And it was all a dream...

The return home is often a strange experience. On one hand, there is the feeling that you have never left. Everything feels just as it always did. Give yourself a good night's sleep, recover from the jetlag, and you may wonder if you were ever gone at all. Did you not, perhaps, simply dream it all up?

On the other hand, if your time away was in a place very different to your home, there may be some degree of confusion over things that were only recently very familiar to you. You may, for instance, be surprised at which side of the road you drive on, even though prior to going it seemed the most natural thing in the world to drive that way.

People drive on the same side of the road in Malaysia, so I do not have to adjust to that. And, all things considered, I was only away for two weeks, so it shouldn't be all that strange to be returning. Then again, having lived in Malaysia previously, I found myself adjusting very quickly to life there, which makes the experience of returning so soon perhaps that bit more confusing. Confronted this morning with a knife and fork for eating breakfast, I caught myself thinking, ever so briefly, what do I do with these? Faced with crossing a peaceful Brunswick street, I instinctively thought, quick - run across while it's clear. Looking at our front door - just a door, no gate or padlock - I thought, how simple these doors are to open. Even a sea of white faces seems a little odd. And I was only gone for two weeks.

Give me a night of sleeping in Australia and I'm sure I'll be back in the swing of things. But for now I'm happy enough to be where I am - half home in Australia, half still in Malaysia.

(More travel stories will appear here once the jetlag has passed and I've uploaded my remaining pictures - for those who are interested...)

A whiter shade of fake

Back in Kota Kinabalu for a few days, I find myself confronted more - though only a little bit more - with western tourism. In Tawau, you can imagine that you aren't actually a tourist, and in a sense I'm not a tourist when I go there, being there more to visit friends and volunteer at the school. Now, in KK, it's different. I'm here on holiday, and for much of my first two days here I did not see anyone I knew and was left to my own devices, wandering around with my back-pack on my pack and the streams of sweat pouring from my pasty-white brow showing that I was very much "not from around here".

There are other westerners in KK - not many, but more than you'll find in Tawau. Granted, that isn't saying much. But if you go to certain key tourist spots - Jesselton Point, for instance, or the overly expensive bars on the waterfront - you'll see them. They probably won't want to look you in the eye, because they will want to pretend that they are the only white people there (see this post on Stuff White People Like for an authoritative confirmation of this theory). Most of us are quite good at deluding ourselves about how others see us; when white, travelling in a sea of non-white faces, we can imagine that we blend in; that, because we can use chopsticks and feel authentic because of how much we are sweating, we must surely look like locals by now. Only, there's one problem - the whiteness of our faces. Seeing other white people exposes this for us; it shows us what everyone around us can already see: that we are white, not Asian.

Of course, I can think cynically about these things, and I have lived here, so from time to time I can fancy that I am somehow superior, that while they are tourists, I am somehow something higher. The only problem here? Almost everyone thinks that. If you're white, you are either determined not to be a tourist (while still going on frequent overseas holidays) or you are completely comfortable being a tourist because you didn't even realise there was an alternative. I find the latter group offensive because they draw attention to themselves and blunder ignorantly into situations they do not understand. I find the former group offensive because they show me up for what I am.

Is there another option? A third way, perhaps?

I think that, so long as we are looking solely at ourselves, trying to modify our own actions, trying to ensure that we are different, that our actions make us purer and higher than those around us, then we will fail. We will remain wannabes who redeem themselves by their own tolerance and by how much chilli they can eat. If instead we do everything with the love of God in our hearts, seeking to honour Him and to love His people, then I think a better way will open itself up without our even noticing - a way that is better than all the rest, because it is inspired by and rooted in love.

Don't you know who I am?

I suspect that tempers boil a little quicker in hot climates. Make the weather particularly humid, and it gets even quicker. Add an Air Asia flight to the mix, and the boiling point is probably brought down a good (or bad) ten degrees.

