Obtuse and opaque.

Always say yes...
— Stephen P. (@mysonabsalom) May 21, 2013

I can only manage obtuse, opaque writing about the last week. The odd sensation that everyone is watching. This blog is the perfect alibi: hide in plain sight.

I'm embarrassingly in search of a theory of everything -- the search, a kind of vestigial organ of my Evangelical faith. I want truth: I want to know the one cause, but if I've learned anything, it's this: there is never, not ever, never one cause. (A kind of truth.) There are causes, yes, but an endless list and when you think you have identified them all, you have only identified the identifiable ones. How many unknown unknowns lurk just beyond your perception. Many more that you think, I'm sure.

Maybe this truth, embodied in the entropy of our terrace house: left alone, everything gathers dust.

All the objects, some material, some immaterial, remind me of being alone. The house, the emptiness, is hot when I come home late from working all day. Working later than I would have otherwise, but there are no sticky hands to grab onto me when I open the door so I put it off as long as I can. I left the fan on yesterday: I had spent the night in the city again, in a guest room in KL, but I fell asleep alone. Another empty cavernous house, with heavy wood chairs. I woke suddenly, reaching across the bed for my wife's absent body. 

A truth: you can never sleep in the middle of a bed. You always favour one side, subconsciously leaving space for another.

Or this: you will always talk about what matters to you most, despite where you are and who you're with. Empirical evidence: a view of the city from a condo in Bangsar, all these people I don't deserve to be sitting with. Suddenly, I catch myself talking about my children. If I had pictures in my wallet, I would make everyone look at them.

In my theory of everything, I think there are no exceptions to this rule: never say no to sitting with people who know more than you.

Or this truth: life with others is always better than life alone. Not always. Most of the time. A majority of the time.

Another day passes: Yoko will not be home again. Yoko, the woman I love: of course distance reminds you what you know, what your body already knows. I love you, stay with me, I wrote once in a poem voicing Bahktin's longing for his own wife. I am so sick with love. .

Love might be a theory of everything: I warn myself again and again, Never tell the truth; serve the narrative.The narrative will eventually become the truth. 

Silence

When I woke up on Saturday, again, silence. I slept through the azan and when the alarm went off, the house was empty and cavernous. I went to work, paid road tax, shopped, came home, took a nap, and left for the city, talking to no one on the way. I picked up the house, cleaned the floors and put up the toys thinking, This will not come off the shelf for a month.

I had envisioned this time away from the family to be different — more depressive or more liberating or something — than it has been. I sleep well in the house alone: I had worried I would have trouble sleeping. I've been cooking simply, vegetables and meat: the sorts of things I want to eat. I wash my things and put them away. Turn lights on and off. Sleep and wake up. An empty Rothko room — colours on colours, a frame.

Nothing more to say for now.

Leaving

Not everything needs to be melodramatic: Yoko and the girls got on a plane to Japan early this morning without any tears or clinging. They got on an escalator and road up to security and were gone and I was left, metaphorically, alone.

I say metaphorically because Auntie and Uncle appeared, as the do, to save us last night. Their car pulled up at 8:30: Come, we take you to the airport. I feigned trying to say no, but was immediately and deeply thankful. Thank you. We all piled into their car as we have again and again and again in this country and they took us. Auntie held Mia as Yoko checked in. Uncle parked the car. It's okay; no problem.

So they drove me back home, Yoko texted that she was at the gate, and then on the plane, and then they were gone. I went to sleep and woke to the alarm clock at 6:30. The alarm clock: I couldn't believe it. The terrace house on Taman Sri Minang takes on new meaning — children's boots at the door, waiting for them to return. Perhaps in all this quietness, the truth will seep into me.

6

Naomi, you are six today. Six. You are so big now: I remember that day you were born so well. You changed my life, like your mother had the year before. Your face, the first time I saw it, was a revelation. This morning too, as you stood in your room looking up at me, waking up to your birthday: a revelation. Naomi, I loved you when you were born and I love you now and every day with you has been better than every day without you.

Understanding Nothing But Understanding Everything

Mei, you are four today. Four. You had such a hard year: you were sick for so long. I remember this about your last year: Mummy washing you in the shower as you screamed and screamed. Mummy kept saying, shouting over your screams, 'We will not lose to this illness!' She used that word in Japanese 負けない. You did not lose — you fought through it and now you are stronger, more confident than ever. I love you, Mei: you are your own particular person, with all your own particular peculiarities. I hope this year is better than the last.

I hope, but I am not certain: not just for Mei, but for the family and the whole country. The whole world. Malaysia is in a lull after the election last week. There were blackouts, I'm told, at polling stations and when the lights came on, the whole thing had been stolen. I don't know any of this; it's only what I've heard — a recurring theme of my life here. Last night, I watched the opposition rally, the men and women in black screaming, 'Reformasi! Reformasi! Reformasi!' over the sound of vuvuzelas. I tweeted: 'Understanding nothing but understanding everything.'

Malaysia, this 'one Malaysia' that we are all promised, has deep schisms and histories. The Chinese contingent in Taman Sri Minang warned us to stay indoors the night of the election and I wondered what it would look like if the country exploded with race riots. The next morning, the election stolen, I woke and went to get water at the strip mall. There was a holiday in the state of Selangor and everything was moving as it normally would — the Indonesian cafe full of people leisurely eating nasi lemak with their hands. I filled the water bottles and went home, wondering what change would really look like here.

But Malaysia in my narrow view of it just serves as the backdrop to my own narrative, tending towards the stagnancy of waiting for my monthly salary. Democracy? Race riots? Fine, but will I get paid on time? Yoko and the girls will go home to Japan on 17 May and I am watching Yoko prepare, packing the bags and buying souvenirs, wishing I could go too. Of course, this is the wrong thing to say — how fundamentally selfish. I kiss the girls at night and wonder what I will do without them for 28 days. What they will do without me. Again, what to say: I am stuck in this cultural no man's land: do I act like I am American or like I think a Japanese husband would. Understanding nothing but understanding everything: can you even put it into words.

So I am making plans to bury myself in my work for the next four weeks. Escape the weekends when I can with more work. Travel with colleagues to a conference in Johor Bahru. Save money. Avoid being alone. Work. And work some more.

Success

Naomi has passed her first entrance exam at the tender age of five — she will be able to attend the school we had in mind from the very beginning. Things, as they do, work out. Tana-rata is Malay for 'flat field': it is a quiet school in the middle of a palm oil plantation. A metonymy. There is a pool and the school is full of kind aunties.

This was, I believe, the last step in establishing an indefinitely secure life here. I have a renewable contract and the girls can go to school until A-levels, if they want: Mei and Mia are automatically accepted. Now, to have it fully paid for, and I will be able to exhale some more. One thing at a time: everyone has been so patient, but we've done what this post has required, despite the difficulties, and that's something. A kind of academic merit badge. 

The future is starting to materialise on the horizon. So many possibilities in the multiverse: I pray to 75 year-old me for guidance. This could be a big year, a very, very big year: I need to keep my head down... I'm writing like a madman, a kind of manic energy overload that, harnessed, leads to an incredible output. After Mia was born, I sloppily drafted my dissertation in 10 days: that sort of energy. The older I get, the better I am at dealing with the energy and the inevitable depression, but it's hard to explain, to put into words. I suddenly feel a rush of endorphins just standing there, no reason: just suddenly, incredibly happy. If I told you what triggered it, you'd laugh. I close the door of the office and a week later there is a research proposal, another journal article, an edited collection going forward, a new class I'm teaching... Where is the time coming from, how is it all getting done? 

Yesterday, the girls played in the park across from our terrace house in Taman Sri Minang and I cleaned leaves out of the gutter around the park. When prodded, the leaves coughed out a cloud of mosquitoes, so I spent an hour digging them all out and pulling out plants that were growing from the damp mulch. A leather-skinned Malay man came out to watch me, smoking and sitting on a bench: he didn't say anything, so after a while I said hello and we started chatting.

He is retired, living in Ipoh, but his son rents a house in our neighbourhood. He told me the council should clean the gutter, and I laughed, making a joke about nothing getting done unless you do it yourself. He used to be an audio technician, he said — worked in Qatar and in KL and we talked about the world as he saw it and I saw it. He smoked, watching me waist deep in the gutter, making three piles of mud and leaves to burn after they dry out. 

The terrace house in Taman Sri Minang, with its fans and aunties and bugs, a kind of home for us. Yoko points to an army of ants walking across the wall from one opening in the door frame to another. There's mould on the ceiling. We talk about moving out, but there's really no better place to go for now. We are situated perfectly for the future here: for Naomi to go to school, for Mei to go to kindergarten, and for me to walk daily to the bus station. Provided we can accept the bugs and the heat, seal all the holes with silicon, and keep our heads above water. Provided it all works out. 

