Places

Nothing like a Swatch to remind you about the passing of time – it ticks so loud.

As a child I did not spend more than 3 years living in the same city or town. And although some say adolescence is the most formative time of one’s life, I never quite lost the wanderlust from my childhood years of exploring the vibe of a brand new place, and inhaling the scent of possibilities only fresh paint in an empty house can offer.

I “incubated” in Petaling Jaya during my teenage years and cannot say I enjoyed it too much. One year in Sydney introducing me to myself, then it was back to base camp. I call it such because the next 8 years (man, that is a big number) was and is one big old fschiwizz of travels – 37 places and 16 countries, each experience alternately wonderful, lonesome, insightful, intimidating and peaceful in itself.

These opportunities come from work. I’ve been fortunate to get the corporate version of a Globe Trekker job. And to digress, I love how equalizing work can be. Hairdressing in Hong Kong is no different from hairdressing in Manila or anywhere else – a good cut is a good cut. Not much gives me more satisfaction than seeing a Malaysian working alongside and holding their own with people from different, more developed countries, I’ll be honest. For me, that is through playing in a field with rules and people from different places, and making it, on the books, and in my way.


Jalan-Jalan (I’m just travelling around)

I love traveling. Despite immigration and suitcases, I do. This I realized when standing in Amsterdam's airport at 5.30 am after a 13 hour flight, teeth un-brushed and slightly bleary eyed looking for the next connection, and I am inexplicably happy. I think it had something to do with spotting Ronald McDonald with that congenial arm draped around an airport bench, familiarity mixed up with adventure, like making a friend of an acquaintance you clicked well with before.

Some places will always feel a little bit like home – Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Antwerp. Some feel like I never knew them in past lives but have the maiden chance to start now – Busan, Bangkok, Tokyo. And some, I’ll just be passing through.

Being loyal to a place for me is similar to being loyal to someone. If it is the right person, it is not highs all the time but there are wonderful moments that keep you nourished, and despite the work and rough times there is a kind of peace from feeling that you are in the right place. And if it’s the wrong guy, it is suffocating and draining despite all the getting by.

Yet, at some point we all need to get past the second date, the second year, yes? I guess what you earn for accepting the ugliness alongside with the light is your own furniture, and your own someone to come home to. We reap what we sow. Good thing is, we can make our own rules and do it on our own terms, but we reap what we sow.

Getting acquainted with Antwerp

Apparently this city lies at the crossroads of five international motorways, linking the Netherlands, Germany and France. Bergen op Zoom where I work is a speedy 30 minutes away, and Maxis sends me texts every morning when I cross the border, to tell me to enjoy my time in the Netherlands, and not to worry as I can call the Malaysian embassy at +31703506506 if I need to .

I love how urban it is here. It is classic and beautiful like so many European towns, but there is size, scope and enough trash on the street to make a city a city.

It feels a little like Sydney. It reminds me of how much I relish walking a city, disappear in it, discover it at my pace and make it my own.

I will make you a Bo Bunh

One sunny day in Lausanne, I decide I would visit Dalat for dinner.

Tripadvisor highly recommends it so I take a cab, 10 minutes up slopes and into apartment suburbia.

I sit outdoors in a corner between the wall and the other side of the door, and a nice man hands me a menu in French, as most things are here. I don’t recognize the words but I smell something wonderful coming from the kitchen.

I suspect he is the owner, a French man who married a Vietnamese lady, and we gesture to each other that I don’t read but what is that cooking? Do I speak Vietnamese? No. Chinois, anyone? No. He decides to take me to the kitchen where I am introduced to a petite Asian lady with kind eyes.

For some reason, I am so happy to see her and I have a huge grin on my face when I tell her I am from Malaisie and could I please order what is cooking? Apparently there are several things cooking. After some back and forth, she tells me, she will make me a bo bunh. Her eyes tell me, with the confidence of a mother who knows what is good for you, this is what you want.

That settled, the one who I think is the husband takes me to choose my drink. He shows me the interior of the dark cooler and all its possibilities. I take a sugared green tea, which he makes a show of swirling in a wine glass and letting me try. I love this couple already.

The bo bunh comes – a bowl of vermicelli topped with beef sautéed in onions, spring rolls, carrots, beansprouts, peanuts and coriander. It is a hearty serving, yet I realize as I look at it that I am going to finish every last scrap. And I do. I take my time, for it is so good and so authentic that it makes me understand how food can be restorative, even remind a person of who he or she is.

These two people will never know the kindness they offered a homesick girl in a foreign land simply by being themselves and cooking good food. I am truly grateful.

2nd time around

"Maybe I'd gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I'd circled the globe. How would I know?
- Murakami -

Although there's nothing like being in a place for the first time, I say sometimes coming back is even sweeter.

Sydney after 7 years, and Amsterdam just about two, it's good to see you again.

Actually, it is Simple

When things are going well, be grateful.
When things are not going well, don't worry.

Euro-Asia

Where “privacy” and “personal space” are still buzzwords for some living in Asia, these here are requirements as basic as breathing, existence unfathomable without.

Where watching, gauging and measuring before speaking are valued as strengths, these may be a handicap here.

Strength, built from self-possession and individualism, pit against fluid power gained from years of tolerating and standing in the shoes of others.

A million other things, none right or wrong, just as different as apples are from oranges.

How is it we are so exhaustingly different? And how do we achieve more common ground?

Be it as Neil Gaiman said “If only experience could be endowed without experience”, surely we will be enriched by these times, but the currents of give and take make trying teachers.

The Dropdown List

How is it that sometimes things are said quite eloquently?

“Because of the rat race, a lot of us have been pushed into studying something that would give us security for life”.
– Scarlette of Core Design Gallery, Timeout KL April 2010 –

If you were a post-secondary / college student in Malaysia in the late 90s, instead of “I want to be ___”, your career decision may likely have been influenced by “I will select from the below list”, which looked something like this:

1. Accountant
2. Engineer
3. Doctor
4. Banker
5. Lawyer
6. IT (no designations because to be honest at the time, no one really knew what it was, other than IT was the next big thing)
7. Pharmacist
8. I am struggling to even come up with more

Call it realities of capitalism, the developing country, or the arguable conservatism/foresight of parents who want the best for their children, there is no wrong or right. I do hope though, that we are moving towards an environment where individuals from more professions can find their choices equally rewarding in practical and personal aspects, so long as they do their jobs well.

To fill that blank myself, I might have said….anthropologist. What about you?

Discussion with an atheist

Today a colleague of mine told me that spirits cannot exist in the same realm that we do, simply because the world would then be overpopulated. I told him that unlike real people, probably more than one spirit can sit in the same chair, so really they wouldn’t take up so much space.

This is the math grad who believes that there is no God (in the context of the bible, at least) because given the proven time that photosynthesis takes, the world could not have been created in 7 days. I don’t argue with that, but then, I haven’t read the bible.

Anyway, he counters by saying that even if this were true, at some point, we would still run out of room because think of the multitude of spirits we must have through time since the creation of man (being from Hong Kong, he is very concerned about space and population control. Being Malaysian, I am a little more easygoing about real estate in general).

Why then I say, that is exactly why we have reincarnation. Same soul, re-born into a different body that lives through a different time. At some point, perhaps that soul might move on to somewhere beyond, and there will be room for a new one here and there. Everyone/thing else in between, is what we accountants would just call timing differences.

Hey I don’t have all the answers, but mathematically it seems to make good sense, no?

Are we ever 100% ready?

"How often I have found out where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else."
- R. Buckminster Fuller -

I guess maybe the idea is to first, set out.

God I hope I am a sophomore, but I am not really sure

A good friend of mine once introduced the idea of the “University of Real Life” [社会大学], a place where there is no course duration, no syllabus, unlikely and unbeknownst teachers, and no guarantee of passing with honest study.

Two years ago, I made an “enrolment” of sorts into such an institution. I applied all my pre-requisites, watched and learned, and here are some takeaways I have so far:

- We are all alone, yet no man is an island
- Talk is cheap, yet information is power
- There are no perpetual friends and enemies, but relationships go a long way
- No news may or may not mean good news
- You may not agree with the rules of the game, but to be honest - winning is fun
- Go with the flow, but all is lost if you are not true to yourself

I’d like to say that 2+2=4, and I still believe that it does, but My Goodness, sometimes so many invisible forces need to come together to make that unsuspecting equation happen, and depending on who you are, who you know, what deliberately / inadvertently happens, it just may not add up despite best efforts.