When I first came to Sabah, I came knowingly as a servant. I came determined to accept whatever situation I was put in. This proved harder than I had thought it would be, though sometimes the situations I found myself in were far easier than I had expected (and also sometimes far harder). I was sometimes looked after very well, sometimes not at all. Often I was given nice, comfortable accommodation. Often that accommodation came with heavy responsibilities, eg. looking after 8 teenage boys. I was required, I suppose, to put Philippians 4:12-13 to the test.

This time round, I told myself that I was going to come with no expectations, to once again accept whatever situation I found myself in. If I was treated like a celebrity, so be it. If I was treated like dirt, well, I didn't much fancy that, but so be it, I suppose. But in my heart I said, "But really they should treat me like a long-lost friend."

And in Tawau that's how I was treated, mostly. In KK it's been a bit different so far. The friend who was supposed to pick me up from the airport didn't. The room that I had stayed in on my first night here - small but nice, and with an en-suite - had been changed to a smaller one, with no en-suite, and where the adjoining communal bathroom seemed to have no hot water and not even really something I would consider a shower.

Pride, of course, kicks in very quickly in these circumstances. "Don't you know who I am?" the fleshly spirit rages.

Yes, there are many in Malaysia with better accommodation than I will have tonight. Yes, it is annoying that I was not collected from the airport. Yes, it is frustrating that these are my friends who seem to be letting me down.

Then I think of a garden where the best of all men knelt crying and sweating blood while his closest friends slept and their spirits began to prepare to abandon, even deny, him. If anyone deserved to say, "Don't you know who I am?", it was him. Yet he never did. The one time he declared his identity, it was at an impromptu and shoddy trial for his death, and the declaration sealed his fate.

My flesh tells me I should not have to put up with this on a holiday. "Go and book yourself into a hotel where at least they'll book you a taxi and give you breakfast", it says. But then my mind is half-drawn back to the one who can show me how to handle this situation properly, and I am humbled.

Who am I? I am nothing, if I am not like Him.

Tawau's Got Talent

I remember reading what the Lonely Planet guide to Borneo has to say about Tawau. I bought it just before moving here, and was a little disappointed to find this description of my prospective home:

Despite the progress, desolate pockets remain after dark. Particularly around the local bus terminus, dog packs are big and loud enough to cause distress, and street lighting could use an upgrade. But what's really missing there at night are people.

The lure for travellers is the border: Tawau is the only crossing point with Kalimantan where foreigners can get a visa to enter Indonesia.

The last part isn't true. I tried to get into Kalimantan twice and failed. You need a Visa, and they're not easy to get. Or maybe that was just me. But I certainly remember feeling somewhat disappointed by what I found when I arrived. Up to this point, I had been familiar with Malaysia's tourist hotspots. The most provincial experience I had had of Malaysia had been Kuching, Sarawak, and I had loved that so much that I thought living in Sabah would be a cinch.

I suppose I can admit now that it really wasn't. While I loved much about it, and still do love it, Tawau was a difficult place for a foreigner to live. The chief reason is that there are simply no other foreigners here. I can distinctly remember the few times that I have seen any other orang putih (that means "white men", rather than a type of monkey) here. I saw a few the other day at Taman Bukit Tawau. It was a novelty. While you might find that in the bigger cities, even in Kota Kinabalu, you can live a relatively western life just with spicy food and exotic, tropical surrounds, Tawau does not afford these luxuries. Here, you are thrown into life with few of your protective mechanisms. You may not realise on the surface how different this place will be to live in, but you'll learn quickly enough once you are here long enough to need routine and familiarity.

One issue, I think, in a place like this is the attitude of the locals towards their own town. Some love it, some view it with contempt and can't wait to get out. Others simply don't know any different. For someone who has lived in many different places and now lives in one of the more cosmopolitan and advanced cities of the world, I view complacency a little critically. I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, since it brings with it much that is unreasonably judgmental. Still, there is much to be said for knowing other ways of living. I have come, for instance, to love the upbringing I have had because, knowing of lives other than my own, I have learnt to see the value of what I have. Many of the people I see daily in Tawau are teenagers, and many of them, by virtue of youth, long for another life. I remember being much the same as a teenager busting to get out of Drouin.