Rain

When it rains in Malaysia, it rains hard. And just now, like the alarm had been sent to go off, the rain starts.

Signs of settling and progression again, despite the lack of changes in the weather, the incessant heat. The last month I was in the UK, I bought new shoes that didn't fit properly, and threw away my old ones the week we moved. My feet swollen, I could not get the new shoes on after our plane ride here — I went through immigration, out to the baggage claim, in my socks. But, a sign — the shoes now fit well: perfectly, in fact.

I finished my first semester of teaching last week, only to begin again on Monday morning: my part-time hours for the summer to help top up my income. The new class went off with no trouble — some version of me is an English language teacher and he, if you ask politely, will appear on demand. He also, surprisingly, has a wealth of knowledge about it, gained in the EFL salt mines of Japan. Ten weeks of English for Academic Purposes? That knowledge is stored in a dusty shoebox in the back of my mind.

Slow progress articles too. One coming out in May, one almost through review, another to be sent in at the end of this week, and another 'in preparation'. And the book proposal: almost through review.

This progression doesn't, however, stop the almost daily discussion of leaving. No one here talks about staying, just trying to get out. I make and then immediately break my promise to not complain about finances, but it is the natural arc of so many conversations.

Building your career is such an imperceptible thing: money in the bank is not. I think of the 75 year-old version looking back at me, praising this decision and I want to curse at him for being so selfish, why won't he let me give up. Let me go, old man.

So another day. My weight goes up and down. The house is always the same, every night. What does progression look like in the heat. Yoko's eczema flairs up and I wake in the middle of the night, night after night, to move to the sofa. The call to prayer, the sun comes up, another morning.

Stability

Stabilities, like plateaus, are always easy to recognise when you arrive at them. You don't know you have reached the top until you look up and can see the horizon. Sᴇᴇɪɴɢ ɪs ᴋɴᴏᴡɪɴɢ. The call to prayer wakes you — you were sleeping next to your wife, and the rain has cleared. Everything that is normally dirty is suddenly clean. You walk the twenty minutes to the train station and watching the people come in and out of taxis and cars, you recognise stability in the system — that the system is fundamentally stable. The feeling is tangible for a moment. Everything that looked like chaos is profoundly, fundamentally ordered. A complex system.

A complex system: I think of the components that lead to temporary stability, some known, some unknown. Payday: yes. Small successes personally and professionally: yes. Kisses, hugs, parting cheers of Daddy, daddy! Yes.

You also know stability when you imagine the future as progression forward into something new, rather than retreat back to the familiar. When you begin to think of new ideas and new places you might call home rather than the overwhelming desire to go back.

The sense of stability is convergence. It's not just money, or love, or the weather. It's none of them, it's all of them. It's all of them together.

Mia is talking now, stringing together little phrases. If you've had small children, you how liberating this is for both the parents and the child. Vygotsky is right: in the acquisition of language, we internalise reasoning. Suddenly, getting breakfast in the morning is not a series of cries and shouts, but a request made and answered: a process that leads to pride and contentment, rather than frustration. You tell her to dance and she understands, smiles shyly, and swings her arms at her waist.

All this moving together, convergence and divergence. Jorie Graham comments on the process in a poem I suddenly decided to teach in class this last week. Graham, as the narrator, is hanging over a dock railing, watching minnows swim, when she falls into thoughts of the system:

And if I listen now?
Listen, I was not saying anything.
It was only something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Yes, this is it.

Everything moves together, but only when we realise it moves together. The rest of the time it is chaos. The world works? This shouldn't surprise me, but it does. Best to pin it down, log it, display it, write about it. My boss reminds me of the moment: this blog, this life, is about the moment. 'Here: never.' Tomorrow will be another day, another depleting bank account, a screaming child still hanging on her mother's breast. But for a moment, this moment, best to look to the horizon and imagine.

One moment

Just now, I am standing in the kitchen, looking up and out across the alley for a moment into Auntie and Uncle's lit up back window. There is Uncle, doing the same thing as me: washing the dishes. He smiles and waves and I think about the responsibilities he and I share, caring for our little families in the same way.

Eight Ringgit

Stories come and go over the week: when I can pin them down, they’re never the best ones. I had a post about my two staff photos called Recovery on deck. The photos, one from January and the next from last week, are clear evidence that things are looking up. At the very least, I've lost some weight. That story, however, slipped away before I could make something of it.

The end of our fourth month is coming up soon, but like every end of the month, we are under the strict confinement of the budget. Waiting to get paid is not something I thought I would be doing here, not after finishing my PhD. It will get better, I keep telling myself and Yoko, as we put off buying what we need to buy for another three days: the refrigerator pathetically empty.

One of the things you don’t notice in the developed world is the efficiency and raw force that occurs when you flush the toilet. It’s a thing of wonder, really. Only in rare, extenuating circumstances will the toilet become clogged.

In our quaint terrace house in Taman Sri Minang, surrounded by the local Malaysia, the toilet is plastic and does not flush with force, but with resignation, like it’s given up. This is Malaysia: it works nominally well most of the time, provided you don't ask too much of it.

That is to say: on Saturday night, the toilet clogged. I stood there, staring down, thinking, Shit and not taking the time to admire the irony of the situation. I told Yoko that the toilet was clogged, and Naomi kept saying, I want to see, I want to see! I got angry with her, shouted: No, of course not what's wrong with you.

The story ends happily, if a toilet flushing solid waste normally is a happy ending. In Malaysia, it is. I was content for about ten minutes— an abnormal sense of peace coming over me as clean water filled the bowl. But the peace only lasted until I had cleaned up.

I have RM8 in my wallet and am determined to make this last until Thursday, a kind of self-imposed minimalism — if everyone in the family has to suffer from this misadventure, I should do the most: this is, after all, my idea. Get up, ride the bus, work, work out, teach, go home, eat, sleep, do it again until Thursday when I will buy some fruit with whatever is left of the RM8. It's stupid, it doesn't make any sense except to me. We have savings, money coming in the next couple of months. But today is 22 April, and the future is the future.

I'm obsessed with these eight Ringgit and what I can make them represent. Five years it's been like this, I’m reminded again, sitting at the dining room table, another stalled conversation in the dull, oppressive heat. Five years, six, seven years is a long time. Maybe money does buy happiness and love: I'm not sure I will ever find out.

Growing up, burning out

Something about Malaysia that is metaphorical, if you want it to be: the weather doesn't change. Today it was hot and muggy: high of 34-35. Tomorrow it will also be hot and muggy, high of 34-35. It might rain, it might not. The next day, and the day after that will also be hot and muggy. And next month, and so on and so on. The fat white man is disoriented by this and says things that have a slight condescension about them, everyone nodding and agreeing: I don't know, I just like the change of seasons back home; the sense of passing time. Of the many deficiencies of the country, the weather is one: I say this without saying it. I use this metaphor: it's like a tunnel without any ending.

In Japan, even the Japanese slow in August. They take a week off to sit around and complain about the weather: it's hot, isn't it hot?

The Pihlaja family goes back and forth about purchasing an air conditioner; the house didn't come with any so buying one (or two or three) would mean an active decision. We — the royal we; that is, I — don't like to make decisions like this. We, in theory, reject the air-conditioned life. We have no microwave. No TV. The air conditioner would result in all of us, suddenly, simultaneously, getting asthma and getting fat. So another day passes with the fans on: a student says, This is Malaysia, sir. It's hot and there are bugs. I feel especially white and fat when I answer: yes, yes, but it seems particularly hot and buggy where we are. 

Living as we do, we have no idea about the future: unease about investing in an aircon is just a metaphor for how little I can say about the future, even in the short to medium term. I don't even know if we'll be in this house in six months: we're taking it step-by-step, never quite sure. Why buy anything, really, except food and clean underwear. The bare essentials. Live like animals, hand to mouth. Jesus, if you'll recall, told us to look to the sparrows for inspiration. Quaint, yes: they don't appear to worry about anything. 

So I put on a dress shirt, tie, and slacks, kissing the girls goodbye and heading out into the morning which is deceptively comfortable for the first 15 minutes of the walk to the bus. It's not that hot, really. You just have to be willing to accept it. The fat white man walks to the bus, he sweats, the people stare until, mercifully, the bus coming up the road sees him and honks, pulling over. Hello, yes, selamat pagi, many thanks.

