Maya Ova’s Sea Changes: Journal of a Transgender Woman is not just a book, it’s a deeply textured meditation on identity, transformation, and creativity. Woven through a mosaic of journal entries, poetry, photography, and travel anecdotes, the book offers readers a window into Maya’s life as a transgender woman growing up in Southeast Asia and later navigating a global career in education and culture. It is equal parts memoir, scrapbook, and soundscape, a tribute to the many selves Maya has inhabited, and the melodies she continues to create from them.
Born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Maya grew up in the ever-expanding urban sprawl of a city constantly reinventing itself, a mirror to her own fluid evolution. As a child, Maya knew she was different. She wished she had been born a girl and carried that silent truth through a world not built for easy honesty. “I grew up in a modest urban landscape, albeit with little resources available,” she writes. “I would look at my friends who play the piano, arguing whose music centre is better while I itched to learn how pressing each key would sound like.”
