A Little Malaysian Goes A Long Way

A Vietnamese meal and a bottle of wine were the beginning and the end.

The long and short of it was that I dropped my driver’s license, unknowingly, somewhere in the dark streets of Richmond, Melbourne one night in my search of the perfect bowl of Vietnamese noodles. About a week later, a lady working in Kampung Pandan, Kuala Lumpur sends a letter to my home, saying her brother in Melbourne picked my license up and would I like to have it sent, or collected somehow.

She had sent the letter twice, after having it returned the first time due to some postcode mix-up. I call her up, then her brother, who turns out to be a cook in Tien Tien, an Asian restaurant in St. Kilda’s. He says he came home one night, and there it was on his doorstep. Probably a neighbour had picked it off the street and thought it was his, or some relative’s.

I collect the fateful document at the restaurant, which is charming, and return a few days later with a bottle of wine as a gift. He takes it after much back and forth, then proceeds to cook dinner for me and a friend, and refuses to let us pay for it. Because we are all Malaysians, he says, and have “yuen fen”, to meet each another.

Kinship, across borders with people you have never met. I am inspired, and so comforted to have encountered this – simple yet amazing bond among us. Good things in life are hardly free, but you know, evil is banal as good is simple.

Thanks again Kee Weng! I am a lucky girl.