These are first world problems in the developing world: comical, really. Everything is going well, I report in e-mails to old colleagues. Books, two of them, in different stages. Articles forthcoming, under review, in preparation. Money problems on the verge of being solved, permanently and definitively (don't jinx it though — this is Malaysia and promises made are never promises kept). I even got my staff photo retaken: the less sweaty, thinner version of me, not squinting or standing flat footed. No, the new picture is almost aspirational: this fellow looks like he's headed to great things. Smiling confidently, but not too much. It's hot, yes, but I have it under control. 

Criteria

The Malaysian misadventure is full of thoughts of criteria.

Naomi needs to be peeled off me again to take her entrance exam at the only international school option we have at the moment. She has changed schools three times now, and here she needs to take a test. We spent the last whole two days trying to prepare her, but when the moment came to go in, she couldn't. They told me to leave her crying in the room. So I left. Pay RM350 to torture your daughter: what sort of life is this. And it will happen again, if by some miracle she passes the exam, in the autumn. Again and again and again. You can't protect your kids from change, certainly, but all this change, all the time? I am mad: the whole misadventure is mad.

What criteria do they test on, I wonder. They interview me and I feel confident and strong, like we belong here: we, this school and my family. I use those terms. I try to be amiable and likeable--I interviewed so much last year, it feels like a skill I have; I know what to say, I think.

Then she comes out of the test, sees me, waves and goes confidently with the teacher into the office. What the hell. She tells me she counted to 100, wrote some words, was praised a lot. Can we have ice cream now?

More criteria for testing: I look through CVs trying to help find another person for our new little School of English. A new family member in a way. How do you choose this person over that person? There is no test: this post doc versus that set of publications. I know that university, I don't know that other one. And then, of course, it's about me: how did I make it up a list like this one to be hired. Why did I get chosen. What other job might I get chosen for.

And then I have been marking my own students. I want to write them all the same comment, 'Forget this number, try your hardest, and be passionate... Work hard. Work as hard as you can. I gave you this number, but all I really want from you is hard work. Someone gets an 80 easily, another person struggles and fights for a 53. You want to be the person with the 53, not the 80.’

Naomi will or will not enter this school based on some criteria, but I suspect she is fundamentally not a person who does well in new situations that are high stress. She is exactly the opposite of me, in this case. She, when she takes her A-levels or SATs or whatever test she takes in 12 years for university: I suspect she will get all the books to prepare and practice tests and still, on the day, be hyperventilating. What can a father do. You can only protect your kids for so long.

I hope she is, or is becoming, a girl who can cry a bit, shake it off, and then blow the challenge out of the water. I sort of suspect that she is. If not, I'm sorry if I'm making things too hard for you, Naomi: I love you, I want the best for you. In a better place in the multiverse, we could all have what we want in the same place. We don't live in that world. So we all just have to do our best.

All the worlds

The fat white man endeavour found itself this weekend in the kind of place fat white men find themselves in Malaysia: high rise condominiums perched above the more Malaysian parts of Malaysia. At the gate of the condo, there was a Malay man waving people in, and I saw one women in a Tudong, but otherwise, it was Chinese, white people, and Arabs, sitting by a beautiful pool which was surrounded by beautiful condos, surrounded by a beautiful golf course. and ringed by expressways on all sides. Completely cloistered from Malaysians on motorbikes and the markets. Fountains and clean changing rooms.

We were at these condos to visit some new friends that Yoko had made. Down-to-earth, good people: the kind of Japanese people who embody the stability and clarity of Japanese culture while maintaining the independence of people living abroad. Calm and wise: the sort of people you sit with and instantly feel at ease. This is the best thing that can be said of someone, I think: they make you comfortable. The children swam and Yoko and I sat, speaking Japanese together like we were suddenly back five years, before we had kids and when Yoko sat on my lap sometimes. We had lunch and hung out in the apartment until it was time, after seven hours, to go home.

I realise with every passing week how long it's been since I have completely exhaled, how many levels of stress have been weighing on us the last four to five years. I keep thinking, now I've exhaled, but then I go another month and exhale some more. I realised this weekend that we will soon have no children under 2 for the first time in six years. That Yoko will not be pregnant or caring of a newborn. That I will not be doing my PhD or looking for a job. I'm less on edge, particularly after Mei went to the hospital and it was okay. It's okay: can we say that now? It's okay.

Our little terrace house in Taman Sri Minang has no pool or gatekeeper or wall. The gate in front of the house could be broken down by anyone. The sounds of Malaysia permeate everything: the birds and call to prayer and the stray dogs barking. You must, in our house, open the windows or you will burn up: it's a metaphor for everything. The neighbours are always coming and going: there is a truck that comes by to take away cardboard and another truck selling tofu and another truck with vegetables. A man on a motorbike with a weedcutter who you pay RM10 to cut your grass.

Yoko and I go back and forth about where we live and where we might be able to live when our finances stabilise sometime in the next couple of years. We could move out of Taman Sri Minang into a less local area. That's the codeword, 'local' as opposed to 'international'. I keep saying, I came to Malaysia to live in Malaysia, but there are parts of me that think it would be nice to swim and relax behind the walls. Perhaps our narrative arc bends that way, but I think having it every so often is enough for me. I say that all the good things in this country have come to us because we don't have any money. If we were rich, we'd have air-conditioning, but no Auntie, no Uncle. No running in the streets in the early morning.

Here, in Taman Sri Minang, Malaysia confronts you and then swallows you whole; we are embedded in the local culture as the other, but an other which is very much present in the local life of the community. My daughter comes home from Auntie's in the Tudong the other day, talking about how beautiful it makes her. She wears it with a Cinderella dress and then she says to me, in Japanese, that she wants to be Muslim. What do you say to that. Mei's accent is fully Malaysian now. What do you say. I shrug and smile.

We inhabit so many worlds as a little family, moving weekly in and out of them. Another context, another language, another god. Mia's first words are in four languages: she's standing naked at the gate shouting 'Selamat Malam!' at the neighbours. The conversations we have with people orient towards the children's future all the time, but I am just starting to enjoy the present, all the gods here in Malaysia looking over all the different people around me. More food under the back fence from Auntie: fried noodles and curry and watermelon. I bought whisky and sat down yesterday without the impetus to go on to something else. We played Candyland and I listened to Jazz: Sunday night like I used to imagine Sunday night should be. When it was done and everything was finally quiet, I shut off the lights of the house and locked the doors, but the windows were still open upstairs. Not home, but a kind of home. Our home for now.

Known Unknowns

Tucked in yesterday's post—my climbing on my desk and shouting in my own passive-aggressive way, I'm not going to take it anymore—was the story that really mattered:

Yoko calls: Mei has cut her hand, should I go to the hospital? And I am now that person I always feared I would be: Can we afford to pay for it out of pocket and wait to be reimbursed sometime in the future?

I wrote this as it happened: Mei had cut her finger trying to open a jelly desert–badly enough that she needed to go to the hospital. I had expected some accident to happen eventually, a Rumsfeldian 'Known Unknown', and had investigated our options, all the hospitals nearby and covered by our insurance plan. But in the course of a day, a whole series of events unfolded, all representing different struggles about life here and resulting in the problem becoming more and more debilitating as the day wore on... It came to a head at 4:16 when I had to duck out of class on the mobile phone with the coverage breaking up: Mei having still not been to the hospital in four hours, and me trying to explain to Yoko where she needed to go over Mia screaming in the background.

Mei was, of course, fine, more-or-less. She's always more-or-less fine. She needed stitches, but she had stopped bleeding and was comfortable enough. Mei is the daughter I can tell to stop crying and she stops.

But still, more problems: the university doesn't give you insurance cards so you have to pay out of pocket and be reimbursed, but because Yoko can't have a bank account she can't have a bank card, and usually doesn't have that much cash. She had RM300 yesterday by a fluke, but I had no idea if that would be enough to be seen. You only know what you've heard: I had heard they ask for a thousand Ringgit deposit. The panel hospital I had sent Yoko to, it turned out, was having a blackout and not treating anyway. This is, after all, Malaysia. The receptionist Yoko spoke to suggested she head to Cheras, another 40 minutes away in traffic, but when Yoko called me, the whole thing sounded like a massive miscommunication. I told her to just go to the public government hospital: try that before going all the way to Cheras.

This was happening while I was in class, but my phone died and everything went dark. There's nothing I could do anyway. Class ended, and I got on the bus headed to the hospital, wrapped up in all the thoughts again. Man made troubles: fat white man troubles. All of these puzzles, this confusion, is a tangled web of my own life choices. Knowing the reason for them doesn't make their solutions easier or harder to find, but I always note this when it's hard. We are choosing this. All of it.

