November 13, 2019

"London-based artist Laura Melissa Williams woke up one morning last week to find thousands of messages for her on social media — all from Malaysia...."

"[O]ne of the English comprehension questions [on the teenaged schoolchildren's standardized exam] was about a fictional paraglider called Melissa. The question described the fictional Melissa hitting a storm-cloud - like 'being tossed around in a washing machine' - and having to be rescued from the roof of a farm by villagers. Following the exam, a student looked up the question on the internet, found Ms Williams (whose middle name is Melissa), realised from her social media she was a paraglider - and the hashtag 'The real Melissa' was born... 'I checked with some Malay-speaking friends as I started worrying, I got a bit concerned about any threats - they just said it was mainly immature,' [Williams] said. And then overnight in UK time, Ms Williams found herself the subject of another hashtag: 'Stop cyber-bullying Melissa.'... [F]rom then on, Ms Williams said, apologies had flooded in.... She has since received invitations to go to dinner in Malaysia, offers of gifts, and apologies from school teachers, influencers and the media.... In total, she has now received 210,000 Instagram messages, 30,000 tweets, countless direct messages and she has also acquired 5,000 new followers. 'I now have an army of people as my protectors and standing up for what is right and moral,' she said."

BBC reports.

9 comments:

gilbar said...

it's a weird world we live in!

tim maguire said...

Feel good story of the day. Except the part about the threats. Why would someone threaten The Real Melissa? And is there a correlation between those who made threats and those who failed the test?

Ben Lange said...

I feel like there’s information missing from that excerpt.

rcocean said...

Oh, she was concerned about "Threats". Good God.

Darrell said...

I get some wrong numbers.
I can't say they are threats because I don't answer.

BarrySanders20 said...

Need a tag called Weird Asians

J. Farmer said...

Malaysia is an odd place. I used to spend a good amount of time there while I lived in Thailand, and one of my best friends is an ethnic Chinese who was born and raised in Penang. It is dominated ethnically and religiously by Muslim Malays, who are about 60% of the population. Chinese make up at least 20% of the population and are widely loathed by many ethnic Malays as the Chinese have dominated Malaysia economically for about a hundred years. This has led to a number of discriminatory practices against Chinese in Malaysia, and it was the primary reason that the British were able to defeat the Malay insurgency in the middle of the 20th century.

Scott Patton said...

Reading this post, I was thinking that it sounds like minor subplot in a Cory Doctorow or William Gibson story. Then I scroll down and see Gibson mentioned in an older post.

Lurker21 said...

From the snippet, it sounds like she is strangely unmoved by the adulation of all those Malaysians. English hauteur.