Community

Since I moved back to Malaysia, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time interacting with people — all kinds of people — and this experience is shaping me and my observations about “community.”

I left the country when I was 18 and travelled a bit before enrolling at Tsinghua. I carried the impression that excelling in Malaysia would be thorny and challenging for a girl like me, so I strived to see the world outside. It was a bold journey for the young girl I was then. Leaving the country felt like a frog, who had lived its entire life under half a coconut shell finally emerging.

I studied International Politics with a sincere — or you might say naive — desire to participate in shaping the future with a sharper mind. To understand the future, one must understand the past. IR gives you a bird’s-eye view of how states interact based on their respective interests. I certainly didn’t foresee that my aspiration to work in multilateral organizations would be shattered by the outbreak of Covid-19.

Change — or upheaval — especially when it strikes your health is something no textbook can prepare you for. I began with the UN in mind and was in Kenya before the outbreak. Life seemed to be following the trajectory that my younger self had planned. But then the pandemic hit. While I battled my own health issues and lost people I knew, I was also struggling and working to adapt to the “new normal.”

There was no time to complain or feel remorse, as it is lucky enough to breathe and to survive. Yet, during that time, I began to question so many things in life — about social lives and relationships, about governments and societies, about my “job prospects” and dreams. As I pretend to be forgetful, life keeps going but wounds never truly healed — nor have the questions been answered.

It feels like a shame to have delayed this journey of reflection for so long. All the pain and suffering should have been transformed into something meaningful — yet I was caught up in figuring out life: what I want to do versus what I can do.

Now the world is changing at an increasingly rapid pace. With technology accelerating everything — the good and the bad — it becomes harder to tell them apart.

Do I have the confidence to say that I possess a moral yardstick strong enough to differentiate between them?

Did I truly transform my sufferings into virtues I now hold sacred, or do the hidden longings still remain veiled?

I don’t have answers.

The only thing I’ve realized is that the depth of life doesn’t come from endless questioning of oneself but through engagement. We may never reach a perfect understanding of things, but community engagement is still something worth celebrating — the courage to keep reaching out, eye to eye, hands to hands.

Seven years later, I am back in my tanah air — a place I once left to chase wider skies. And now I find myself circling back searching for its unfinished stories.

Perhaps there is one key difference between then and now:
She now fully understands the power of actions. It is actions that form your belonging, perhaps home is where you engage the most.