A Whole New World

So recently my family discovered the HGTV channel. In the evenings after dinner, we’ll watch shows about fixing, renovating, and discovering new homes. One in particular is called Perfect Home Asia, about American couples, families, and individuals looking for the ideal house or apartment as they move to an Asian country for the first time. They often get work as English teachers, amusingly.

I’m sure that Western audiences find the participants relatable and the differences in culture and design exotic. I do too when the setting is somewhere far away like Japan or India. And sometimes the show will be set in a Southeast Asian country like Thailand, Singapore, or Malaysia. It interests me, seeing how people from the United States react to local fixtures like squatting toilets and dragon fruit. Things that are outside their comfort zone.

Because twenty-one years ago, I was one of these people. I was born in the US and moved to Malaysia at age eight. Most of my teens were spent adjusting to a very different climate and culture. Most of my twenties were taken up with forming a new identity as someone of mixed heritage and coming to appreciate my Sabahan roots. And now here I am entering my thirties, having lived most of my life on this culturally and ecologically diverse island called Borneo.

Isn’t that curious? I was born on the other side of the world, and now I call this one home. Life is strange sometimes.

The other reason I like the show is that it awakens a bit of wanderlust in me. For all that I moved across the world as a child, I’ve stayed in one place since. For one reason or another, I was always at home, guarding the fort while others have traveled to other countries and continents. Heck, I’ve barely even gone anywhere within Malaysia.

The jungles of Borneo are among the oldest in the world.

I talk about books and video games because that’s where I’ve spent a lot of my time over the years: with my nose in a book or my hands on keys and controls. I’ve also talked about psychology, self-improvement, and addiction. These are topics that interest me; the ways we think, grow, and become hooked on things. And of course, I value imagination and creativity. Whether it’s fantasy and science fiction, words and bright colours, or emotion and thought, I’ve spent much of my life thus far exploring other worlds.

The irony is that I’ve hardly explored at all in real life.

And over the past two years especially, with the pandemic keeping borders closed and all of us hunkered down, wary of even going to the mall, I’ve come to realize that I don’t want to just stay in one place when this is over. When my mom was my age, she’d left home on her own adventures a long time ago, flown across the world and back again. My life has been pretty localized by comparison – although growing up in Malaysia has been an adventure all its own.

But don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not a bad thing that I’ve always been home. I got to spend these years with my mom.

Because we were together, we made so many memories throughout the years. Going out for pizza, movies, all the quiet dinners at home together. Struggling with her illnesses, her cancer diagnosis, sleeping on the hospital floor at her bedside during chemo. Through the good times and the bad, my mom and I were together until the end of my twenties. I’ll always be grateful that we had this time together. Not everyone is so lucky.

I can’t believe it’s been over a year now since she passed away. Time speeds up as we get older, and it sure as heck isn’t slowing down.

My mom is gone now, and I know she wanted me to spread my wings, so to speak. I’m entering a new phase of life. Everything that’s happened over these last few years – my mom’s illness and passing, the pandemic keeping us all locked in place – makes me realize that I want to experience life. To see new horizons, storms, and sunsets in other parts of the globe. There’s so much out there that I haven’t seen or done. Not yet, anyway.

I’ll still be talking about fantasy worlds, to be sure. But nowadays…

I want to explore the real world too.