The real challenge for Tawau, and for Malaysia in general, is for people who leave for education and broadening of experience to return, to come back to their home with love and the kind of civic-mindedness which governments can promote but only the heart can produce.

When I think of how I should pray for this country when I return to Australia in less than a week, I suspect this is a very good prayer to pray: that there would be more and more Malaysians who love their home, not because they don't know any different, but because they see the value of home, and see the good that they can do for their people.

It's also a prayer that can be prayed for every cosmopolitan city, where travel and self-development are valued much more highly than staying put and working for the good of your home. We can all learn, I think, what it is to seek to bless not yourself but your home, to hold in tension the problems you see and the love you have for the place. It is a tension, I suspect, best achieved by the grace of a God in whom we always have a higher calling, a higher Home.

A fitting resting place

In January of last year I had my first set of Australian visitors come to see me in Tawau - my friends Anne and Paul who stopped by on their honeymoon. It was a rare opportunity to put aside my responsibilities for the weekend, and also my first time out of Tawau since arriving. One sweaty Sunday afternoon, after church, we drove to Semporna, the next town - around 100km away. I remember sitting down at the famous floating restaurant, looking out over the magically clear water, eating magnificent food (fish that had only been caught a few minutes earlier) and drinking cool beer, and breathing perhaps my first sigh of relief in one month.
Today I returned to Semporna, with Aunty Wendy, an older Chinese lady who now does much the same job in the student hostel that I had last year. She had been wanting very much to go to Semporna and could not find anyone with the time to accompany her. I, fortunately, also wanted someone to go there with. We shared the driving, ate seafood for breakfast and lunch and took a boat to a small island adjoining one of the many kampung air (water villages) peppering the coast. The boat was suitably wild, belly-slapping the surface of the water at opportune intervals, the boat's driver seemingly dodgy at first then proving quite the gentleman, and the children at the kampung initially standoffish then wondrously happy when our cameras came out, jumping and dancing for no reason aside from apparent joy. They followed us to the jetty, echoing each other all the way down with repeated cries of, "Bye bye! Terima kasih! Jumpa lagi!" ("Thankyou. See you again.") One child introduced a variation with, "Terima kasih! Jumpa lagi! Makan (eat) KFC!"), and by the time I was in the boat the cry had become, a little unusually, "Thankyou, daddy, I love you, daddy". They also enjoyed poking my feet, which they found to be delightfully white. It was a suitably odd and joyful moment that I feel I have to record, for the sake of remembering it when moments like these seem rather strange and unlikely to have ever actually happened.

I later found out that the name "Semporna" means place of rest. Like "Brunei Darusalam" ("Abode of Peace"), it forms one of the most aptly named places of momentary rest and peace in the busy life I led while here. Today it was also an oasis of peace after two and a half days of fairly solid time spent back at my old school. Driving back to Tawau, up the lush oil-palm-lined hill that led us home, I looked ahead at the clouds and blue sky set against the alarming green-ness of the Sabah landscape and thought of the resting place that still awaits me - a resting place I will never have to leave, never have to say "Bye bye" or "Jumpa lagi", but where I can dwell forever, with a permanent, resounding "Terima kasih". That, I suspect, will be the day to end - and begin - all days.

