Yellow

My sister had jaundice in the first months of her life. The doctor advised my parents to make sure she gets some sun everyday and to apply some strange yellow paste all over her body at night. I was seven then and wondered why my parents wanted to make my sister yellow. She was already looking like an uncle who has drunk too much alcohol and made his liver kaputt.

One night during her jaundice days, I was awoken by a strange sensation. Someone was piling something gooey on me. I reacted as I would whenever I am not sure what is going on; I kept still. When I was certain it was safe to move, I ran a finger over my face and discovered to my horror that I have been stained yellow. Although I am certain this had not caused my yellowness, a curious obsession with the colour yellow was begun.

A couple of years back, I examined my arm in all possible light situations and asked my sister, “Baby, do you think I’m yellow?” She looked up from her laptop screen and casually put her arm beside mine.

“Hmm…ya huh! You are a bit yellow leh!”

If you have seen truly yellow people, I thank you for being predisposed to understanding how strange this colour really is as a skin tone. I blame my hypersensitivity to colours on my oil painting instructress. She has single-handedly restructured my vision into one that tries to match every colour I see to a paint catalogue.

In my coloured opinion, I think a nice skin tone to have would be pink. The Mister is of this nice shade of warm hue. We were sitting together, fingers entwined, our arms together. In a silent moment, I said, “Look, I’m yellow.”

He chuckled, “Yellow? No…you don’t look yellow. Why yellow? You strange girl. So what colour am I?”

There comes my chance, the opportunity to reveal an observation I had been wanting to let loose, “You are pink!”

The pink deepened.

“Pink? Skin tone? How can? You strange yellow girl!”

Eversince, the Mister calls me ‘yellow girl’ and whenever I make an unusual suggestion, his rebuke would be, “Don’t be yellow!”