March 2025, near the equator
Recently, a friend asked me a great question: "If your life were written as a book, what would the three main themes be?" I think of themes as the core questions that the story—and the characters within it, grapple with. For me, the three themes would be leaving, returning, and making home.
Like many Malaysians (especially those of Chinese and Indian descent), Malaysia is a place to leave - if one can afford it.
"Go study abroad and don’t look back."
"It’s better out there."
Most of my cousins have left and won’t be returning anytime soon. Whenever I’m back, I see the look in my uncle’s eyes as he asks if I’m back for good even though he knows he’s turning a blind eye to all the forces that push me away, including our own family’s idea of what “success” means.
Even within Malaysia, education can be a form of leaving. Going to an international school is a privilege many parents strive toward. This too is a kind of departure. Kids leave the local culture and are raised in a bubble of Western teachers and Western curricula. They’re taught about the Black Death and the Blitz, tragedies that befell people whose primary connection to Malaysia is one of colonization. In many ways, attending such schools means that kids leave Malaysia every morning at 7 a.m.
I returned to Malaysia, or Kuala Lumpur, to be specific, when I could walk it. I think to truly feel part of a place is to walk it with your own feet. There’s something deeply human about using one’s energy to traverse a space. You develop a sense of how far things are from each other. You’re forced to navigate in real space (highway speeds make car travel feel unreal). You can observe the world: how the roots of trees lift the blocks of the pavement, how deep the monsoon drains really are, how the air above the asphalt shimmers in the heat.
I felt like I had returned to Kuala Lumpur when I could navigate it by MRT. The stations aren’t always perfectly placed, and some are surrounded by highways and other pedestrian-hostile spaces, but it does an okay job. The stations are spacious and clean. There’s a joy in hitting the streets with just your feet and a small bag, seeing where the day takes you. I became familiar with the backstreets of Bukit Bintang. Dirty and dark though they may be, they became familiar nonetheless.
While I was back, I began to see that making a home was easiest at home, at least in terms of the people I could connect with. Malaysians are sentimental, in part because of a shared sadness for what the country could have been, and still could be. There’s a fire in those who stay. I also include those abroad, whose care for home remains steadfast. I’ve found that making a home means connecting with people who care, people who shrug off easy cynicism and dare to be hopeful that things can get better. It's clear we were meant to be friends because of the task still ahead.
The funny thing is that my life is a mirror: this essay could just as easily have been written with Norway as the home, because it’s the one I chose for myself as an adult. Each of these two lives I’ve lived has moved through its own cycles of leaving, returning, and making. They are mirrors, because when I leave Malaysia, I return to Norway. And when I return to a part of myself, I leave another behind. I’ve created homes in both, just at different cadences and in different lights and each will develop in the same cycle.
Notes: