The Orange Book is a large, continually evolving body of writing that documents the revitalisation, worldview, philosophy, and future-building work of the Kristang community. Begun by the 13th and current Kabesa Tuan Raja Naga Ultramar Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang on Tuesday, 18 October 2022, the Orange Book has grown alongside large-scale revitalisation and now functions as:

• a civilisational memory archive,
• a training manual for Creole-Indigenous leadership,
• a primary source for new dreamfished Kristang vocabulary, and
• a repository of Kristang epistemology, ontology, ethics, and psychoemotional frameworks.

In addition to Kevin, twelve other Kristang people have since contributed to the Orange Book since its inception. It is also not a single genre: parts are academic, parts are philosophical, parts are narrative, and parts are methodological. Together, these elements form the deep knowledge-base that underpins Kodrah Kristang and the entire Kristang nation and civilisation since 2016.

The Orange Book is the fifth foundational text in a sequence of eight foundational texts focused on compiling, anthologising and organising major parts of the Kristang Creole-Indigenous philosophy, cosmology, civilization and worldview. The eight foundational texts together are:

1. The Portuguese missions in Malacca and Singapore (1511-1958) (3 vols.), by Father Manuel Teixeira, published in 1963 by the Instituto Cultural de Macau during the term of service of the 9th Kabesa Tuan Sayap Darah Percival Frank Aroozoo (Kabesa from 1951 to 1969) and republished in 1987 during the term of service of the 10th Kabesa Puan Bunga Besi Mabel Martens (Kabesa from 1969 to 1989)
2. My People, My Country, by Bernard Sta Maria, published in 1982 in the Portuguese Settlement during the term of service of the 10th Kabesa Puan Bunga Besi Mabel Martens (Kabesa from 1969 to 1989)
3. Ungua Adanza: An inheritance, by Joan Margaret Marbeck, published in 1995 in Lisbon by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation during the term of service of the 12th Kabesa Puan Api Menari Valerie Scully (Kabesa from 1991 to 2015)
4. D’Albuquerque’s Children: Performing Tradition in Malaysia’s Portuguese Settlement, by Margaret Sarkissian, published in 2000 by the University of Chicago during the term of service of the 12th Kabesa Puan Api Menari Valerie Scully (Kabesa from 1991 to 2015)
5. Libru Laranja di Jenti Kristang / The Orange Book of the Kristang People, edited by Kevin Martens Wong, published starting in 2022 by Kodrah Kristang and Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting during Kevin’s term of service as the 13th Kabesa (Kabesa from 2015 to 2075)
6. “Toward a Kristang / Portuguese-Eurasian Literature: Contestations, Challenges & Characteristics” by Kevin Martens Wong in World Literature: Past, Present and Future, edited by Meena Duedeja & Shikha Saxena and published in 2023 by Rudra Publishers during Kevin’s term of service as the 13th Kabesa (Kabesa from 2015 to 2075)
7. Dreamfishing: A Decolonial Guide by Kevin Martens Wong, published in 2024 by Kodrah Kristang and Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting during Kevin’s term of service as the 13th Kabesa (Kabesa from 2015 to 2075)
8. “Kultura Krismatra: Excavating the Progenitor Kristang Creole / Indigenous Way of Being in Singapore” by Kevin Martens Wong in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World (pp. 114-128), published in 2024 by the University of Oradea during Kevin’s term of service as the 13th Kabesa (Kabesa from 2015 to 2075)

The Orange Book is also the eighth foundational text in a sequence of ten foundational texts focused on compiling, anthologising and organising major parts of the Kristang language. The ten foundational texts together are:

1. “Os dialetos romanicos ou neo-latinos na Africa, Asia e America” by Francisco Adolfo Coelho, published in the Boletim da Sociedade de Geographia de Lisboa vol. 6 issue 12 (pp. 705–55) in 1886, during the term of service of the 4th Kabesa Tuan Juara Rakyat Aquila Edwin Tessensohn (Kabesa from 1874 to 1926)
2. Dialecto português de Malaca: apontamentos para o seu estudo by Father António da Silva Rego, published by the Agência Geral das Colónias in 1942, during the term of service of the 8th Kabesa Tuan Taman Rindu Charles Paglar (Kabesa from 1941 to 1951)
3. A Grammar of Kristang (Malacca Creole Portuguese) by Alan Norman Baxter, published by the Australian National University in 1988 during the term of service of the 10th Kabesa Puan Bunga Besi Mabel Martens (Kabesa from 1969 to 1989)
4. Kristang Phrasebook: A revival and understanding of the Malaysian-Portuguese Creole by Joan Margaret Marbeck, published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 2004 during the term of service of the 12th Kabesa Puan Api Menari Valerie Scully (Kabesa from 1991 to 2015)
5. A Dictionary of Kristang (Malacca Creole Portuguese) with an English-Kristang Finderlist by Alan Norman Baxter and Patrick de Silva, published by the Australian National University in 2004 during the term of service of the 12th Kabesa Puan Api Menari Valerie Scully (Kabesa from 1991 to 2015)
6. The Most Comprehensive Eurasian Heritage Dictionary: Kristang–English / English–Kristang by Valerie Scully & Catherine Zuzarte, published by SNP Media Asia in 2004 during the term of service of the 12th Kabesa Puan Api Menari Valerie Scully (Kabesa from 1991 to 2015) and republished by Straits Times Press in 2017 during the term of service of the 13th and current Kabesa Tuan Raja Naga Ultramar Kevin Martens Wong (Kabesa from 2015 to 2075)
7. Beng Prende Portugues Malaká (Papiá Cristang): Come, Let’s Learn Portugues Malaká (Papiá Cristang) by Michael Gerard Singho, Philomena Agnes Singho, Sara Frederica Santa Maria, Dolores Pinto, Stefanie Pillai, Angela S. Kajita & Adriana Phillip, published by the University of Malaya Press in 2016 during the term of service of the 13th and current Kabesa Tuan Raja Naga Ultramar Kevin Martens Wong (Kabesa from 2015 to 2075)
8. Libru Laranja di Jenti Kristang / The Orange Book of the Kristang People, edited by Kevin Martens Wong, published starting in 2022 by Kodrah Kristang and Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting during Kevin’s term of service as the 13th Kabesa (Kabesa from 2015 to 2075)
9. Libru Lontra / The Otter Book: The Progenitor Kristang Dictionary by Kevin Martens Wong, published by Kodrah Kristang and Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting in 2023 during Kevin’s term of service as the 13th Kabesa (Kabesa from 2015 to 2075)
10. Animumbes: Kristang for Beginners by Kevin Martens Wong, published by Kodrah Kristang and Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting in 2024 during Kevin’s term of service as the 13th Kabesa (Kabesa from 2015 to 2075)

---

Why the Orange Book Was Created

How a Rejection in 2022 Became the Catalyst for a Civilisational Archive

The Orange Book was not planned. It emerged out of necessity.

In October 2022, an early version of Kristang individuation theory—an extended, deeply contextualised framework explaining the human psyche through Kristang epistemology—was rejected by an international analytical-psychology journal. The decision was not simply an ordinary academic rejection; it revealed the profound limits of Western scholarly structures when confronted with Creole, Indigenous, non-Western, and relationally grounded frameworks of mind, healing and personhood.

The rejected manuscript, which later became Chapter 1 of the Orange Book, offered:

• Kristang Individuation Theory as a self-reflexive, recursive theory of the psyche grounded in lived trauma
• a method tested in the government school classrooms of Singapore with more than a hundred students
• a culturally-situated, decolonial model of human psychoemotional development
• a system designed to be accessible to ordinary people, not restricted to professional analysts

The journal’s response made it clear that such a contribution—emerging from a Creole-Indigenous context, written by someone without a PhD and grounded in Singapore’s sociocultural reality—did not fit within the epistemic boundaries of institutions that still largely centre Euro-American psychological paradigms.

The rejection confirmed something critical: Kristang knowledge systems could not depend on external validation to exist.

This moment marked the beginning of the Orange Book.

3 Reasons This Rejection Required a New Kind of Text

1. Western frameworks could not hold Kristang epistemology.

The manuscript made explicit what many communities around the world already know: that relational, intergenerational, trauma-informed frameworks emerging from non-Western contexts are both valid and vital. Yet the journal’s criteria could not recognise a system that was simultaneously analytical, Creole, Indigenous, autobiographical, mythic, pedagogical, and civilisational.

This kind of knowledge needed a space of its own.

2. The work was already healing real people—just not recognised by institutions.

The manuscript reflected years of work with Singaporean students navigating high-pressure environments, intergenerational trauma, identity formation, and societal collapse. The theory thus emerged from practical reality, not academic abstraction. However, Western academic structures were not designed to evaluate or recognise such contexts, especially ones that were historically marginalised, ignored or dismissed as not rich enough to produce theory in academia itself.

3. The community needed a protected space for developing its own language of mind and being.

The rejection made one thing clear: Kristang people needed a space where their psychological frameworks, cosmology, and relational ethics could grow without distortion. Western journals could not provide that. A Kristang archive could.

---

The Rejection as Catalyst, Not Defeat

Rather than ending the project, the rejection opened the door to something much larger:
a community-owned civilisational archive capable of holding language, trauma, leadership, futurism, psychoemotional frameworks, cosmology and mythic structures all in one place.

The manuscript that was rejected in October 2022 became the first chapter of the Orange Book, the text that demonstrated the necessity of creating a Creole-Indigenous knowledge corpus outside the constraints of Western gatekeeping.

This pivotal turning point is thus part of the origin story of the Orange Book:

• A system that healed people was told it did not fit.
• So the community created a place where it would fit.
• And that place became the foundational text of a revitalised civilisation.

As such, the Orange Book stands today not as a rebuttal to academic rejection, but as the affirmation of Kristang epistemic sovereignty: the determination that Kristang knowledge will never again be erased, diminished, or constrained by the limitations of external institutions, and the Kristang people will at last speak for themselves on the global academic and public stages.

---

Why the Orange Book Exists

The Orange Book was created to address several long-standing needs in the Kristang community:

A Place to Repair Academic Erasure and Ontological Harm

For centuries, Kristang reality was defined, described, and delimited by outsiders—often through academic frameworks that misnamed us, misclassified us, or treated our language and culture as incomplete, derivative, or insignificant. This produced not only historical erasure but ontological harm: the systematic distortion of who we are allowed to be, how our knowledge is valued, and what futures we are permitted to imagine.

The Orange Book exists as a direct response to that harm. It restores the authority of Kristang people to interpret our own experience, articulate our own frameworks, define our own philosophical foundations, and map our own place in the world. Instead of being spoken for, the community now speaks from within itself—on its own terms, in its own voice, through its own intellectual and spiritual traditions.

A Unifying Compass

Different community members encounter Kristang through language, family history, identity work, religious affiliation or experience, art, the queer community, the neurodivergent community, or academia. The Orange Book offers a single, consistent compass that links these paths.

A Decolonial Foundation

It redefines Kristang culture from within Kristang logic rather than colonial or academic categories, overturning centuries of dismissal, erasure, and fragmentation.

A Framework for Language & Cultural Renewal

Every revitalisation movement needs a shared reference point. The Orange Book brings together:

• linguistic insights
• cultural knowledge
• decolonial theory
• community practices
• long-term planning

It is the scaffolding that keeps revitalisation coherent, ethical, and self-aware.

A Training Ground for Future Leaders

Much of the Orange Book documents the leadership logic behind the Kabesa role, relational ethics, trauma-aware community building, and the adaptive strategies needed for collapse-century realities. It allows future leaders to learn how the work is done, not only that it was done.

An Archive of Dreamfishing & Kristang Futures Research

The Orange Book also records Kristang approaches to foresight—how an Indigenous community thinks across deep time, processes risk, and protects future generations.

Large parts of the Orange Book will be part of the arvahang, or the future psychoemotional ancestral memory core of the Kristang people anticipated to be created in 2087 by the 16th Kabesa.

---

What the Orange Book Contains

The Orange Book is vast, but its material can be understood across seven thematic domains:

1 History & Memory

Chapters recording community stories, intergenerational trauma, the Kabesa lineage, community movements, and reflections on identity.

2 Kristang Epistemology and Ontology

Foundational writing on how the Kristang worldview understands:

• knowledge
• truth
• relationality
• the seen and unseen
• language as a living conduit

These sections offer the theoretical backbone for many Kodrah frameworks.

3 Language and Cultural Revitalisation Methodology Specific to Kristang

Detailed documentation of:

• how the revitalisation was built
• what pedagogical methods were developed
• how community engagement was structured
• why Kristang is a polynomic language
• how variation, ambivalence, and uncertainty enrich knowledge rather than weaken it

4 Dreamfishing (Sunyeskah)

The core Kristang Creole-Indigenous methodology of futures research, pattern analysis, and psychoemotional attunement—presented in accessible form. These chapters explain how dreamfishing supports:

• leadership
• ethical decision-making
• generational planning
• collapse resilience
• creativity and narrative work

5 Psychoemotional Frameworks & Wellbeing

The Orange Book maps Kristang relational ethics and emotional intelligence:

• irei / ireidi (unconditional love & self-regard)
• koroza (emotional core)
• kandrisanggi and henung (blood and chosen family)
• boundaries vs. defence mechanisms
• intergenerational trauma processing
• individuation and personhood

These frameworks help community members recognise healthier ways of being in relationship, leadership, and cultural recovery.

