Returnee #1: Paul Yap

When I started this blog, I promised to feature stories of other returnees. Well, after eight “Brains Abroad” columns, here’s the first Q&A with a Malaysian who recently moved home.

This family moved into the neighbourhood and we met at a Christmas cookie-making party thrown by our Danish neighbours. Yes, Christmas. It’s now March.

It’s taken Paul that long to sit down and fill out answers to my questions. But then he did and it was worth the wait. Then I had to chase him for a family pic. He sent one with eyes closed. Nevermind. Can’t have everything. 

“Why did you move back?” everybody asks when they meet a returnee. Well, here’s one doctor’s reasons why.

(L-R: Jeanne, Oliver, Paul, Olivia)

Name: Paul Yap

Age: Getting old.. (32 this year)

Family: 2 kids, 2 dogs and a wife

Hometown:  KL (but born in UK )

Current city: KL ( Was Manchester UK)

No of years abroad: 10

When did you return?

Came back May 2010.

Why did you return? 

The usual reasons. Family, friends (the social network general) and the food. Was always planning to return but could never decide when. Having kids abroad by ourselves  made that decision a lot easier!!

What do you do for a living?

Doctor-ing

What did you like about living in the UK? 

From a work perspective, I like the organization and structured training. Its very structured (even to the point of being over regulated at times) so you know where you stand and where you are (potentially) headed. They have a worker friendly environment – Working hours are regulated so you aren’t worked to death ! (particularly relevant to junior doctors). Minimal discrimination – tempted to say none, but that wouldn’t be totally true.

Crockery Shopping With Mama

  Back Room Buddha, Kwong Yik Seng

My dinner guests were entranced with the little nonya porcelain spoons next to their cups of pumpkin soup.

Where did you get them? they wanted to know.

Actually, they were a gift from my mother, who got them from a decades-old store in KL’s Chinatown.

So we planned an expedition. My mother would be our tour guide.

Last Saturday, we trooped over to Kwong Yik Seng at 144, Jalan Tun H.S. Lee. (We parked at Central Market, a 2-minute walk away.)

Walking through busy Chinatown, it hit me how little we see of the city these days. We get in our cars, zoom along our many expressways, from one suburb to another, bypassing the traffic but also the colour and life of the older parts of town.

But, no time to be nostalgic. There was serious shopping to be done.

Kwong Yik Seng is a true-blue Chinatown institution. My grandmother used to shop there. Stacked ceiling high with plates, bowls, vases, teapots, cups, chopstick rests, statues of Buddha and all manner of Chinese gods, it’s not for the faint-hearted.

In The News – Marriages of Inconvenience

Here’s some news that’ll be of interest to anybody with a foreign spouse. Okay, I’ll admit I’m doing this because I got tired of yelling at the papers this morning and need to vent. Consider yourself warned.

The New Straits Times’ front page is devoted to a story about a so-called “visa loophole” that allows prostitution syndicates to bring in Thai, Chinese and Vietnamese women to Malaysia by “marrying” them to Malaysian men.

With these “marriages,” the women get a five-year social pass and the “husbands” get between RM3,000 and RM5,000 as well as a monthly allowance of RM500 to RM2,000 for their troubles.

In one particularly memorable paragraph, the paper describes one couple – 70-year-old man, 21-year-old woman – gazing lovingly at each other at the National Registration Dept. He strokes her hair; she strokes his urine bag. Once they leave the building, he gets paid and it’s Bye Bye Suzie.

Please, the NRD and immigration officials beseech, get rid of these 5-year social passes for wives and husbands of Malaysians.

Whaaaaaa???

Please, they plead, let’s go back to the pre-2010 system where foreign spouses of locals have to renew their visas every month for a year, then every year for about 10 years. And then they can apply for PR status.

I hope you’re hyperventilating by now. I am.

So we have to penalise the innocent to catch the guilty? I’m sure all of you know of poor foreign spouses who’ve had to go through the yearly immigration torture because they had the misfortune to fall in love with a Malaysian.

But wait! Page 10 of the NST has a helpful photograph of the 2010 circular to the Immigration department (“which officers blame for the headache,” the caption says) sent by Pemudah, a task force set up to cut government red tape.

It does indeed instruct immigration to issue long-term social passes to spouses of Malaysians. But the next paragraph is interesting:

“Pemberian kemudahan juga adalah tertakluk kepada Peraturan-peraturan Imigresen yang akan diberikan oleh Unit Naziran bagi memastikan tidak berlakunya ‘Marriage of Convenience.'”

So those in marriages of convenience should have their applications rejected!

Yet the article goes on to describe exasperated immigration officers pointing out members of vice syndicates handing over cash outside the NRD, as if they were “thumbing their noses at the authorities, mocking and taunting them.” Their hands, they say, are tied. They must, they say, approve the visas anyway.

I’d say the rules are quite clear: Give the 5-year social passes to real spouses. Don’t give them to fake ones.

What’s the problem? Why didn’t the reporter ask the NRD and immigration this very basic question?

Gargh.

NST story here.

A Nice Upper…

As opposed to a downer.

Malaysians these days are a jaded, cynical lot. There’ s a lot to be jaded about. A country struggling to claw its way up the income ladder, political scandals erupting left, right and centre, and a general limbo as we await the next election.

Why did you come back? I still get asked, a year after we landed.

So I loooooved getting on Skype with a Malaysian in London this morning (her evening) just to gab and know that I’m maybe not crazy. That moving from a first-world country back to the third world is something other people dream of too.

Koh Sin Yee is a 35-year-old Malaysian living in London. Sin Yee is working on a PhD in Human Geography at the London School of Economics and talking to professional Malaysians working in London and Singapore, as well as Malaysians who have moved home.

Someone told her about my blog and she got in touch. After she’d asked her research questions – which included, yes, “Why did you move home?” – I turned the tables on her.

Like many Malaysians, she’s lived in multiple countries. She left for Singapore after Form 3 on an Asean scholarship, went on to university there and stayed on to work as an architect and in urban development. Two-and-a-half years ago, with an eye to a future career in academic teaching, she went to London to get a PhD.

The funny thing is, she went half-way across the world to study the issues that beset her birth country.  See a description of her research on her blog Moving Malaysians.

We exchanged contacts, people and groups we knew would be of interest to the other, stats that we’d gathered here and there.

And then the moment of truth: Will you move back? I asked her.

She didn’t pause. Her future teaching career, she thinks, will be quite international.

But “ultimately,” she said, “I want to be back in Malaysia.”

Why?

“Because I like it there.”

Simple as that.

Brains Abroad #8: Wan Abdullah Wan Salleh

My friend Wan Kean (Brains Abroad #3) suggested I talk to “the other Wan” in South Africa. Glad I looked him up – what a fascinating life!

Wan Abdullah Wan Salleh is better known as Wan Batu, thanks to his gemstones business. He was also briefly known as Wan Bola, when he sold licensed World Cup Merchandise during the time South Africa was host country. (Read the article in the Star here.)

As it turns out, Wan Batu tells me, he’s about to start a business promoting tourism between South Africa and Malaysia.

What next? Wan Lancong?

Wan Batu and wife, Siti Aishah

Name: Wan Abdullah Wan Salleh

Age: 46 years old

Family: 4 children

Hometown: Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia

Current city:  Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa

No of years abroad: 21 years

What brought you to South Africa?

Love is blind – lasted 14 years, 2 kids. Life goes on. The best thing that ever happened to me as a human being. University of Life.

What do you do for a living?

Businessman – Retail / Manufacturing / Semi-Precious Gemstones Products – Jewellery, Ornaments . Tours and Travel and Photographer. WGS Artifacts Africa / WGS Africa Tours&Travel / Studio Wan Photography.

Brains Abroad #7: See Meng Wong

I’m pretty sure that when TalentCorp talks about wooing home the diaspora, See Meng Wong is the kind of person they have in mind (as opposed to journalists and other objectionables like me…) OneBrain is happy to welcome its first nuclear expert to these pages.

I got See Meng’s contact circuitously through Choy Leow,  Brains Abroad #2 and a fellow alumnus of Iowa State University. See Meng was in Malaysia for his annual trip to celebrate Chinese New Year with family and friends.  I missed him by a day but he kindly agreed to submit to a Q&A anyway.

Name:  See Meng Wong

Age: Born in the Year of the Dragon.

Hometown:  Born, raised and schooled in the royal town of Klang, Selangor.

Current city:  Germantown, Maryland in the suburb of Washington, D.C.

No. of years abroad:  Over 35 years in U.S.A. starting in Minnesota (during high school), Iowa (during graduate school in ISU), Louisiana, New York (13 years on Long Island outside New York City), California (in San Luis Obispo), and Maryland (over the last 14 years).

What do you do for a living?

My job title is a Senior Reactor Analyst in the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).  I am a nuclear risk expert on safe operation of nuclear power plants with nuclear operations inspector credentials.  The USNRC is an independent agency of the U.S. Federal Government that has regulatory oversight for the safe operation of all U.S. nuclear power plants.  In addition to my current job activities at the USNRC, I am a technical consultant supporting the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) activities on nuclear safety.

What do you like about living in the US?