By Professor Danton Remoto
I attended the Embassy of Malaysia’s celebration of their country’s 68th year, and this happy event at Makati Shangri-la brought back memories.
I lived in Malaysia for four years. In 2002-2003, I was a research scholar of the Asian Scholarship Foundation at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia) where I specialized on Malaysian literature in English.
Three times a week, I took the KTM train from the KL Sentral train station to the Bangi train station. Then, I would talk to the cab driver in my limited Bahasa Malaysia and ask him to bring me to the Pusat Penggajian Bahasa dan Linguistik, or the Center for the Bahasa Language and Linguistics, where I held an office. My office looked out to the wilderness beyond, filled with giant trees whose leaves blotted out the sun. Sometimes, a monkey would knock on my window pane, presumably asking for food, or just checking up on me.
My colleagues were kind and helpful. My adviser, Dr. Ganakumaran Subramaniam, borrowed 20 books from the library and lent them to me. They were books on postcolonial criticism and theory, as well as tomes on Malaysian literature in English translation, or written originally in English. I stayed for ten months and read the 20 books with diligence, taking notes and photocopying the literary pieces that I could teach in the course on Southeast Asian Literature that I was preparing for my classes at Ateneo de Manila University.
I lived in a condo unit in Taman Desa, near the dam. It was a stone’s throw away from Megamall, a huge shopping complex that was five minutes away by cab. I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the small restaurant owned by a kind Chinese couple, who always gave me extra servings of their wonderful dishes. A small shopping complex also sat behind my pink condominium unit, where I bought my groceries, my medicines, and enrolled myself in a gym.
I went to the gym three times a week because I had nobody to talk to, outside of my colleagues at the university. While walking fast on the treadmill, I looked at the trees outside and thought of my mother and my father back home in the Philippines, of my sister who had Down syndrome. I also looked forward to my home visit for the coming Christmas holidays. I also spent a lot of time in the coffee shops, bringing the books that Dr. Subramaniam had assigned me to read. I especially liked drinking tea tarik, kurang manis, or milk tea that has less sugar, and took a liking for the kueh and other small and colored Malaysian sweets made of rice flour, reminding me of home.
I also spent a lot of time at the Kinokuniya Bookstore at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center (KLCC) beside the Petrona Towers. The mall, then and now, was big and gleaming, and the bookstore was well-stocked. I had an ample monthly stipend and a book allowance that allowed me to buy books to my heart’s delight: poetry and fiction, mostly, and some travel books that would serve as touchstones for the books that I was writing.
Like my stay at the University of Stirling in the UK and at Rutgers University in the US, I spent my time in Malaysia reading, soaking up the words that served as my boon companions. I considered my days of study and research abroad as days for reading and writing literature, for which I didn’t have time in the Philippines. Back home, I taught at Ateneo, wrote columns for a newspaper, and was finishing my graduate studies in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines.
But overseas, I had time in my hands, paid for by scholarships and fellowships, and I spent them preparing myself for the storehouse of stories and memories that would fill up my books in the coming years.
From 2017 to 2020, I worked as the Head of School, English, at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia. I was the first Filipino to head a School of English in a British university. It was located on Jalan Broga in Semenyih, Seremban, and I lived in the commuter town of Kajang. It was a small town that only had a shopping mall, several shops, and KFC and Texas fried chicken restaurants. But my condo unit was only 500 meters away from the train station, whose clean and efficient coaches whisked me quickly to Kuala Lumpur and parts beyond. I envied Malaysia for its green trees, its clean avenues, its efficient trains, and I wished the same for my beautiful but poor country.
While walking to the train station, I would sometimes see a small snake slithering, and it would swiftly vanish in a hole in the wall when it sensed my presence. I also stopped before a Buddhist temple and bowed, and did the same in front of another Hindu temple. Malaysia is a country of several cultures and religions, but I did most of my prayers in front of an image of Saint Michael the Archangel, who was the patron saint of my parent’s hometown and of the military base where I was born. I also went inside the church and prayed for my dead parents, my PWD sister, my writing and my health.
Lastly, I prayed for my country that was only three hours away, and yet it seemed to be afloat in another, faraway universe.
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Danton Remoto has published Riverrun, Boys’ Love, The Heart of Summer, Radiance and Sunrise, The Preying Birds, and Crocodile’s Tears with Penguin Southeast Asia. These are available at Fully Booked and at www.acrephils.com, Kinokuniya in Asia and Amazon in the rest of the world.