The bus arrived and I burst into the emergency room, sweating and out of place (mat salleh!?) and a Chinese man, seeing my confusion, held up three fingers, quizzically. How did I know what he meant: Yes, I said. He pointed to a door. I opened it and a doctor was sitting there. I'm looking for my wife and daughters. Mei Pihlaja? Yes. She's fine, you can wait outside.

So I waited, watching the people come in and out of exam rooms, listening to the numbers being called, and feeling abruptly, surprisingly at ease, a strange, serendipitous whiplash Malaysia gives at times: there are places where everything is controlled by people who are genuinely empathetic. Behind the glass of the reception counter, I suddenly saw Yoko and the kids, all three with candy and smiling. They came out and Mei jumped into my arms and I held her and held her. It was okay, it was all okay. Just like that, they glued the cut up. The supervisor looked, all the nurses: like always we were the main attraction for the day. That's it? RM50 and we're done. Let's go to the night market.

Mei, you can always trump your father if, when I'm scolding you or angry with you, you ask me, But didn't you do the same thing when you were my age? I did. This is karma.

Yoko says staying only a year is a waste: she's right. You fight through things and you make progress and you take workarounds and you don't let it get you down. Yoko is the master of this: nothing phases her. I fall into deep depression, analysing and thinking and reassessing, but she is happy to have the moment, take pictures of the new food and chat with the neighbours about the flowers. Maybe that's the lesson learned from another problem overcome: my marriage is my grace. My children are my grace.

Threading the needle

Walking by the Oriental Crystal Hotel, the place we first stayed when we came to Kajang, I said to Naomi, If we go up those stairs, and say we have a reservation, I bet there is a reservation for us. And I bet the reservation is for two weeks and if we stay two weeks, a taxi will come and take us to the airport, and there will be plane tickets for us, back to the UK. We will get back and come out of Terminal 3 at Heathrow, into the early-April British snow, and our car will be idling, waiting. And we'll take the M25 to the M1, exit in Milton Keynes, and drive home to Booker Ave. The door will be open and we'll go upstairs: all of our things will be there and we will fall asleep in our own beds. And when we wake up, we will only remember Malaysia like you remember a dream. Like it never happened, did it?

Some narratives are stories, some are just information to sort through—maths to do over and over again on mobile phone calculators. Known knowns. Known unknowns. Unknown unknowns. Malaysia is full of the second and third categories. Yoko calls: Mei has cut her hand, should I go to the hospital? And I am now that person I always feared I would be: Can we afford to pay for it out of pocket and wait to be reimbursed sometime in the future?

Coming to Malaysia, I felt like there were three scales of success, based on how long we could end up staying. The first one was three months: this would have happened if life here proved to be impossible and we needed to suddenly up and leave. The second was for one year: that life proved to be manageable for the medium term, but serious problems remained either in terms of the kids education, my job, finances, or our overall happiness. The third was for three years, the full term of my contract.

We have now made it through three months, steaming towards four. This is a kind of achievement, a success, I think, although not that surprising. There was a lot of momentum built up. Still: I have had my doubts, mostly related to the finances, which have been difficult. I'm actually not sure how we have done it: I look at the money coming in and the money going out and it doesn't make sense. Just one month at a time for now: Yoko and the kids continue to sacrifice despite all my promises that it would be easier here, better here. I feel like I lied to to them. It's one thing to suffer for yourself, for your own career: but to ask those you love to do the same. I keep saying it will get better. I keep hoping it will get better.

We are getting to a crucial step which will really determine if we stay for one or three years. Naomi has been shortlisted at the local International school we had applied to and the school we had moved to Kajang to attend. Not a true International school, but really an English medium school with Malaysian staff and, therefore, potentially affordable. She will have her test on 12 April and then we will know for sure what our choices are. For (white, Westerner) foreigners in Malaysia, getting access to education is a privilege, one that your company buys for you; it is illegal, after all, to attend local schools. This is not an issue for people employed with multi-national corporations, but it is a massive problem for our little family, as my employer only subsidises a part of these costs. I had expected the costs to be negligible, but as things are in Malaysia, they are more expensive than you think when you're making a local salary. Forget USD, and GBP, and JPY: you're making RM. That's the only number that matters. Add to that any number of hidden costs and reimbursements which come on time sometimes, and other times not. It's a constant stress: you're constantly e-mailing, phoning, stopping by: I'm sorry, just to check up on this, was my claim filed? No? Can it be done today please? And you are then the complaining fat white man: so spoiled, such a high salary and still pushing, pushing, pushing.

I'm constantly thinking about it, with my mobile phone out: how much money will I have, how much will come in, what happens if it's late, or if there's an accident where we absolutely need to go to the hospital and need cash on hand, or if, if, if. And even the known-knowns are troubling. In August, I will need to put up almost two months of my take-home pay to register her in school. As Malaysia is, some of the money should be reimbursed, but when and how much, no one can ever say for sure. Yoko's tired of me talking about it: it's all I ever talk about.

I took some part-time work at the University leaving me with no summer holiday and an added teaching load when I should be doing any number of other things. But hopefully the work will take some of the stress off of our day-to-day life. We, Yoko and I, keep saying this is the best thing–making this work is the best thing.

I'm optimistic that things will, as they do in Malaysia, work out. Naomi will sit the test and I will pay some ridiculous amount of my pay this month for that privilege because I have faith and have not given up yet. Still, that reverse reality I began this narrative with gnaws at me: an envelope full of passports and airline tickets, some other multi-verse, some other waking dream, a plane ride away. 

Forever

Every story begins sometime in the past, some point that is relevant to the conclusion of the story. I've been thinking all night about where this story begins, but I don't, as I sometimes do, feel a strong commitment one way or another. So I'll start in the rain in Paris in October of 2009: 

I am pushing a double pram with Naomi and Mei through the corral leading up to the Eiffel Tower. The width of the corral is almost exactly the width of the double pram and I keep getting caught, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until we finally arrive at the lift to the top. We are soaked, Yoko and I, but the kids are dry and bored under the plastic rain cover and I am reciting Nietzsche to myself: the will to power. I remember recounting this story to my PhD supervisor who often listened to stories of me and my family with a kind of disbelief and wondered aloud about the wisdom of travelling with children. Will they even remember any of it?

Most of the stories that I've told so far about our adventures in Malaysia have included some appearance by 'Auntie and Uncle', the Malay family that live behind our terrace house in Taman Sri Minang. Auntie and Uncle both work for the Ministry of Tourism in difference capacities: upwardly mobile, middle-class Malays who, as far as I can tell, are relatively conservative, but have lived abroad and enjoy International company. The girls, Naomi and Mei, were on school holiday this last week, and somehow in talking to Auntie across the alley behind the house, we agreed to take a trip together. I was unclear for most of the last three weeks what this trip would entail precisely or where we would go (I thought mistakenly we were going to Tioman Island for most of last week), but on Friday morning at 7:30, we drove around the block to their house and followed their whole family--Auntie, Uncle, and their teenage kids--through KL and up out into the countryside, headed to Pangkor Island. Auntie wanted to buy anchovies: the anchovies are very good there.

Getting to Pangkor Island, or to Lumut, the town where we stayed on the mainland, included driving some 120 kilometers off the expressway in the countryside of West Malaysia, through palm oil plantation after palm oil plantation, the kids alternatively sleeping then laughing then screaming in the back of the car. The trip was supposed to take 3 hours and some change, but stretched to 5 after we stopped a couple of times, once at a wayside where monkeys were coming out of the palms to eat food that people were throwing at them, once to lay out a picnic brunch on plastic sheets in a parking lot, and once to get petrol. 

The hotel Uncle has chosen for us, negotiating some discount, overlooked the beach and was, from what I could tell, the nicest place in Lumut. This of course being Malaysia, is not necessarily saying much: we stayed in the nicest hotel in Kajang when we arrived and still struggled with basic amenities. The Orient Star, however, had the key amenity needed for a successful trip with three kids under five: a large, shallow pool which we spent most of the time in and around. Yoko remarked that the hotel felt very Muslim, which I agreed with, but immediately felt strange about saying. It's like things are in Malaysia: places feel Muslim or they feel Chinese. It's partially the people around, it's partially the architecture, it's partially what's being sold. Like a green Carlsburg sign gives it away: everyone's welcome, but that doesn't matter.

