Report from Malaysia: Three main streets and that’s it? Michigan on my mind

This is the second in a series of blog posts from Western Herald writers in Malaysia. Check this space every week for posts from Ranchithaa Anatory and Daing S. Nasir on their summer back home.

When I moved to Kalamazoo three years ago and was shown around the city, which consisted of West Michigan, West Main, and Westnedge, gave me the shock of my life: three main streets and that’s it? I made a call back home to verify and, yes, daddy indeed told me that “there were only two of those main streets 28 years ago and that Meijer was on the other side of town.”

Maybe having gone through all the episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 and CSI’s had my expectations on the other end of the spectrum of what Kalamazoo was going to be like.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Kalamazoo. I am in love with every aspect of it. Kuala Lumpur, on the other hand, is a metropolis. I was never a city guy. I guess I was born to live in the suburbs. Having lived all over the world, whenever we went back to Malaysia, “home” would be an island at the north of the peninsula that is closely bordered by Thailand: Penang.

This tropical island was indeed the gateway keeper to the straits that were once the spice route for merchants from India on their way to China. Founded by Francis Light, a British colonist, this island has since become a melting pot of European, Middle Eastern and even East Asian cultures, namely Portuguese, Indian, Arabs, Persian, Indochina and Chinese.

In 2004, an earthquake in the Indian Ocean resulted in a tsunami that hit the beaches of the beautiful island I used to call home. This disaster, from which approximately 230,000 people died, brought a horrible ending to 2004 not just for the people effected, but the entire world.

I was devastated. If you go onto YouTube and search “tsunami” and “Penang” you will know what I mean. I am humbled by this tragedy and can understand what the United States went through one year later when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

Touching down at the Kuala Lumpur International airport three weeks ago after a dramatic layover in Stockholm and Amsterdam, (the runway in Stockholm was under construction and we couldn’t refuel to maximum capacity or else the aircraft would be too heavy to take off, so we had to land in Amsterdam and refuel), I was finally home in the country that I will forever call home.

But what then do I call my apartment on Lafayette Avenue? My “temporary home?” My “home away from home?” I was born in the United States and have come back to the country in search of who I really am. Traveling around the world has made me understand that having a sense of belonging to a particular identity makes you who you really are. I would love to be a true-Malaysian or a true-American, but I know that I will never fully be either. The hyphenated identity has made me become the person I am today and I celebrate it in ways to help people like and different than me understand; it’s okay to be different.

Malaysia has conditioned me to be the person that I am today. Being a democratic Muslim state, Malaysia, for the most part, is a conservative country. Having said so, if you go inside one of the malls in Kuala Lumpur you would suddenly be in a state of deja vu and think that you were on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

That’s how Kuala Lumpur is.

The hustle and bustle of a cosmopolitan city designed with a garden like atmosphere invites one to think “how can skyscrapers and trees stand side by side.” Home to the famous Petronas Twin Towers, this city is the home to many of those that have migrated from the other 13 Malaysian states to find a better life in hopes of making it big in the city.

If you see me now you would probably not recognize me. I have put on 10 pounds–hence the gym membership that I just signed up for yesterday. Food has become the heartbeat of every single Malaysian. We eat when were are happy. We eat when we are sad. We eat when we are hungry and we eat when we are not: we eat 24/7. Hence stalls that are open all day and all night on the side of the streets to accommodate this rich hobby Malaysians have.

Eating. I barley could remember an occasion that that did not involve eating. Maybe it is a south-east-Asian way of replacing the Western champagne, but we eat fish head curry and sate in times of celebration.

Malaysian food is a vibrant mix of many cultures that have transpired into a culture of its own. Malaysians in Kalamazoo drive two and a half hours just to have dinner at “Penang” in Chicago. That’s how passionate we are about what goes into our tummies. Come hail or blizzard, if you see a car on the road on I-94 headed West with five people inside and that the weather is below zero outside believe me: it’s the Malaysians.

Being a Bronco away from home makes you wonder about the many things that you miss about WMU and Kalamazoo for the months that you spend away from it. This time last year, I spearheaded the students’ delegation in helping out representatives from the Haenicke Institute for Global Education (HIGE) in an American Education Exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. It was important for me to make known to the public here that studying in America didn’t only mean going to New York University or University of California: Los Angeles and educate them on our haven for education in the Midwest and what WMU has to offer.

Having promoted Malaysian study abroad programs to WMU students helped me to make it clear that despite our geographical barriers and the 13 hour time zone difference, the Malaysia-WMU bond needs to remain strong and firm for our future generations. I look forward to doing that again this year as I wait for instructions from WMU to go out and meet future students that want to embark on this journey that currently some 100 students from Malaysia in Kalamazoo have embarked upon.

Daing S. Nasir studies organizational communication and psychology at Western Michigan University.

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Posted by heraldstaff on Jul 23 2009. Filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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