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[ESSAY] “Asian Pirates? In a Musical?” by Shanon Shah

Zhui Ning Chang (director). Asian Pirate Musical, Upstairs at the Gatehouse, 28 July—2 August 2026.

I have always been drawn to people who do not fit neatly into social norms or categories.

I am finally able to look back on my mixed-race, queer and Muslim childhood in 1980s Malaysia with grace and affection.

Spending nearly a third of my life immersed in the academic study of religion, specifically gender pluralism and sexual diversity in Islam, has certainly helped, not only by exorcising several personal demons but also by expanding my horizons of what is, and always has been, possible. I can now imagine an existence in which the multiple and seemingly contradictory aspects of my identity not only make sense, but also infuse my understanding of the world with a complex sensitivity that is unique to me.

Growing up, however, I felt lonely and alone. Freakish, even. On several levels. First, as a third-generation child of immigrant families with both Indian and Chinese origins, yet officially classified as “Malay”. Second, as a Muslim, since the Federal Constitution defines all Malays as Muslim, but with the Chinese side of my extended family following either different denominations of Christianity or a blend of the “three teachings” of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. Third, as an effeminate boy who did not have the vocabulary to articulate his gendered and erotic dispositions, even to himself.

Perhaps predictably, I have always been drawn to people who do not fit neatly into social norms or categories, whether historical figures, celebrities or people on the street. But growing up in the increasingly ethno-nationalist and authoritarian Malaysia of the 1980s and 1990s, knowing how to spot kindred misfits was tough. Censorship and propaganda can obfuscate even the clearest evidence.

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^{Zheng He statue in Sam Po Kong temple, Semarang, Indonesia.}

This is my way of explaining why I was initially so unbothered when my history teachers trotted out the expeditions of the imperial Ming-dynasty diplomat Zheng He, known to Malaysians as Laksamana, or Admiral, Cheng Ho, as evidence of the pomp and splendour of the fifteenth-century Melaka sultanate.

That he was Muslim was often emphasised if the teacher was Malay. This point-scoring only makes sense against the backdrop of the divide-and-rule politics that the British bequeathed to multicultural, post-independence Malaysia. Because of this legacy, even at the best of times, the nation can only ever be a clumsy patchwork of Malays, vaunted as Bumiputera or Sovereigns of the Soul; immigrant Chinese and Indian communities, often treated with condescension or suspicion; and the restive natives of Borneo.

It was only much later that I learnt Zheng He was not merely an imperial Chinese diplomat who happened to be Muslim. He was also a eunuch. In other words, this hero who attested to our pre-colonial Malay and Islamic prestige was not only Chinese and Muslim but also, literally, an emasculated man. Why was this point not emphasised in school?

Upon learning this much later, I had to fight the temptation to reinvent Zheng He in my culturally and religiously hybrid, queer image. For how do we imagine a history in which someone like him could command such geopolitical significance yet confound today’s commonsense expectations about religion, sexuality, masculinity, global power and then some?

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This lifelong quest to find kindred spirits in hyper-hybridity led me to Asian Pirate Musical, staged Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village, London, from 28 July to 1 August 2026. The promotional summary alone tickled me:

Drawing on the real histories of fourteenth-century Muslim navigator Zheng He and nineteenth-century pirate queen Sek Yeong, alongside the imagined futures of twenty-first-century climate survivors and twenty-third-century space revolutionaries, Asian Pirate Musical is a new legend on the high seas.

^{Yñaqui Tuason-Inocian as Zheng He (picture by Mike Skelton)}

Director and co-creator Zhui Ning Chang is candid about being familiar with Zheng He’s voyages, having grown up in Southeast Asia. But they and the rest of the creative team were keen to complicate him by exploring “how his faith, as a Muslim, sexuality, as a eunuch and, in [their] alternate-history interpretation, as an explicitly queer man, and position, as a representative of the Ming imperial court, are entangled with each other”. This is a work that dares to imagine a world that my schoolteachers had hidden from me in plain sight.

Pairing Zheng He, played by Yñaqui Tuason-Inocian, with Sek Yeong, played by Amanda Maud, takes this act of intersectional, decolonial speculation to a whole other level. I suspect I am not alone in being pleasantly surprised that, firstly, there were indeed female pirates and, secondly, that Sek Yeong was one of history’s most successful pirates of any gender. But while there are now several retellings of her story in English, Chang feels that these are often “romanticised and not evidenced in any community accounts or historical scholarship”.

Hence the decision to introduce Sek Yeong through a lesser-known portion of her biography, her later years as a retired and successful woman. Calling her “Sek Yeong” forms part of this respectful recovery. Many sources refer to her only as Zheng Yi Sao, the wife of Zheng Yi, the pirate whom she married in 1801, when she was 26.

In the play, a storm-induced space-and-time slip transports Sek Yeong and Zheng He to the year 2049 and onto a ship helmed solely by the pirate Nazar, played by Ashley Goh. They are joined by Keliling, played by Rai Endah, and Riang, played by Nabilah Hamid, a couple of space revolutionaries whom the space-and-time slip has hurtled back from the twenty-third century. Nazar’s world, set a couple of decades from now, is ravaged by climate collapse. Meanwhile, Keliling and Riang return from a liberated, genderqueer cosmos that made me think of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

Thus begins this science-fiction musical, which invites us to reimagine the past by contemplating the future, and vice versa. It is a work that simultaneously pays homage to the grand musicals of the 1980s and 1990s while correcting their heteronormative and racialised biases. The creative team ensured that the production was “stacked… with queer and trans Asian creatives who care about creating more of these intersectional spaces and futures”.

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^{Left to right: Ashley Goh as Nazar, Amanda Maud as Sek Yeong, Rai Endah as Keliling, and Yñaqui Tuason-Inocian as Zheng He (picture by Mike Skelton)}

This inclusive, liberatory ethos is not new, at least not in the world of pirates in the South China Sea. According to Joseph Mackay, the historian of international relations, pirate bands in late-imperial China were unusual melting pots that experimented with their own distinctive political cultures. Their crews consisted of recruits from multiple ethnicities within and beyond the region. As social units that intentionally tried to undermine imperial power, they strived to be as egalitarian as possible, including in the redistribution of booty.

When I attended the play’s opening night, the audience not only stepped into the theatre but effectively climbed aboard the pirate ship. We, too, reflected the pirate crew’s diversity, whether in gender presentation, sexuality, age or ethnicity. And, judging by the enthusiastic applause, the audience knew exactly what kind of party they had been invited to, while the creative team knew exactly who this story was for.

Most importantly, for a musical, this hybridity was woven into the music. For example, Sek Yeong’s big solo number, “Swallow the Sea”, blended gamelan with Western musical-theatre conventions.

There was poetic significance in the naming of the fictional characters, too. Nazar, the name of the lone captain of the otherwise abandoned ship, is an Arabic word meaning “sight” which, in Islamicate societies, takes the form of an amulet to ward off the evil eye. As a Malay loanword, it also signifies something more like a votive offering in exchange for an answered prayer. Meanwhile, the joyful half of the futuristic space-revolutionary duo is named Riang, meaning “cheerful” in Malay, while their more dominant, know-it-all partner is called Keliling, meaning “surround”.

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While this level of ambition and scope was admirable, these many moving parts did not always cohere. The fictional characters, Nazar, Riang and Keliling, were suitably attractive visual representations of non-heteronormative pirate chic. But their backstories could have inspired more vivid characterisations, and I wanted far more dramatic intensity in their interactions.

There were also some missed opportunities in the encounters between Sek Yeong and Zheng He. For example, before Sek Yeong’s husband, Zheng Yi, died in 1807, the couple commanded a fleet of 400 junks and up to 70,000 pirates, at times engaging in conflict with British, Portuguese and Qing imperial forces. In an early number, “Who’s the Captain”, Sek Yeong boasts about these and her other exploits, insisting that, as the erstwhile “Pirate Queen”, she should be the one running the ship.