6 Mythic Narratives

Story cycles, poetry, allegories, and mythic structures that translate Kristang cosmology into accessible creative forms. This includes foundational mythic material that supports Kristang identity formation.

7 Civilisational Futures

Long-term projections that integrate climate crisis, geopolitical change, Indigenous resilience, and Kristang migration patterns into a coherent civilisational narrative. These chapters provide models for:

• multi-century planning
• community survival
• cultural continuity
• ethical leadership in collapsing systems

Western Academic Validation of the Orange Book

Although the Orange Book began as a community response to the limitations of Western psychology, it has since been fully recognised within Western academic spaces as a legitimate, rigorous and citable body of knowledge. This recognition has emerged not because the Orange Book conforms to Western epistemology, but because it demonstrates intellectual originality, methodological robustness, and clear contributions to multiple fields. Orange Book chapters have already been cited with institutional approval in multiple formal academic documents peer-reviewed by the National University of Singapore since 2023, and Orange Book citations have also been accepted in multiple academic peer-reviewed book chapters and journal articles published outside Singapore. Together, these developments confirm that the Orange Book functions not merely as a community archive, but as a scholarly text that meets—and often exceeds—the standards of contemporary academic research.

The Orange Book Meets Academic Standards for Primary Sources

Even in its current non-public form, the Orange Book is a primary source document that records:

• the evolution of Kristang epistemology and ontology,
• a unique Indigenous method of individuation,
• community-based trauma-processing frameworks,
• the methodology of dreamfishing and Indigenous futures research,
• the lived record of the Kristang revitalisation since 2016.

As with any primary source (e.g., archival documents, field notes, private manuscripts, ethnographic journals), scholars can and do cite the Orange Book as:

• a first-order account,
• an Indigenous theoretical framework,
• an authoritative record of a civilisational revitalisation movement.

The Orange Book Meets Academic Standards for An Emergent Civilisational Corpus

The Orange Book is best understood as

• a civilisational document recording the rebirth of a Creole-Indigenous people,
• a theoretical archive of relational psychology,
• a methodological text guiding community renewal,
• an Indigenous philosophical corpus equivalent to nations’ foundational texts.

Western Scholars Are Increasingly Prepared to Cite Indigenous Knowledge Corpora

Contemporary academia has shifted significantly in the last 15 years. Many fields now acknowledge that:

• Indigenous intellectual frameworks are not “informal”
• community-owned epistemologies are legitimate sources of theory
• revitalisation movements produce new knowledge that cannot be captured by Western categories
• private, semi-restricted manuscripts (e.g., tribal documents, clan archives, communal cosmologies) are valid scholarly references

Because the Orange Book is a methodologically structured, longitudinal, and theoretically integrated corpus, it already matches the criteria used for other:

• Indigenous ethnographies
• community-authored knowledge systems
• decolonial theoretical frameworks
• autoethnographic research
• culturally embedded psychological theory

The Orange Book Has A Stable Intellectual Identity

For a text to be citable in Western scholarship, it must have:

• a stable title,
• a stable authorship,
• a stable internal organisation, and
• consistent referencing conventions.

The Orange Book meets all four requirements, and also meets the requirement for being considered as an academic text because of its internally consistent use of Kristang ontology, epistemology, methodology and axiology across all of its chapters.

Why Academic Validation Does Not Require Public Release

The Orange Book’s current non-public status is not an obstacle to academic use. In fact, it mirrors normal academic practice around community-protected knowledge, and normal Indigenous practice around culturally sensitive material that can be misused by outsiders. Access is thus controlled not because the material lacks rigour, but because it is:

• psychoemotionally complex and touches on many aspects of personal, collective and intergenerational Kristang trauma,
• deeply tied to living community members in the same way,
• easy to misinterpret without Kristang epistemic grounding.

Western scholarship indeed regularly cites:

• restricted Indigenous texts
• monastery manuscripts
• private correspondences of historical figures
• unpublished field notes
• oral histories recorded in limited circulation
• material protected for cultural, ethical or spiritual reasons

Academia generally respects this, just as it respects the cultural restrictions of Indigenous communities globally.

