Posts by Aisyah.
The only TCK in the family
It started out as intra-country movements – I lived in Malaysia for the first 14 years of my life. In that time, my parents took me out of my birth city, Kuala Lumpur (KL), when I was only over a year old, to another city called Johor Bahru which is only a 30-minute drive to Singapore. I lived there for most of my childhood and I remember our monthly trips to Singapore.
When I was 10, it was time to move again to a small city called Ipoh. As a kid, the moving did not affect me much. In fact, when I was at school in Ipoh I had such a terrible time there and wanted to leave. At 14, I was very happy to hear that my father had been appointed a position at the Malaysian Consulate in Medan, Indonesia and consequently I was to move with my parents to Indonesia.
Culturally there are similarities between Malaysia and Indonesia but Medan was something completely different and unexpected. The widespread and extreme poverty really struck me; it was the first time I was exposed to that. I remember the adults claiming how things are so much better in Malaysia; now I realise that many expats talk about how things are better in their countries, a viewpoint I do not wish to have. Indonesia opened up my eyes and moving there is one of the best things that has happened to me.
At first, I missed Malaysia for a bit because it was a bit hard adjusting due to little things like having no car, no shops within walking distance and the pollution which caused me to get sick several times in the first few months there. However, I thoroughly enjoyed going to school – it’s a very small international school, had only about 80 kids from K1 to Grade 10 during my time there. The school was about the only thing that kept me sane, I remember my reluctance to return home at the end of the school day.
In the first year, I didn’t realise there was a change happening in me until we went back to KL (where the family house is) over the summer holidays. My immediate and extended family constantly criticised and made fun of me because I was living in Indonesia. The way they see it is that Malaysia is superior to other countries in Southeast Asia, which is utterly stupid and bigoted.
Anyway, I basically loved everything about the school – the subjects, the relaxed classroom atmosphere, the support given to the students, the school trips and learning about the many different cultures of Indonesia, the service activities…everything about it. We were supposed to move back to Malaysia after 3 years but it really hit me after my first year there that I could not go back to Malaysia and back to the Malaysian education system. The fact that my family is not privileged money-wise didn’t make it easy. However, to make a long story short, I ended up boarding at an international school in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I completed my secondary schooling.
Whenever I go back to Malaysia, I feel foreign there. I’ve moved so much and have lost contact with friends from my childhood and early teen years. The last time I met up with a few of them, I realised that Malaysians have a completely different mindset that I don’t relate to at all and now I no longer talk to them. I don’t have friends in Malaysia and I don’t feel at home at all in Malaysia.
It is very, very hard to be the only TCK in the whole family. Everything I do is wrong in my family’s view as the family is very conservative. They simply do not understand and they cannot understand because they refuse to open up their minds.
My life is currently in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which is a place I’m fond of. I’m still at the school I attended in Chiang Mai now but as a staff member. I’m working out things for university because going back to live in Malaysia would be my worst nightmare. I’ve been lucky because the boarding parents at the school are very supportive and I have my own little family here. Two of the boarding parents are like my surrogate parents, I call them Mum and Dad for laughs sometimes.
Anyway, on a lighter note, I intend to keep moving through working in the development field, settling down doesn’t exist in my books at the moment.
P/S: Please don’t think that I’m a depressed sod – life is good.
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