On Saturday after Auntie and Uncle left to attend a wedding and go back to Uncle's hometown, we took the ferry to Pangkor Island and swam in the ocean for the day. Not the sort of tropical paradise you imagine from a brochure, but very much Malaysia as I've come to expect it. The beach was dirty and there was broken glass in the sand. There was a public toilet that was completely locked up although the hours said 9AM-7PM. We went across the street to a mini-market to ask to use their toilet, but the woman told us to use the public toilet: there was a phone number. I called and was told to hold on, someone would come to open it up. After about ten minutes, I called again and the same person I talked to before told me that the man who opened the toilet was eating lunch and would be back at 1, in about 20 minutes. I got upset on the phone, but the man clearly didn't care: it's lunchtime. So Naomi and Mei both pee'd behind a palm tree at the gate: this is Malaysia, after all.

I'm always curious about the Western couples in places like this. There weren't many, but a few interesting stories to be sure: a young British guy without a shirt and a tattoo of a cross on his forearm with a partner, renting a motorbike. A mixed-race (Chinese-Malaysian and white) guy with a Western partner and his Chinese-Malaysian family, all having breakfast at the hotel. Two fat, sunburnt Americans lying on the beach on Pangkor, looking uncomfortable in the sun. How did we all get here, where does their story begin.

Nothing was easy for the three days: Mia clingy, Naomi complaining, Mei running into the street. I can hear my dad in my own voice, like I am threatening to turn this car around if everyone doesn't shut the hell up right now. But these holidays are amazing for the serendipity they afford. Like the broken down amusement park in Lumut, full of rides that look like they will kill you. There was a ferris wheel, all rusted out and about to fall over, but it was running. I bought tokens and got Mei and talked Naomi into riding with me. The sort of thing you should never do with your kids: we paid out RM8 and loaded into the third basket. And suddenly we were up above the city, the ocean and the setting sun--the sea breeze coming and Naomi on my lap, laughing after having been terrified. We went round and round, Yoko taking pictures as we came past. Daddy, when will it stop? Naomi asks, laughing. I don't know, I say, maybe it will never stop and we'll be here forever. Forever!? Naomi says, laughing: Really?! Forever?!

I don't know what they will remember about this: maybe they will remember me cross with everyone, passive-aggressively complaining to Yoko about the cost of another thing we're doing. Maybe they will remember crying and crying because I wouldn't buy another toy to play with in the pool ten minutes before we were going to leave. Still, the pictures tell a much happier story, the one that I hope endures. I remember Paris fondly, despite the rain: we ate so much chocolate. And so for Pangkor Island, let's forget the rubbish in the water and remember instead the swing under the tree, where you built sandcastles. We spent the day away from the city and all the frustration of the real world, together as a family, with the whole world underneath us. 

Official!

Oh death

Our terrace house in Taman Sri Minang is a kind of hotbed for discontent at the moment. Everyone is sleeping fitfully, the kids are waking and crying and sleeping and waking all through the night. It's hot: it's always hot. Mia is clinging to Yoko like she is an infant again and trying to breastfeed. Everyone looks exhausted, burnt out on another day. What's the answer: the blog goes quiet for a week under the weight of it. Two people sitting silently at the kitchen table, waiting for something to change.

How to think about the past without being nostalgic. Maybe Frank Zappa can help:

...I've also talked about the End of the World being a question of whether it's going to be by fire, ice, paperwork, or nostalgia. And there's a good chance that it's going to be nostalgia because the distance between the event and the nostalgia for the event has gotten shorter and shorter and shorter with each nostalgia cycle. So, projecting into the future, you could get to a point where you would take a step and be so nostalgic for that point where you would take a step and be so nostalgic for that step you just took that you would literally freeze in your tracks to experience the nostalgize of the last step, or the last word, or your last whatever. The world just comes to a halt - remembering.

'The world just comes to a halt – remembering': Frank Zappa must have looked into the future, seen me, and been horrified.

This morning, I rode past an accident. I saw the car first: a Myvi with the front left bumper crumpled. And then I saw in front of the car, the bike that had been hit and then the body of a man, face up and spread out on the asphalt, dead. No one was next to him: he was alone in the middle of the road, no helmet and with both of his shoes. He looked bigger to me in passing than he probably was. His shoes, in the glimpse of him I got–I remember his shoes. High tops, but with loose laces. I don't remember seeing his face. The cars slowed, and there were a couple of people standing around, but he was dead: very, very dead.

Everything seemed to come unravelled in a moment, all the feelings I have bound up and managed to keep at bay to make this whole adventure work. I wanted to suddenly stop my bike, get off and walk back to the house. Tell Yoko that I had made a mistake. I'm sorry for this, for all of it; let's buy tickets now, back to whatever life we left. The body with the life sucked out shocks you: how can anything be worth it. I wanted to put a pair of jeans and three shirts in a suitcase, tell the kids to get their shoes now, and leave everything behind on the next plane: it's too hard. A landslide of thoughts, inadequacies, fears: how long can a family keep going with so little money, so little energy. How much more can you ask those around you to sacrifice.

There were no dead bodies in Gurnee, IL, where my parents live in the States, and the place that is closest to home for me. Only when I was 15: the body of my grandmother, after a long illness (I had the urge to touch the body on the leg). No, I have just been insulated: there are dead bodies on the streets all over the world. Just like that: just suddenly dead. No reason, no lesson. Just suddenly dead. What's shocking is how surprised I am. Of course, the world is saying to me, of course, this happens. Take a look around yourself for the first time in your life, you spoiled child. What did you think happened.

Why didn't I stop and try to help. I just kept going like everyone else. Poor, pathetic dead man. Another dead man. Malaysia will make you confront the world as it really is if you let it: not the as world as it appears behind tinted glass windows of an SUV, but the world from the view of a Yamaha Wave 100. We are all only one mistake away from being dead in the street.

Do not be afraid, the good book tells us. I like this line; I always have. Being afraid is a terrible way to live, but insulating yourself from fear is even worse. What's the balance, I wonder, riding away from the body and talking to it in my mind: Why am I not on my knees next to you, waiting for the police to come. Why did I leave you behind as well. And it ends there, without a simple answer, or good or bad ending. It just ends.

Weddings

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the rest of this is redundant.

The fat white man adventure found itself at a wedding this weekend. How the adventure got to a wedding, it's hard to say. A neighbour was getting married, and we got an invitation. I had originally thought the wedding was for our Chinese neighbour and stupidly, looking at the names which are clearly not Chinese, still thought this was the case. We talked to Auntie and Uncle and since they were going as well, they agreed to take us: a throwback to the early days of the adventure when we travelled in their car everywhere. I was, again thinking this was a Chinese affair, surprised that Auntie and Uncle would go given all the tidak halal things I imagined taking place: beer drinking and pork eating, mostly. As I was filling out the wedding card today, it finally made sense, They're Malay, right? Not Chinese?  I asked Yoko and, of course, that was the case. No insight into Muslims at non-Muslim parties and no free beer.

On the ride to the hall, the conversation was mostly, as you would expect, about getting married. I asked about inter-cultural, inter-racial marriages in Malaysia, and Auntie and Uncle assured me it was common and no problem. But the Chinese or Indian partner needs to convert to Islam. Yes, yes. Is that difficult? No, very easy. You just convert and then follow the Sharia law, halal and haraam, what you don't do and what you should do. Like any religion, Uncle said.

When we pulled up, there were huge banners with the picture of the serious looking couple and men dressed in traditional clothes everywhere, smiling and greeting us. It also turned out to be not so much a wedding, but a reception, held in Putrajaya, in a public gym. Very similar to the place that a middle-class couple in the States might have their reception, with lines for the basketball court on the wood floor. I was, of course, the only mat salleh in attendance and when we sat down, next to a table of kids with hand drums (eating before the bridal procession into the hall), one nudged another and another and soon they were all looking at us. Another young man came up with his Blackberry, wanting Yoko to take a picture of us together.

We asked around about how much to dress up and what to give. The consensus was that we should give RM20 which seemed awful small, given that in Japan you would give about 50 times that. Auntie and Uncle assured us that anything over RM5 was fine (it should be higher, like RM100 and above, if it's a Chinese wedding, they said). I felt bad about this, particularly given the size of the party: the food was fabulous and rich; the coffee already heavily sweetened for you. They were playing loud music in the hall while people sat and ate quietly. I asked Uncle if there was going to be dancing, and he said likely not. I asked if I could dance and he said, laughing, You can do anything you want.

I was over-dressed, but that looked to be better than being under dressed: there were a few guys in jeans, but I sort of suspected it might have been, again like the States, a class thing. And it didn't matter: part of the fat white man protocol is the impromptu set of rules that follow you around. Unless I had been wearing a tank top, I don't think it would have mattered. Yoko was wearing the same dress that she had from my sister's wedding last summer, and looked great as usual, although she put on a yellow sweater when we arrived.

