I reach out to shake her hand and, as I do, I see a large, mouth-shaped bruise on her forearm. I gasp. Kemi just smiles again, and then leaves.

I look at the piece of paper with the list of sweets on it again. It feels like a time capsule, like an ancient artifact—a piece of information about a distant ancestor rather than an immediate relative.

When I was around thirteen, I started to wonder about my mum’s origins. One day, I used one of the school computers to google vampire myths and read about the langsuyar, a type of vampire from Malaysian folklore. The langsuyar is the ghost of a woman who died from the shock of hearing that her child was stillborn. On her birthing bed, she clapped, transformed, and flew off, up into the branches of a tree. On the back of her neck, under her long hair, was a hole through which she drank the blood of the living. I wondered if my mum was the langsuyar, created not by another vampire but by her own grief, with no origin, exactly, but, rather, born from trauma. I might be the dead child of my mother, somehow reanimated and called a vampire by her but really something else, I thought. And if that was the case, other things about my mum could start to make sense. In most Asian cultures, I learned, there is no reverence for the vampiric monster as there is in the West; most bloodsucking things are women, and their actions—be it sin in a past life, a pact with a demon, a jealous or unstable personality—are all blamed for their monstrous states. Maybe my mum hated herself for not being able to hold on to her humanity; maybe she hated me for being the cause of her losing it. My mum slapped me, though, when at night while she slept, I rolled her onto her side and lifted her hair to see if I could find a second mouth, and told her what I thought she might be.

“Don’t be stupid,” my mum said. But from that incident I learned about her sire, who she angrily and impatiently told me about: a white British man who had arrived in Malaysia as part of a colonizing power. He ate many women, but for some reason had her drink from him so she would become what he was; I got the sense from her tone of voice that she wished he’d just killed her—that to be food was better than being what we both are now. “Was he your dad too?” I asked, knowing that my mum’s father had also been a British man. But, “Shut up now and go to bed,” she said. “He was a bad man; he killed many people.”