A waterfall and the trouble with staring at the ground

One of my favourite things in all of God's creation is a good old jungle. Back home, we call them rainforests but the difference is lost on me. My geography was never really good enough to understand these fine distinctions. The point is that the small southern Queensland town where I spent my formative years had much rainforest on hand for a small child to enjoy, and our semi-regular trips to the north gave me early exposure to the tropical variety. Years spent in the more pastural Gippsland made my love of the rainforest/jungle lie dormant for a few years, but on first coming to Malaysia it was reawakened. By the time I was living here last year, it was thoroughly active again, to the point that I booked a cabin in the jungle to spend a night back in June last year, even though I had a fever and had barely been able to walk the previous day. I love the jungle. That's all there is to it.
So today, after two and a half days of being back at my old school, more or less acting like I wasn't actually on holidays at all, I had the joy of going to one of my favourite Sabah haunts - Taman Bukit Tawau (Tawau Hill Park), where I stayed for that famous feverish night last year. I went with a friend, the husband of my principal, whose company I always relished when I lived here. We could drink beer and talk about history and literature, and he liked walking in the jungle. Enough said. So today we returned to the jungle, and went on another ill-fated search for the mythic hot springs of Tawau (that's two failed attempts now, this time because a very large tree and menacing-looking rotan branch had fallen across the path) and also had a successful trip to the Bukit Gelas waterfall, pictured above for your convenience. My feet got absolutely coated in mud (yet another pair of shoes to be christened by the extremes of Bornean weather) as did my trousers, and I was thoroughly sweaty by the end of the hike, and had an all-round rollicking good time. Afterwards we drank tea and ate papadums and roti, and talked about history and theology. We're planning another jungle trek on Saturday, this time up another hill nearby.

There was a moment while hiking when I realised, though, that for all my love of the jungle I rarely look at it when I'm walking in it. Much more of my time is spent staring at the ground, avoiding the mud (I was unsuccessful), looking out for leeches (failed on that count too) and generally making sure that where you put your feet is steady and safe (that was more successful). Then you enter the clearing, find the waterfall and put your bag down. You wash your face and hands in the stream and look up, and there it is. The thing you came here for.

You cannot, perhaps, see from the picture just how beautiful that waterfall was. Come to Tawau with me one day and I'll show you.

Divided Loyalties

I mentioned in my post of a few days ago that there are a few different emotions that are brought up by returning to a place that was once very familiar to you. A major part of that experience, I think, is the feeling that there is often an aspect to your personality that is powerfully connected to that place - a part that may not feel connected with anywhere else. Strange and mystical as this might sound, it can actually result from a variety of quite everyday reasons: the people you love who live in that place, or the unique sensations and experiences that stem from living there. While, for instance, I may be able to eat Malaysian food even when not in Malaysia, there's nothing quite like the feeling of actually eating it in Malaysia, with the sultry heat and tropical downpour, soaking in the smells and the colours around you as you eat. This, I think, is an experience that I do not have outside of Malaysia. It awakens in me something that is not awakened anywhere else.

Then there is the love I have for the people, for the school I am visiting, for the whole, gloriously imperfect experience of being here, with them, doing what I'm doing. While I may have comparable feelings in Australia, at my school there - and I certainly do - I am someone who tends to become consumed by whatever situation I am in. While in Malaysia, my mind is almost exclusively on Malaysia. When back teaching in Melbourne, that's where my mind is once more. The effect? Not necessarily what R.D. Laing or William James would mean by the "divided self", but perhaps a more everyday approximation of it. I am still me in any place where I go, and I can be both happy and sad in equal measure wherever I find myself. And, more to the point, God is the same wherever I am, and never leaves me or forsakes me. Yet I am conflicted. I long to stay here, yet I long to go home.

Isn't this, I wonder, what we should feel about Heaven? Yet the feeling, in that case, should be more intense in the conflict it causes, while also more clear-cut in where the lines are drawn. Heaven, unlike Malaysia or Melbourne, is perfect, and we will only ever be happy there, never sad. Going to Heaven will be the true act of Going Home, where there will be no sadness or regret. Yet the Apostle Paul captured the tension perfectly when he wrote these words:

"For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body." (Philippians 1:21-24)

Perhaps, when we feel these inner conflicts, they are because our divided loyalties result purely from division between earthly motives. If our desires and hearts are fixed on our true Home, then we will feel conflict, but not the conflict of a divided heart. Whether here or with Christ, our hearts will be with Him and His kingdom.

Early last year, reflecting on this same conflict, I wrote the following poem, words which, now I am back in Malaysia, bring me back to the very emotions that must have prompted me to write them. I will let this be my prayer today:

The Undivided Self

(After John Donne)

I am a homeland of warring fractions.

I am a mountain pulled by opposing forces,

a mass on the verge of becoming many islands.

