Against the bustling backdrop of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown, a Malay-Muslim narrator reminisces about a teenage relationship between himself and an ethnic Chinese classmate. Pangyau , the Cantonese word for friend, is not just the story of a close friendship, but a prism through which the writer gets to examine his feelings about the the ways in which race and religion have been used in the national socio-political discourse.