I suspect that in the end, only I can define flying colors for myself. Until then, I'm just doing up the homework and waiting for the next lesson to unfold.

Life As We Know It

Work took me to the slums of Malabon last week - this particular one was called "Vegetable", a community of makeshift huts built on a haphazard network of cement slabs and planks, elevated above trash and stagnant water below. Yet, life goes on every day as it does anywhere else.

Pouch pack everything: shampoo, cooking oil, washing powder, you name it. Small packs mean affordable prices for the low income groups.

How perfect Creation is: Flowers bloom, and children are beautiful no matter where.

Pedicab drivers: These guys were blaring a Tagalog version of "Nobody-nobody-but-you clap clap clap clap" (it is The song to play now for the upcoming elections).

Hardware store on wheels: Torches, batteries, mobile phone chargers and other bits and bobs.

These little convenience stores or "sari-sari" are everywhere - usually the store is at the front, and the family lives at the back. Salted eggs are painted red.

Resident dogs - these friendly guys looked like they'd been here a while, maybe seen a couple of things in their time.

Manila and me

A barangay (Filipino: baranggay, [baraŋˈɡaj]), also known by its former Spanish adopted name, the barrio, is the smallest administrative division in the Philippines and is the native Filipino term for a village, district or ward. Barangays are further subdivided into smaller areas called Puroks (English: Zone). A sitio is a territorial enclave inside a barangay, especially in rural areas. Municipalities and cities are composed of barangays.

You get the idea - there are small places inside smaller places, which are then sub-divided into more small places. Welcome to the Manila, the city of villages.

It is important to exhale here, more than in most other cities I've been to. My most pronounced memory of Manila after spending about 3 months here in 2009 and being here again now, is the traffic jams. There are just a lot of cars. The roads burst at the seams at almost at every hour of the day. More flyovers and tunnels would help. Jeepneys, which typically do not go faster than 50 km/h should probably not be allowed on the highway. I am no city planner, but one should probably be able to turn right when they need to, instead of cramming with a crowd of vehicles turning left just to make a u-turn, and then join the futile congestion on the other side.

Still, that is life sometimes. Messy, a little hopeless and you just got to laugh. And keep on trucking, measuring out on each other’s patience and mercy as we go. In time, I hope we will all get home.

Why I Do What I Do Sometimes

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

-Maya Angelou-

Thank you Alliz, for introducing a great lady!

Kita bebas beragama, maka saya beragama bebas

Recently I was on a plane home from somewhere, and a teenager about 13 or 14 years old sat next to me. I will admit this – I deliberately ignored him. It was late, the plane was stuffy and he was the sort of fidgety, meng-a-a* kind of kid who pretended he wasn’t noticing if anyone was watching, yet acutely aware when someone was.

Anyhow. An hour or so after meals, we established we were both Malaysians and I asked if he was going home. He was, to his mum for the holidays from the international school he was attending in Surabaya. This and that for a little while more, and then:

“Aunty (well, I suppose I AM twice his age) orang Cina kan?”
“Ya”
“Tapi aunty boleh cakap Bahasa Melayu?”
“Kenapa pulak tak boleh?”
“Biasa orang Cina cakap Inggeris”
“...”
“Aunty Kristian?”
“Tak…”
“Habis Aunty agama apa?”
“Em.. I beragama bebas”
“Apa tu?”
“Percaya pada Tuhan, tapi bukan pada satu agama. Kenapa pulak?”
“Biasanya orang Cina agama Kristian”.

I wanted to sit him down, and ask him why he would think these things. In Malaysia, we all speak Malay. Granted, in varying degrees, but we all. speak. Malay. This is who we are.

Also, we are a God fearing nation as our Rukunegara first principle states, but it should be God we are united in believing, not religions decreed by race.

I know why he is right, yet he is so wrong. I want to re-adjust the structure of his thinking, almost how you would move the skeleton of a toy square to shape an octagon or triangle. Little shifts, that mean everything.


*meng-a-a: meng-attract attention