of being seen as other, and that it was more important for him to perform sameness and likeness in order to feel secure and permanence in his status. Philip Cole, a scholar who studies statelessness, argues that it's not just a, quote, leftover residue lying outside of the international system of sovereign states, but a structural failure that may involve rethinking everything.

Where would you begin that long journey of rethinking citizenship? Yeah, that's a great quote. You know, one of the things as a scholar that I'm very lucky to be a student of many things, and I'm currently, you know, studying Indigenous legal traditions, not only in Canada, but in the United States. And it's made me think a lot about different approaches to organizing communities, different ideas of membership. And I don't pretend to be an expert in this, but I have learned from my indigenous colleagues, concepts of kinship, of relationality, of respect. And, you know, would start there. and would start there.

I would start with how we could incorporate these ideas and the philosophy of how we engage with one another and more compassionate and with more integrity. I would think about why is it that the state has all this power in terms of recognition of who belongs and think more about a collective responsibility and a collective identification process or collective review, I guess. And so that's where I would start. And, you know, and I've taken a lot of comfort in knowing that other communities have different ways of

conceptualizing how we welcome not only kin, but how we welcome visitors, what kinds of things we might expect of visitors as well. So as you think about these alternative ways of thinking of citizenship, can you imagine a new conception of citizenship, one that might actually provide a remedy for all the statelessness that is experienced in our world? Yeah, and I think it's really hard for people to conceptualize it because we take for granted that these systems are in place. And I guess I would say is, you know, one of the things I would love to see is, you know, this less emphasis on borders, less emphasis on, you know, this traction of like prohibition or exclusion. of like prohibition or exclusion, I would start there and really question the state's motives and ideas of why is it that we are fearful, you know, and why is it that we operate from a default place of assuming that people are wanting to take advantage of us, harm us, and rethink the ways in which we want to engage with people in a holistic manner. And so I think I can understand that and can try to envision that,

but it is a monumental project and one that I don't have all the answers to for sure. I imagine it feels like a monumental project, especially in the times in which we live, when citizenship is such an acrimonious subject. Yeah, it is. And it's really made me think about why are people on the move and how are people being treated and not to take for granted that how people see people, you know, and to think about what people want us to take away in terms of how they see themselves. You know, I think the biggest lesson I learned from stateless people is that they themselves know who they are and we should listen to them, right?

And instead of taking for granted that states or organizations who speak for them know best. And that is, I think, an important aspect that people should remember that we should go back to those communities and ask them. And I just think about communities today that really are canaries in the coal mine, like the Rohingya in Myanmar, Assamese in India. These are people experiencing oppression in ways that are tied to the lack of citizenship. And citizenship is now being weaponized to exclude and oppress people. This book started with the retelling of an infamous folktale, the story of a maligned woman who became the ghost Pontianak. Like Pontianak, ghost citizens are feared, misunderstood, and unwelcome. Both tell tragic stories about loss, death, and a wayward existence. These ghosts are hard to purge,

despite many tactics used to expunge them from the world of the living. of the living. At the end of Ghost Citizens, Jamie returns to the story of Pontianak and rewrites it to give the story a new ending. I wanted to end on a note of hope. I wanted people to think about a potential future where statelessness is not as enduring. And I also wanted to give more empathy and understanding to the plight of stateless people, especially the women that are being depicted as monsters, as something to be feared, and to show that there is a reason why she's lingering. There's a reason why her shadow is upon us and something not to be feared, but to be more understood.

In my version, Pontianak is stuck in the in-between and does not want to leave because she is searching for her baby so she can give them citizenship. The baby, like many children, is stateless because of their mother's race, foreign citizenship, and lack of marriage to their Malaysian father. The baby's mother is not around

to substantiate their identity, but Pontianak wants to be. Pontianak floats in purgatory, worrying about the child she has left behind and their fate. And so I kind of write that story in the hopes that people will instead of moving to that default position of fear but move to a position of oh why why is this phenomenon happening and to understand more from the perspective of the people under undergoing these processes what what it feels like and so you know at the end of the day there's nothing else that you take away from the book. It's that kind of feeling that you're just wanting to understand and learn more. And that's my hope for everyone. I rewrite the ending of the ghost story, showing Pontianak where her baby is sleeping,

I rewrite the ending of the ghost story, showing Pontianak where her baby is sleeping, to allow her to tuck a birth certificate, a passport, or a citizenship certificate in its swaddle. It is her last task to aid her baby in acquiring not only their identity, but their citizenship. It is only after this act of love that Pontianak can stop haunting people in her search for her baby. She leaves the life of limbo and finally rests. This is my hope for the millions of stateless persons, many of whom are children all over the world. My hope is that the journey has begun for stateless people to move from the precipice of the afterlife to the land of the living.

I hold out for the possibility that stateless persons will be recognized as kin and that we will work to reconfigure our communities and relations to each other with honesty, respect, and compassion. On Ideas, you've been listening to my conversation with Jamie Chai-Yun Liu. She is the author of a non-fiction book called Ghost Citizens, Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign, and Wayward Figures in Law. She's also the author of a novel called Dandelion. It's a book that also ends with a character rewriting

her understanding of a formerly stateless woman. When I was feeling particularly sad, I would play out the memories where mother seemed fragile. She was delicate, gorgeous, and sang like a bird. In these moments, I thought of her as being too fragile and weak, tired of performing. But if she was broken, she must have healed by now, for how could someone that broken make such a monumental trip again across the world? Her fragility, I thought, was a state of being that existed only in Canada. Perhaps her seemingly frail existence in my childhood was not a sign of brokenness, but a record of who she was at the time. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth.

Special thanks to Charles Huston at Hawaii Public Radio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. The technical producer for Ideas is Danielle Duval. Our acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad.