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.
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