The show of multiculturalism did occur when the Chinese neighbours appeared about an hour after we arrived. They were happy and smiling and, as Yoko said, there was finally another person in a sleeveless dress. There was a procession with the children singing and playing drums. The couple looked tired, but happy, and I was, as I always am, enamoured with the religious aspects: the blessing which people didn't seem to listen to carefully, cupping their hands and looking around. Mei saw everyone doing it and did the same thing, standing in front of Uncle for approval. He smiled and patted her on the head as the blessing ended and everyone lifted their hands to their faces.

We greeted the bride and groom--I'm not sure I've met her before, Yoko said--and Uncle said, Shall we make a move, and we got up to leave. I gave our card with RM20 to the smiling father of the bride who seemed happy to have us there, but then again, he seemed pretty happy anyway.

I should take that moment and bring it around to talk about the potential that I will be going through this myself some time in the future, but I don't know if I have the energy tonight. Maybe another day.

Hitting all the high points

The little bits of life here keep passing, but I'm having trouble gathering them up into a single story, finding the common theme in them. Perhaps this is a metaphor for how I am feeling more generally: feeling uneasy, and unhappy with my own uneasiness. Like this: like we were caught in a sandstorm and the last three to four months have been digging things in our life out. We uncover thing after thing that we own, at first happy to find that we have it, and then realising it is in as bad a shape as before the storm. Life as we left it in England was quite dark: the PhD had taken its toll on all the relationships, all the expectations. Our joys didn't only disappear in the storm, but also our problems, the fundamental ones that we always work on, but never solve: they are still here too.

I'm thinking metaphorically about storms because on Wednesday, there was a terrible and sudden storm here, the sort you expect living in a tropical location. I've been trying to write about it, to write about fear, but I've come up empty every time. I was caught on it in my motorbike and had to stop on the way home after the road had become impassable and there was no visibility. I realised too late that there were no other bikers out: it was incredibly, incredibly dangerous to ride, and ankle deep in rushing water, with a dark car coming up behind me, headlights off, I wondered for a second if my luck had run out.

It had not, thankfully: I pulled into a strip mall and was absolutely drenched, despite my rainsuit, and people were, as they do, staring. Of course, the same question I always have came up: is it me, or is it what I'm doing. Are they staring because I'm mat salleh, because I'm drenched, because I'm riding a motorbike, or because I am visibly uncomfortable with the cockroaches which are coming out of the storm drains and trying to crawl up my legs. Or because I look like I have just seen the face of god. 

I got home okay, and the next morning, although I was expecting to find cops everywhere directing people around fallen trees and swollen rivers, burst pipes--there was nothing. Everything was dry and the trees had been swept to the sides of the roads. The mayhem had simply vanished; the water rushed away and evaporated.

Another metaphor for life in Malaysia: no trouble lasts too long.

The girls have been quickly losing their Milton Keynes accent as it has been replaced by a Malaysian lilt. Famali fo-TO, Mei says, referring to the picture of our family that I was trying to get printed in the apocalypse last Wednesday and which she took to school. I've been noticing the same accent in other speakers and aping it when I speak Malay: it's amazing how the accent makes you suddenly understandable. Naomi is even more surprising: you can here the lilt coming up in her Japanese now. Who will these children become:

Was Auntie praying? I ask Naomi when I pick her up at the neighbours and catch a glimpse of Auntie wearing a white tudong to pray.
Yes, Naomi says, and pauses: why don't we pray?
Well, I say, because Auntie has a different god.
And I rephrase it. Auntie has a different god than your mother, but daddy doesn't pray because daddy doesn't have any god. You can choose if you want to have a god and pray. 

And I think immediately of something Letchu, our moustachio'd taxi driver, told me about Ganesha. His mother showed him a picture of Genesha and said, This is our god. And so Letchu prays to Genesha.

My Malay has become slowly more functional, but only through forcing trial and error in every situation I can, and making every Malaysian I speak with uncomfortable. Today, I felt good that I ordered all my food in Malay, and then, when it came, realised that I had not gotten what I had wanted exactly. I went two turns of a conversation with someone at the market. 'What is this? Is it tea?' No, it's herbs. 'How much is it?' and he switched to English, '30 Ringgit.'

A perfect snapshot of learning: ordering my food, I was attempting to ask for half as much rice, but had forgotten the word for 'half'. I did, however, remember the structure for making fractions, so I asked for 'one over two', essentially. This confused the woman and another guy at the food stall, who kept insisting on responding to me in English, came up and took out two plates, 'He wants the rice on two plates.' No, I said, finally in English, dejected, Half.

All these little failures, however, are cumulative and you remember the things you mess up much better than the ones you get right. You just have to push through the feelings of intense fear and weakness. You can fail, you will fail: fail now, or learn nothing.

So. Uneasiness. Mat salleh tries, mat salleh fails. The history of the whole damn fat white man misadventure.

Finally, I stopped my weight gain after the second attempt: I am back down in reasonable numbers. It took a week of intermittent fasting to get my centre back and to really stop myself. I get going and I can't stop. Eating is a metaphor for everything. In my emptiness from fasting, I took to swimming rather than running, going to the pool everyday during lunch. I did my makeshift breaststroke and improvised a kind of doggy-paddle on my back. It is nothing to look at, certainly, but I felt much better, creeping up and down the pool in the hot sun. Back and forth, back and forth. These problems that beset me, the immense pressure of work, family, finances, research, teaching, this new life. The pressure to go, go, go... Maybe this year can bring some peace and silence. It's worth trying, at least. 

Coming home

The time has been passing like normal, like it is when you are not new somewhere, but when you live somewhere. I had expected that around March or April, things would smooth out for us, that the endless list of chores would start to taper off. Yesterday, I came home and Yoko had moved the new sofa to an acceptable place in the living room and I hooked up the speakers to the laptop and finally fixed a recurring problem the computer was having. The lamp is now in the corner, giving us warmer, incandescent light rather than the harsh florescent lights in the house. Some of my expenses were paid and the bank account will not go to zero this month. All these things lead to a sense of normalcy, of evening out. A new kind of normal. 

Language

I used to be, it's worth noting, quite religious.

13 October 2003

I am touched by Mark 1:20: Jesus calling John and James and how they leave their father “without delay.” I am struck by the urgency of their actions and how this same call todiscipleship falls near the call to repent and believe the good news. Discipleship follows very closely after. Maybe this is particularly encouraging to me because James and John leave their father to follow Christ (he is still in the boat with the hired hands).

Yesterday, Martha left and we both held each other cried and prayed and I think I understand this passage better because ofthe pain. I remember God saying that he will bind up the bruises that he inflicts and I rest in that. The best that I can right now, though it isn’t very much. I feel very far from rest, very torn up inside and I blame myself and my poor discipleship.

I wonder what God thinks as he looks down at this: Jesus doesn’t say anything to James and John to comfort them. He just calls them. Maybe the comfort comes later, or maybe there is comfort in following Jesus in and of itself. Would I be worse off not following? I know the answer is yes, but I feel very much like the answer is no. I don’t want to hurt for the gospel and I don’t want to go. I want to stay at home and see Martha over her school break. I want to be back at school.

“Come, follow me.” It’s so simple and there is so much reckless-abandon in the disciples. How incredible Jesus must look.

In 2003, when I first went to Japan, I had only intended to stay for a year and then return to the US to do an MFA in Creative Writing. I went as a missionary, primarily, although this embarrasses me now and I avoid talking about my first year in Japan in Evangelical terms because I was so spectacularly naive and ignorant. I had the whole dispositif of Evangelical Christianity around me, embodied, quite literally, in hands laid on me in prayer before going. It shocks me as I remember the experience: I thought I was right, that I had the truth, and the Japanese, whoever they were, needed to hear it. I hadn't thought about colonialism, the history of missions in the country–none of it. My paradigm at the time didn't require any self-reflection: it only required doing by saying. Proclamation, testimony: the word was with god and the word was god.

The word, I quickly began to realise, was an English word. I had never thought of this before–native speakers are generally not critical of their own language–and Japanese and the Japanese caused me problems. There are myriads of examples of cultural assumptions embedding themselves in language. The most famous one in terms of converting Japanese to Evangelical Christianity is the lack of distinction between singular and plural forms in Japanese–difficult when you're trying to distinguish between gods and the God. Japanese reflects the Japanese: there is no need to distinguish between the two because there is no concept, historically, of monotheism.