If you have the power,

and the love to overpower my will,

keep me as one –

or, if there is much that must be discarded,

may you leave just the parts attached to your land;

cleave them unto your shelf, your continent,

and may all else cleave away.

If I cannot be one, then make me all None,

and make my nothing All on the land-mass of

your wondrous whole.

Over the mountains and the sea

If you are comparing Kota Kinabalu to other South-East Asian cities, you may find it small and laid-back. It isn't as inexplicably quiet as its neighbour, Bandar Seri Begawan, and the constant traffic jams make it seem less than idyllic. But to one side you see lush, jungle-thick mountains stretching out as guardians over the city and to the other you see water, and islands, and boats wandering out to bring the two together.

Sabah Reflections #1: On being foreign (and not especially humble)

I’m not sure how regular my internet access will be over the next two weeks, so my blogging may well be sporadic at best. This post is being written offline while the ideas are fresh in my mind and will be uploaded as soon as an opportunity arises. It’s early evening in Kota Kinabalu – the end of my first day back in Sabah. It’s been a day of ups and downs, not helped perhaps by the fact that I did not get to eat anything until around 12:30. But it’s also been a day of wonderful rememberings and reflections. Some solitude in the afternoon afforded me a lovely leisurely time roaming the familiar streets of KK, going to old haunts and taking far more photos than I was actually aware of. You can expect to see some uploaded here presently, but I might just focus on thoughts for the time being.

Returning to a place that was once very familiar is a strange experience. The first few days, I suspect, are a mix of delighting in becoming reacquainted with it all and being reminded of things that you had not once thought about since leaving, some of them good, some of them not as good.

It’s amazing, for instance, how simply being back in Malaysia helps me make sense of aspects of my life here that had become distant memories, even beginning to take on the atmosphere of myth. My writings from the first half of last year, for instance, attest that while living here I grew in God in ways that, back home, I have come to question, even potentially doubting that it ever happened. Being back here I can see why. There is something so humbling about life here, at least for a foreigner. You could live in far less resourced places, but enough things just won’t work, or simply don’t work how you’d expect, that you either become very quickly angry, or learn that the world does not revolve around you. There’s also a gratitude for simple blessings that develops in a place like Sabah. Functioning hot water systems can come, appropriately, to seem luxuries. Drinking water can be an unalloyed pleasure. On the other hand, rarely knowing how to do some of the most basic things has a similar effect, I suspect, to being an adult who, for whatever reason, loses the ability to walk and must learn to do so again.

When faced with humbling situations, there are two choices: accepting humility, or being humiliated. The latter regularly stems out of pride and leads only to further hardness of heart. The former leads to joy and gratitude: the sort of gratitude that, 18 months ago, prompted me to write this simple poem/prayer, which I will share with you today:

My heart is full

(sweet syrup of

your love, and each

and every gift; with sap

my tree-trunk spirit fills);

my hands, though empty,

better suited are to reach

inside my heart and take

full quota of this

liquid-blessing. Full

my heart to overflowing.

(Blessed be the hands that give.)

Jet Planes and Setting Suns

Well, there hasn't been an awful lot of activity here at Ideas From the North of late, primarily because I've been quite frantically trying to finish up the somewhat implausible amount of marking that I've had piling up throughout the term. The deadline? Flying back to Malaysia tomorrow morning for a two week return to the place I called home for half of last year.

Apart from being flat out tying up loose ends in Melbourne (I haven't succeeded; many ends are still loose), there's naturally a lot of conflicting emotions in me in the lead up to my return. Now, I'm not going to go into the details here as to why exactly I feel mixed about it, but suffice to say that my experience of life in Malaysia involved some of the greatest joy and some of the greatest pain of my short life so far. Returning to the place where it all coalesced bizarrely and indescribably - well, you can imagine that I'm not exactly sure what to feel.

Fortunately, unlike John Denver, I'm fairly sure of when I will be back again, but have less idea what to expect when I get there. I may have a chance to report some of it here, but make no promises. I remember once hearing something along the lines that, when you've been overseas for a week, you think you can write a novel about the experience, after six months you think you can write a short story, and after a year you think you can manage a sentence. I wasn't there for the full year, but I think enough got crammed into that year to have a similar effect. I may have coherent thoughts about it all. I may not. But I suspect it will be worthwhile.

One of the biggest challenges that I face right now is entrusting the whole situation to God. I'm not sure why. I know He can be trusted with everything, and has been trustworthy so far. But for some reason I feel that nutting things out on my own, in my own incompetent style, is better by far than being humble enough to accept that God's plans might be better than my own. Yes, the humbling part of the process seems to be the hardest.

The good news is that God is still likely to look after me, however immature and untrusting I am. The Bible makes it quite clear that God provides for His creation constantly, regardless of what it does or does not deserve. This morning, for instance, I read Psalm 50, which begins with these wonderful words:

"The Mighty One, God, the Lord,

speaks and summons the earth

from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets."

The rising and setting of the sun each day should serve as reminders of God's sustaining goodness. I can trust in Him because He is powerful, and because He is good. Those are two things that I am certainly not, and this is a very good reason to trust Him and not me.

Tomorrow I will leave as the sun rises. I will return when the sun has set. In the middle - the goodness and faithfulness of God.

About Face

These days, my ears and eyes are readily tuned to take in all things Malaysian. Recently, a man at my church, who I presume must be Malaysian from the things he said, responded to a sermon about Jesus' death by commenting that, in a Muslim society, the idea of a suffering saviour is offensive. He was asking how we could present the Gospel in such a society. I don't remember the answer our pastor gave, but we did consider the question in our Bible study the following Tuesday night. What we agreed as a group was this: there's no escaping the fact that the Cross is offensive. It should be. We speculated if the fact of the matter is that we, as Christians, have simply lost sight of that offence, meaning that, in a sense, we have lost sight of what it really means. We shouldn't be avoiding offending people (I suggested as much, I think, a few months ago in a post I wrote at Christmas). Instead, we should recognise that the Gospel is offensive to those who are closed to its truth - a suffering saviour is the only one who is any good for us, but He's also the last thing many of us are looking for.

It did make me reflect on the "face saving" aspect of Malaysian culture, and the fear this demonstrates of being shamed. I remembered the principal of my school over there speaking about "taking off her face" in a conversation with a parent, in which she was required to be significantly humble. This phrase stood out for me, and it struck me that this is exactly what Paul tells us in Philippians 2:5-11 that Jesus did for us. In other words, if we try to hold onto our own sense of honour and moral dignity, we will be offended by what Jesus has done for us, and we will remain gloriously immune to His sacrifice. If, however, we accept our shame just as He bore it for us, then - biggest paradox of all - our shame will be taken away.

I wrote a poem about this while in Malaysia that seems relevant here. It isn't meant to be a direct allegory as such - bits of it won't make sense if you read it that way. But I more or less wrote it asking the question, "What if there were those who followed Jesus only for His status, and not for His sacrificial love?" This is what I produced. The name, "Giving Face", comes from a Chinese phrase which I had directly translated for me - it means, "Showing respect to", but often in a superficial kind of way. I wondered, and then wrote this poem to wonder, what true, deep "face-giving" would look like. Here is the result:

Giving Face

Tired of superficial looks,

bowed heads and insincere hearts,

he looked for a way beyond all this –

a way of speech deeper than the surface,

a way of looking much more penetrating than glances.

“I am sick,” he said,

“of respect that goes no further

than the start of my name.”

So he climbed the deepest of deep-deep wells,

far beyond mortal status-seeking and glory-clambering;

he went beyond the face-saving multitude

to a place where there lay the truest of faces.

Where did he go? the shy pilgrims ask.

Why, he jettisoned all he knew,

left this island behind.

He crossed over the sea, and out of his skin.

He shed all clothes and fine embroidery.

He went – do you know where it was?

He went,

(truest of true faces in store for him who overcame),

he went, pride discarded,

humility in hand,

to the hill of Calvary.

(Tawau, March 2010)