^{Left to right: Nabilah Hamid as Riang, Amanda Maud as Sek Yeong, Rai Endah as Keliling (picture by Mike Skelton)}

After Zheng Yi’s death, Sek Yeong took control of the pirate federation with the support of his adopted son, Zhang Bao, or Cheung Po, whom she eventually married. According to Mackay, leadership struggles led to her fleet’s eventual surrender to the Chinese authorities in 1810 through an agreement facilitated by the Portuguese in Macao. Most of the pirates were granted amnesty, but some were exiled, imprisoned or executed.

In the opening number, “Hai Onward”, Sek Yeong declares that “pirates don’t have retirement plans”. Or do they? History tells us that, after the surrender, Cheung Po was made a lieutenant of the Chinese navy and retained a small private fleet. After he died in 1822, aged 36, Sek Yeong returned to her native Kwangtung accompanied by their son, whom she unsuccessfully tried to have recruited into government service. She eventually outlived even him and died in 1844 as the operator of a gambling hall, an endeavour she complains about in the same number.

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While I support the creative team’s refusal to romanticise either Sek Yeong or Zheng He, these scant details could still have infused far richer backstories and more dynamic characterisations. There are glimpses of this in the story, for example, when Sek Yeong forces Zheng He to reconsider whether he, as an imperial explorer, is really so different from a pirate. The difference, she suggests, is one of political allegiance. One person’s pirate is another person’s imperial admiral.

^{Sek Yeong confronting Zheng He (picture by Mike Skelton)}

Yet a much bigger question could be asked: to what extent is the supposedly egalitarian, inclusive and redistributive ethos of such pirate fleets sustainable, especially when they are reactions to imperial state-building? Is the pirate’s code so sacrosanct that there is never a temptation to seize power and control others? Mackay argues that, when the pirate fleets grew in size and influence, they too turned into quasi-maritime empires, or “shadow empires”, that preyed on the larger imperial power structure. These moral and political quandaries could have more clearly animated the character arcs of Zheng He and Sek Yeong.

Rebels have sought to overthrow ruling regimes from time immemorial. In the process, many have turned into the oppressors from whom they sought liberation. This has always been a cautionary tale for any liberation movement, encapsulated in the famous quotation by the poet, philosopher and feminist activist Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Against this backdrop, gender, sexuality, religion and ethnicity have often provided resources for the powerful and the downtrodden alike to enact control and resistance.

This is one reason why a world in which Zheng He, Sek Yeong, Nazar, Riang and Keliling can struggle, argue, learn from one another and learn to love one another has so much potential. Especially when there is music involved. The intersectional, decolonial, queer-feminist revolution needs beauty and joy.

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The good news is that there is room to grow. Chang, together with their co-creators Frey Kwa Hawking, dramaturg; Jade Leamcharaskul, lead composer; Nemo Martin, producer; Sarita Lewis; and XANA, are working towards a bigger, more immersive experience, with instruments such as the gamelan, taiko and guzheng played by a live band in a pit.

Until then, perhaps we can give the last word on this multigenerational, superdiverse tale of liberation to Riang, who sings in “Nirvana”: “Here today, we all gather to give merit / And to guide this fallen star through rebirth / And assist, in this flux, a new transition / You will always remind us that we are never alone”.

^{How to cite: Shah, Shanon. “Asian Pirates? In a Musical?.“ Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 11 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/11/asian-pirate-musical.}

Shanon Shah is a scholar-activist whose work explores the intersections of religion, gender, sexuality and environmental justice. Now based in London, he was a multiple-award-winning singer-songwriter, playwright and journalist in Malaysia. His first full-length play, Air Con, was set in an all-boys’ boarding school and addressed the intersecting themes of homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and ethno-religious nationalism. He is also the author of The Making of a Gay Muslim: Religion, Sexuality and Identity in Malaysia and Britain. He divides his time between writing, researching, teaching and leading an interfaith climate-justice charity. Photograph of Shanon Shah © Rehan Jamil.