After a month and a half of thumbing through a rather useless Japanese book (Japanese for Busy People, but I wasn't all that busy and there wasn't that much Japanese), I got a proper textbook, one that I understood, and began to study hard, sitting under the trees of Ohori Park in central Fukuoka. Suddenly, I could ask for things: I could function and understand and explore. And as I began to acquire bits and pieces, my interest in my Evangelical mandate dropped and my interest in Japan, in Japanese, and the Japanese grew.

I want to point to one moment where my paradigm started to unravel but there was no moment: just a series of them. For example, there is a shrine on the top of a hill on Meji dori in Fukuoka, Japan—you miss it passing in a car. It's tucked up behind a high rise apartments and an overgrown cliff. I found it by accident, riding my bike over the New Year holiday. I saw a long stone staircase and I stopped, curious. At the top of the hill, there were worshippers, visiting the shrine to pray for an auspicious new year. I had heard, in the echo chamber of Evangelical mumbling, that Shinto religion was filled with darkness. This experience though was nothing like I had been told. Out in the sun, dressed in kimono, the worshippers rang the bell in front of the shrine and stood quietly–earnestly, hands clasped and heads bowed. The priest handed me a shallow bowl of sake; I drank and watched.

Then there was an English class Bible study that I taught in which an old man, Koga san, told me that he, as a young man, had trained with a bamboo sword for the coming invasion of the Americans. I sat across from him having this vague sense that I was on the wrong side of the table: he, of course, should have been teaching me about how the world is, not vice-versa.

Now, ten years later, I am having the same experience in Malaysia, albeit on a smaller scale: there were no hands laid on me in prayer before coming, and I've only implicitly (although perhaps more dangerously) come to influence the culture. And in the same way as in Japan, my first attempts to study the language have added an intense amount of colour to the world here. My first sentence in bahasa, in Malay, 'Ini masalah kecil,' It's a small problem, reflects the way I'm learning the language; Malay, unlike Japanese, is not rigid and strict, but loose and playful. I've had fun with the administrative assistants here who call me 'Doctor Bebek': 'bebek' (duck) being the affectionate term for the small motorbike I ride.

Standing behind the house, talking across the alley with Auntie, I struggle through a series of phrases I learned at class: This is Mia. That's a door. This is a key to the door. This is the door's key. How are you? and she listens earnestly, nodding.

I tell my students week after week, Form is function; function is form. What you say is embedded in how you say it. When you say, How are you? in Malay, rather than English, you do something different.

I am, of course, still a fat white man: our teacher says, 'Don't pronounce the final consonant or you'll give away that you're a foreigner.' I look around the table of students and think, 'The final consonant is the least of our problems.' Still, a fat white man struggling in Bahasa is better than a fat white man demanding his way in English. Language is not a Sausurrean LAN cable from one head to another: it is phatic. It is always phatic. And we can't deconstruct our or any other culture until we can deconstruct the language. It is the first step. And if I can perform some submission in my broken Malay, this is not only a first step, but also a first step in the right direction.

Making big money

Tonight: morality, safety, and affluence.

Early last month, Naomi had a cavity and, after finding a dentist online, we headed out to walk to the centre of town. As we were walking, a car pulled up, full of Chinese people from our taman (a suitable English word not yet available: neighbourhood, perhaps) offering us a lift. There were already six people in this small car, but it was hot and I said yes. They let us into the front seat and Naomi sat on my lap while everyone else piled into the back. Four adults, four kids: I strapped Naomi in with me and they took us into town. Today, our neighbours took all five of us to Ikea in Damansara. Again: four adults, five children in an SUV, with all the kids in the back. We drove into KL and around and around all day, and I thought only briefly about the safety of the situation. We probably shouldn't do this, I thought: we wouldn't if it was our own car. But we were doing it.

In the US, seatbelts are a kind of moral responsibility, or at least they were when I left and have been every time I go back. Of course, it's illegal to ride in a car without wearing one, but that's sort of beside the point: there is so much moral stigma that you would be shocked to see someone, particularly a child, not wearing one. You would even tell a stranger to strap a child in--you wouldn't feel any shame about it. You would also scold an adult for smoking around a child; you could even be aggressive about it. But you couldn't, of course, scold the parent of an overweight child, tell them, 'Look, you're killing your kid here.' That would be wrong. 

If living abroad has taught me anything, it's that norms about moral behaviour, what's right and wrong, don't withstand shifts in culture. And norms are often tied to economics.

Must suppress urge to tweet about work. Must. Suppress. Urge.
— Stephen P. (@mysonabsalom) February 25, 2013

On Monday, I was paid for the first time, but only about 60% of my salary. Eleven percent of the withholding I knew about, but the other 30% was a mystery. Panicked, I e-mailed people all day. Payroll wrote back to explain it: a new policy was instated to tax all new non-Malaysian staff at a rate of 26% for the first six months, before putting them on the resident rate (closer to 10% and likely less given the pile of dependants I have). Don't worry, I was assured, you'll be able to claim it all back in April 2014. 

This couldn't have happened at a worse time: on Monday I also decided to buy a car. Thoughts of living on nearly 20% less than I was expecting hung over me all week and left me with an uneasy lock box full of cash. What am I doing, I thought, Financial ruin—this is going to destroy us; I shouldn't get a car now. Still, I sucked it up and told myself the story about my career and stability and quality of life: I'm in this for the medium to long term, and if we're going to be here for more than three months, we need a car. I felt the same pain you do when a tattoo artist makes a stroke with the gun. It hurts, but you've made the decision and there's no going back.

On Friday night, when the agent delivered the car, he counted up all the bills on the dining room table, stuffed them in a couple of envelopes, and left. I felt freedom--freedom to have gotten the money out of the house, freedom of having made a choice with no recourse to go back, and freedom to move freely as a family. We got in the car and left almost immediately, coming up to the stoplight on Jalan Semenyih, the four lane highway that makes walking in Kajang impossible and worrying about nothing: not how much the cab would cost, or if we would be able to get a ride home, or if everything we bought at the store would fit in a taxi. We could take our time: we stood in the parking lot and realised we could see the Petronas Towers in the distance. Kuala Lumpur is not that far after all. 

And then Saturday, we woke and left for the morning market near our house, where people smile when you speak Malay and pinch the girls' cheeks. We had breakfast there, sitting on a concrete wall and counting to five in Malay. Then we drove out to the pool, got lost, then swam. Then drove to a festival in Putrajaya that we had happened upon. Then drove to the university for the Japan festival. The new, used car had no problems: nothing fell off along the way. The girls sat quietly in the back, sleeping in the air conditioning and I thought about peace and the possibilities the car allowed us. 

The kids were, of course, strapped in the whole way. Unlike the times in the Malaysians' cars, I controlled the situation and asserted myself with my typical American paternal fascism: sit the hell down and strap in, or this car isn't going anywhere. But as we pulled up next to a motorbike with a husband and wife, and a baby sat between, the thoughts about class, safety, and morality were there again. The only thing really painful about my car purchase was using a bit of my savings. I had the option to get one and I did. Even with 40% out of my salary, I am rich: ridiculously and famously rich. I feel entitled to more money because I am white and educated (goddamned PhD) and I can get so much more if I go somewhere else. But my god: I'm sitting in an air-conditioned car with a permanent job, a golden parachute above me and a golden net below.

How you keep all this in balance, all these different moralities, I have no clue. When you are better off than 96.25% of the people in the world, can you still say, I'm being treated unjustly? It was so much easier to be self-righteous and indignant when the poor people were on the other side of the world. I feel these sudden bursts of sympathy, the desire to completely empty my wallet for a woman begging, but then, at the same time, I see a white couple at Ikea, their American accents grating on me: sure, I bet they can afford to get anything they want. Must be nice. I'm rich or I'm poor, depending whom I looking at. Things were easier when I never thought about this.

Waking up

I woke up sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning to the sound of Yoko shouting out my name in another room--my body full of adrenaline and intense pain in my left hand. I was standing, but I quickly slumped down and my brain went through the process of orienting itself: a process that takes less than a second, but feels much longer. I'm not wearing a shirt, I must have been sleeping: it's hot, right, I'm in Malaysia. I'm terrified, I thought I was dying, I was being crushed: Yoko must be in the other room sleeping with the girls, I must have been sleepwalking. I touched my left hand in the darkness: I was bleeding, why was I bleeding? My brain went back to the dream: you were being crushed and you were trying to get up and out of something. I must have stood on my bed and put my hand into the metal ceiling fan.

