Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh attending a conference in Hollywood on Oct. 17, 2022.
Credit: © DFree/Shutterstock

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. All month long, Behind the Headlines will feature AAPI pioneers in a variety of areas.

She is everything and everywhere! The Everything Everywhere All at Once star Michelle Yeoh is having a year. Yeoh is a Malaysian actress. Yeoh, trained as a dancer, is known for doing her own stunts in action and martial arts movies. In 2023, Yeoh won the Academy Award for best actress for her role in the science fiction comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).

Yeoh Choo Kheng was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, on Aug. 6, 1962. She began ballet training as a young child. When Yeoh was 15, she moved to Chester, England, to train at the Hammond School of performing arts. Yeoh later attended the Royal Academy of Dance in London. She primarily studied ballet. After an injury, she retired from dance and began participating in beauty pageants. In 1983, Yeoh won the Miss Malaysia pageant and represented the country at the Miss World pageant.

Yeoh began acting in the 1980′s. She starred in Hong Kong martial arts movies produced by D&B Films, performing her own stunts. Her name was listed as Michelle Khan in the credits to appeal to Western audiences. Yeoh married Dickson Poon, head of the D&B studio, in 1988 and retired from acting.

After Yeoh and Poon divorced in the early 1990’s, Yeoh starred in the action movies Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992), The Heroic Trio (1993), Tai Chi Master (1993), and Wing Chun (1994). While filming The Stuntwoman (1996), Yeoh injured her back during a stunt. However, she continued acting and performing serious stunts.

In the late 1990’s, Yeoh retired the pseudonym (false name) Khan, performing as Michelle Yeoh thereafter. In 1997, Yeoh played the spy Wai Lin in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. That same year, she starred in the historical drama The Soong Sisters. In 2000, Yeoh appeared in the martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Yeoh began making more English-language films, including Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Sunshine (2007), and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008). In 2011, Yeoh starred in The Lady, a biographical film about the Nobel prize-winning Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi. Yeoh was deported from Myanmar because of her role in the film.

Yeoh began working in television in 2015. Her first major role was in the series “Star Trek: Discovery,” playing Starfleet Captain Philippa Georgiou from 2017 to 2020. Yeoh’s later films include Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Last Christmas (2019), Marvel Studio’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and Everything Everywhere All at Once.

June 18, 2018

Malay is the language of a large group of people in Southeast Asia. The language is spoken by about 13.5 million in Malaysia, plus millions of other people who live in nearby Brunei, Indonesia, and Singapore. Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian, a language family that includes Javanese, Sundanese, and Tagalog.

The flag of Malaysia flies over some 13.5 million Malay speakers. Credit: © PhotoRoman/Shutterstock

The Malay language has numerous dialects. The official language of Malaysia, Bahasa Malaysia, is based largely on the Malay dialect of Johor, a southern state in Peninsular Malaysia. The official language of Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia, is based on the dialect used in the Riau Islands of Indonesia. Because of the similarities between the language used in Johor and in the nearby Riau Islands, the two forms are sometimes classified together as Johor-Riau Malay. Other dialects include Ambon Malay, Ternate Malay, and Banjar Malay. In most cases, speakers of different dialects can communicate with each other without great difficulty.

Click to view larger image
Malaysia. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

The Malay language includes elements of Sanskrit and Arabic. These elements entered the language through contact with the culture and religions of India and the Arab world. Contact with traders from many countries led to the development of Bazaar Malay, which became widely spoken in trading communities.

The oldest known Malay text is a stone inscription from the early years of the Srivijaya Empire, a Malay kingdom that emerged in the late 600′s and lasted until the late 1300′s. The text is written in the Indian Pallava script, and it tells of military expeditions. Later Malay texts were written in Devanagari, an alphabet and script used to write Hindi. Beginning in the late 1300′s, many Malay literary and religious works were written in an Arabic-based script called Jawi or Classical Malay. Beginning in the 1500′s, Dutch and British influence in Malaysia led to the adoption of a Malay writing system using the Roman alphabet.

In the 1970’s, Indonesia and Malaysia adopted a common spelling system for their official languages. Since then, efforts have continued to further standardize the Malay language.

May 20, 2015

Government officials from three Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand—met today in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, and agreed to stop turning away migrant ships from their coasts. At least 3,500 migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar have come ashore in one of the three nations over the last few weeks, but some 7,000 more migrants are thought to be still adrift at sea. The migrants are in distress from their long journeys and many of them are dehydrated and malnourished.

Migrants wait to be rescued by fishermen off the coast of Aceh, Indonesia, May 20, 2015. Hundreds of migrants stranded at sea for months were rescued and taken to Indonesia, officials reported, the latest in a stream of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants to reach shore in a growing crisis confronting Southeast Asia. Credit: AP Photo

Refugees from Bangladesh are mostly economic migrants seeking jobs. The migrants from Myanmar, however, are Rohingya Muslims, a group that has long been persecuted in Myanmar. Rohingya, even those from families who have lived in Myanmar for generations, are denied citizenship in the predominantly Buddhist nation and have few rights there.

The current migrant boat crisis in Southeast Asia began a few weeks ago. Previously, migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar had traveled by sea to Thailand and then overland. Thailand recently cracked down on this overland traffic, and now smugglers are sending migrants exclusively on sea routes. Often these human traffickers abandon the migrants if a ship founders. Navies from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand have been turning away the boat people at their shores and have sometimes towed stricken boats to the shores of other nations.

The agreement to permit migrants to enter the host nations by sea solves a humanitarian crisis in the short run. Eventually, however, the solution lies in helping Bangladesh to become more economically sound and pressuring Myanmar to recognize and stop persecuting the Rohingya population living in its borders.

Other World Book articles:

• Immigration

• Myanmar (2014-a Back in time article)