A Hometown I Know

By Yong Xi Tan

I think of when I got my day off for Malaysia Day and the entire week. My time grows shorter as I progress daily through my school years, and I feel it for the first time in many years. The exciting yet slightly daunting feeling felt back when I left my primary school for where I am now: Dalat International School. It strikes me as the days count down in the style of a numerical continuous value, right down to the zeros, where it reaches the fundamental limit of approaching zero, and something big happens. That moment when you leave a country or city that you consider a hometown. That moment when you realize you have left a place you’ve lived in for nearly a decade or nearly two.

As I work with my AP Statistics tutor, she tells me, “This is your last Malaysia Day. You better enjoy it while it lasts!” Still, I still really don’t know where I’ll end up yet - My senior year just began, and I have lots to apply for. Unexpectedly, however, I found myself dumbfounded; despite being a citizen of this country for so long, I never really celebrated this. For the longest of time, I have been ignorant of my country to the extent in which celebrations except Merdeka Day never came across my mind, though with fairness some elements overlap with good and bad. It is a shame that I have not taken the time to do so.

Now that I realize that this is what it is, I cannot imagine just how much my paternal grandparents must have felt when all this was going on. The communist insurgencies, the Indonesian confrontation, and the independence - To them, the country must feel new in some way. Not the way when I think that it’s new because of age, but the actual feeling of living in a brand new, “clean-slated” country, fresh out of war and distress. There really comes an assumption that not living through all this didn’t make me think of any of these values, but I know God has provided me the opportunity to live at the right time.

Perhaps I’ll have a few years of paying respects to this country, or perhaps not. I don’t know what life will be like, nor will I know until the time comes. All I hope is that all things go well and that God will guide me and test me in times I need. Whether I like it or not, I will be departing where I consider home, down to a bustling city in the metropolitan Kuala Lumpur, or up north to a place I have long wanted to stay in after visiting every half a year, Japan. All this journey that I will have in the next few coming years depends on this choice I make, and though not comprising my entire life in any way, I hope to see myself do the right thing.