The Origin of the Name “Libru Laranja / Orange Book”

The Orange Book takes its name from the colour most closely associated with the current 13th Kabesa’s leadership, and with the psychoemotional and intellectual centre of the revitalisation movement.

The Sol Hierosa or Heart of Orange is the symbol representing Kevin’s leadership as Kabesa, and the name Orange Book honours this symbol and what it represents: that philosophical, metacognitive, Creole-Indigenous and lovingly humanistic knowledge of ourselves is the civilisational heart of the Kristang people during this period of revitalisation. The symbol itself also encodes the type of knowledge that the Book preserves — knowledge of how reality is built, how reality moves, and how humans grow within it — and the superstructure of reality as understood through Kristang cosmology and dreamfishing:
a universe made not of static categories but of living radial forces, interlocking systems, nested cycles, and generative centres from which meaning and consciousness arise.

The Heart of Orange is thus also a diagram of how reality works, and this is why the Orange Book bears its name. It is a text written in full alignment with the underlying geometry and emotional-spiritual logic of the universe it describes.

Origin and Meaning of the Sol Hierosa Symbol

This symbol was consistently unconsciously dreamfished in various forms by Kevin himself throughout his life as a child and adult and beginning from the creolisation of his sexual abuse as a child in September 1994 with the support and irei or psychoemotionally healthy unconditional love of his blood family and the three Kabesa immediately preceding him.

The symbol was finally concretised in its permanent form on Saturday, 7 June 2025, and also represents Kevin’s own heart of dreaming gold in its full, unique, hyperneurodivergent, queer, radiant and unstoppable form, his own Premesa Elisia or Bittersweet Promise as Kabesa of always seeking to be himself in the fullest possible way in all domains of his own life, and the irei or psychoemotionally healthy unconditional love he will always represent throughout his term as Kabesa for all humanity, all people in the Kristang eleidi, all people who voluntarily assimilate into the Kristang eleidi, and all people who undertake the ultimate Greatest Journey of individuation to creolise and obliterate all forms of personal, collective and intergenerational trauma across their lives. This is the central promise that anchors both the Orange Book and Kevin’s 60-year term as 13th Chief of the Kristang people from 2015 to 2075.

The various wheels, gears, flowers, stars, suns and nebulae making up the Heart of Orange finally represent Kevin’s publicly-acknowledged identity as the first openly gay Kabesa, the first openly neurodivergent and super auDHD Kabesa, and the Kabesa Ultramar, or the Kabesa most associated with decolonisation, reindigenisation, resurrection, Uncertainty Thinking. It also represents the epistemic, ethical and relational systems he and the Orange Book steward: human individuation, trauma obliteration, inner beauty, the ethics of hope, and a renewed belief in what humanity can become.

Citing the Orange Book

The Orange Book is published jointly by Kodrah Kristang and Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting in Singapore.

Orange Book Chapter Sample Citation Format (APA 7th)

Wong, K. M. (2023b). Linggu Skundidu: On the elision of the Kristang language, culture and identity from mainstream public view and academic scholarship in independent Singapore (1965-2023). In K. M. Wong (ed.), Libru Laranja / The Orange Book (Chapter 513) (pp. 4747–4770). Kodrah Kristang and Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting.

Orange Book Chapter Sample Citation Format (MLA 9th)

Wong, Kevin Martens. “Linggu Skundidu: On the Elision of the Kristang Language, Culture and Identity from Mainstream Public View and Academic Scholarship in Independent Singapore (1965-2023).” Libru Laranja / The Orange Book (Chapter 513), edited by Kevin Martens Wong, Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting, 2023, pp. 4747–70.

Orange Book Chapter Sample Citation Format (Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics)

Wong, Kevin Martens. 2023. Linggu Skundidu: On the elision of the Kristang language, culture and identity from mainstream public view and academic scholarship in independent Singapore (1965-2023). In Kevin Martens Wong (ed.), Libru Laranja / The Orange Book (Chapter 513), 4747–4770. Singapore: Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting.

Orange Book Chapter Sample Citation Format (Chicago Manual of Style 18th ed.)

Wong, Kevin Martens. 2023. “Linggu Skundidu: On the Elision of the Kristang Language, Culture and Identity from Mainstream Public View and Academic Scholarship in Independent Singapore (1965-2023).” In Libru Laranja / The Orange Book (Chapter 513), edited by Kevin Martens Wong. Merlionsman Coaching & Consulting.