I went into the bathroom: my hand was killing me, but the cut didn't look bad. I got it to stop bleeding and sat on the toilet seat, letting the adrenaline get out of my system. It was a death dream: I have them every so often and sometimes they are more vivid than others. I don't usually remember them except that I wake right at the moment I would die. Although I suspect my real death will come after a long struggle with colon cancer, in my dreams I die being crushed or buried, and it's always terrifying.

I've been thinking about truth this week and how I see autobiography in the way that I do it on this blog. My favourite line in the Bible is when Pilate, having listened to Jesus say that 'Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice', rolls his eyes essentially, asking, 'What is truth?' (John 18:37-38) A brilliant response, and a brilliant answer to questions about the truth in reporting about one's life. What is truth.

Anything you do in Malaysia, when done to the backdrop of the Maghrib prayer around 7:30, feels like postcard come to life, the kind of quintessential Malaysian experience you want to bottle up and send home. Today, the call to prayer came as I was adding leaves to a burning pile of trash outside Auntie and Uncle's house, the kids playing in the street. Our Chinese neighbours coming home in their beat-up 1990 Honda Civic on its second engine and there was a moment of the perfect Malaysian multicultural experience--four countries, four languages, five ethnicities--pulling rambutan out of a tree. The story can stop there: it's enough.

My motorbike returns

Fat white men on motorbikes are not a common sight in Malaysia. Instead, most people who hear that I ride a motorbike are quick to tell me how likely it is that I will die. This is, of course, well meaning: the underlying message is to be careful, but I have been thinking quite a bit about the motorbike and class and safety as I speed up Jalan Broga towards the university, the sun rising over the mountains and palms.

Motorbikes are, I would agree, a more dangerous form of transportation, particularly in comparison to cars and it does seem that if you can afford to get a car, most people do. But many people can't, and as I pull up to stoplights and look around at the people on bikes who congregate in front of the cars with me, the class distinction is clear. The understatement of the year: I don't belong with these guys. These are working men, sometimes with girlfriends or wives and/or kids on the bike with them. They are young and dressed to work with their hands. They aren't in cars because they can't afford them: that safety mechanism isn't available to them. Uncle actually told me that motorbikes are good for people making less than RM 2,000 a month. Everyone else has a car.

This is a kind of protectionism, I think, something I wrote about when my house in the UK was broken into more than two years ago. The world grows dangerous and we build higher walls. The roads are dangerous and we buy bigger cars. The schools are bad and we go to different schools.

I don't think there's anything noble about me on my motorbike: I'm one accident or good scare away from giving it up. Still, all this detachment and protection bothers me to no end: build the walls higher and higher and you can't see over them. I'd rather die among the people than live alone.

Save your marriage, buy a car

There's an episode of Seinfeld I was thinking of yesterday, the one where George is working for a company and they mistakenly think he's handicapped, but when they find out he's not, they do everything they can to try to get him to quit. The whole episode is about the company going through extraordinary lengths to stop him from working. He doesn't quit though, continuing to show up and call his boss every morning, reporting to work.

This week has been a disaster, but rather than not blog, I'm going to ignore the stories I can't tell here, and focus on the stories that I can tell.

I was saying all along that getting a car would be the last big thing we need to make our life here. After weeks of hand-wringing about it, going back and forth to car lots, listening to lines like 'I'm a Muslim, I cannot lie' from a man with a lazy eye, on Friday it became clear: we needed to get this done, and we needed to get this done soon, if the Pihlaja family was going to survive our Malaysian misadventure.

Not having a car in Malaysia is certainly doable: everyone who says you need a car here doesn't think creatively enough. You don't need one, but you would be mad, with a wife and three kids living on the edge of the jungle, not to get one if you can afford it. I am mad, certainly, but also eager to keep the peace as much as I can, so Saturday we set out again, into the heat, to give it a go: another round of bad, expensive used cars, all either out of our price range or in terrible shape.

The Malaysian car industry, which I know more about now then I care to, is highly regulated. The government wants you to buy cheaply made Malaysian cars which are over-priced and glued together, and they tax the hell out of imports, discouraging you from looking at anything else. My neighbour has a 1990 Camry which is now on its second engine and which he is extremely proud of. I was shown a 1997 Honda CRV with 250,000kms on it for RM25,000 (USD$7,500). It's insane, it doesn't make any sense, but this is Malaysia and applying American/British/Japanese rules is even more insane. It is the car economy here: take it or leave it.

I had resolved to get a Malaysian car, accepting my fate and thinking, Well, even if it's a shitty car, at least it has a high resale value, but on Sunday, I got a text about a Hyundai Matrix from a woman in Puchong who we had been introduced to by another neighbour and who was treating me well, she said, because I was a friend of Zachi and Ruby (the girls' 'Big Tummy Uncle' and 'Auntie').

On Monday, I called Letchu, our moustachio'd Indian driver, and asked him to take me to Puchong, something like 30 minutes away with no traffic, but more like 90 minutes at 4:30 on a Monday afternoon. I had been to the dealership before with Uncle, but never by myself; Letchu quoted me RM70, which seemed reasonable, and picked me up in a downpour, warning that the traffic would be awful.

Letchu has driven us around for the last month and half, but he and I have never been alone, so we naturally got to chatting. Letchu is 54 (three years younger than my dad) and has 5 kids: eldest being 27 and youngest being 12. His father came to Malaysia to be a rubber tree tapper, but died when Letchu was young. I asked him if they ever went back to India as a family, and Letchu said that he had only been once, that he didn't know where his relatives lived. I knew from other conversations that he had worked other jobs, but he told me that he had gone to Australia for a while as a landscaper when he was younger, living all over the country.

Letchu talked about how Australians changed girlfriends all the time and asked me, after hearing that I had married in Japan, 'Do you have a love marriage?' I laughed, thinking it was a odd question and then realising it was, of course, not, and said, 'Yes, yes: of course.' Letchu laughed too, and I asked him if he wanted his kids to have love marriages. He laughed again, doing the universal hand sign for using a smart phone: 'Now they have Facebook and I think it's good: let them choose.'

We got to the dealership and I asked Letchu if he was going to go or wait and he said, 'No, no, I wait; you go; take your time.' I went inside, and waited while Faizah, the dealer, called for the car to be brought. Faizah's young and Malay, but not in a tudong and her daughter was with her, maybe four or five. The car was brought up by Faizah's gent, and when I saw it, I knew it was the right car. I got in it, and the agent sat in the passenger side and as I pulled out of the dealership, Letchu was standing by his cab, watching me like a father.

The car was, of course, perfect: Faizah assured me it was the best price she could get and I trusted her in a way that I haven't felt like I could trust anyone selling me anything yet. I don't think it was a mistake: she said she would buy the car back when I left. I was riding on the good will of Auntie and Uncle, the kind of people who describing as 'good' is a disservice. They have loved and cared for us like parents: don't worry, Stephen, don't you worry. When we left the UK, I wondered who would replace Big Mummy and Big Daddy, but the three girls, smiling, are good karma magnets: middle-aged women and men can't resist.

Letchu drove me home and we laughed and talked the whole way. We talked about the many-armed elephant god, Genesha, and how Letchu and his wife prayed and prayed when their son had been injured in a bike accident last year and was in the ICU. He survived and Letchu's wife and daughter shaved their heads. The same boy is preparing for A-levels. Is he smart? I asked, and Letchu smiled, I think he's smart.

Letchu let me out of his cab in downtown Kajang and I said thank you again and again: he took my money, but almost reluctantly and I said that although I was happy to have a car and it would be good for my family, I would miss him. He agreed and shook my hand vigorously, promising to invite me and the girls over during the next festival: he wanted to give us food, he said.

I went to the bank, withdrew money and then deposited it in the agent's bank account. I called Yoko and said what I had been waiting two months to say, 'I got a car: the right car, from the right person, for the right price.' I had done right, finally: stopped being cheap and petty, けち the Japanese say, Yoko calls me.

Forgive me, I worry: I am worrying about financial ruin when I shouldn't be. I should have faith, I should just give up and go with it. We're surrounded by people that are taking care of us. Another set of Aunties and Uncles, the Chinese ones, had us over on Saturday and gave me beer and the girls candy while we set off fireworks. I looked at Yoko as we watched the Chinese lion dance in the garden of a rich neighbour's house: how amazing is this, how did we get here. This story makes the narrative sound much better than it is right now. I'm not telling you the truth, just the 5% that I want to remember. The other 95%, I am hoping will be worked out. Japan is calling me again, reminding me that it's safer there, easier there, but I keep resisting it. I have a car now, after all: I'm committed, I'm all in. I'm falling back, believing someone is there to catch me. Now, we just have faith.