CNY

Happy Chinese New Year people! (Hah I sound like I'm writing one of those People Society emails...) Had a fabulous 10 days celebrating at home, spent some lovely quality time with parents and relatives, pigged out for all I was worth... Thankfully I seemed to have brought the rain back with me, so it was a pretty wet and cooling CNY for a change.

Wrote the following semi-fictional short piece during my 6-hr-transit in Abu Dhabi airport. 'Tis killing two birds with one stone as it fits Sean's silly MPH theme of "The Young Malaysian's Identity" as well as my contribution to Jian Liang's Bristol newsletter of which he's given me free reign. PleasepleasePLEASE leave some constructive criticism if you do read it.

Coffee Arabica

The initial mystery that attends any journey is:

how did the traveller reach his starting point in the first place?

- Anonymous

Here I am again, sipping an iced coffee in the waiting lounge of an unfamiliar airport, in yet another foreign country. All around me hangs the shimmering, shallow allure of the different, the mirage wavering only when one looks past the exotic mosaics and gilt, red-wrapped Valentine cherubs to the grittiness, the sandiness underneath. The Costa coffee cost me six US dollars, my neighbour to the right is a middle-aged Caucasian man in a blue chequered shirt, but the younger men to the left in matching leather jackets and shoes, puffing away between exclamations in a melodic tongue are, like the majority of travellers here, Middle-Eastern. Across the concourse, a dark-skinned man stands shirtless in front of the Swatch shop, half-heartedly fanning away the encroaching evening heat. Abu Dhabi, I decide, is an unapologetic diamond in the rough.

If life is a journey, then it feels as though I have spent these twenty years of my life in an airport waiting lounge. The decision to undertake the journey was made long ago, but still the uncertainty resounds – why am I here? Where am I heading to? The moment I check in, I merge into the many-hued crowd, the only stamp of my identity is a passport and the sheet of fragile paper I clutch which says, Name: HUI/YIWEN MISS, Destination:… The destination has changed many times over the years, the countless airports merged into the single image of a universal waiting lounge.

Was it really the wisest decision to leave home - Malaysia, at the age of fourteen? One is always advised never to look back and harbour regrets, but I simply cannot ignore the irresistible urge to re-examine the past. The years of travelling from country to country have made it so easy to fit in everywhere and yet nowhere, so easy to run away whenever things turn sour. Every time my destination changes, I am back again in this place where all paths intersect, the ubiquitous traveller-in-transit.

Tomorrow will be the first time in six years that I will celebrate Chinese New Year with my family, at home. But can I honestly say that this is home? There is barely anything left to keep me anchored here, merely a childish sense of loyalty - or duty? - towards this country I’ve never truly experienced. A feeling of… displacement, the longing to belong somewhere, emptiness harboured within for many years.

Within hours I will be back in the sticky warmth I was born into, see the familiar-forgotten smiles through the Arrivals glass, and feel the security of my family around me. Then I’ll savour the hour-long drive from the airport when my inner world slowly unwinds on the road to rest. And when I enter the house and allow the familiar scents to crowd my senses, the trappings to pull me deeper and tighter into the place - understanding dawns. In truth, no matter where we are, home dwells within the spaces we choose to make our own.

The Caucasian man finishes his coffee and paper, and leaves. I offer to take a photograph for the three leather-clad Arabs, but in the end, they don’t understand English and the picture is never taken. Within five minutes I will have forgotten their faces, and they will be hard-pressed to recall the small Chinese girl who spoke to them in a foreign tongue in a familiar airport.

But I suppose in such chance encounters lies the magic of the waiting lounge. For in these places of bewildering humanity, I’ve discovered that perhaps life isn’t meant to be lived as a straight and narrow path towards a solitary destination, and that waiting lounges are, after all, also shelters to catch one’s breath between adventures. Besides, wasn’t it by chance that our paths intersected, so long ago, in a waiting lounge just like this one?