“I am not a tourist. I live here!”

Unfortunately the powers that be only put up with me on sufferance. I have sometimes felt that Malaysians are not supposed to marry non-Malaysians and there are folk out there who think we ought to be punished for such effrontery…

My mistake was to relinquish my PR. My husband was seconded – by the Malaysian government – to the United Nations in Vienna. I went with him and we were away eight and a half years. It was exceedingly difficult to maintain PR while not living here. Immigration officials accused me of trying to have my cake and eat it too. so I gave it up. Now they won’t give it back. Nor will they say why. I guess they feel I am an undesirable, in spite of the money I bring into the country.

One observation I do need to make though is that when I’ve been in KL and Melaka I’ve seen remarkably few ‘white faces’, even in the more tourist-intensive areas – and most of those were fairly obviously backpackers or families on holiday, and a few businessmen. More often in a crowded food court or restaurant I seem to have been the only ‘White European’ present at all.

So on an everyday basis, perhaps your ordinary people just don’t have the experience yet of having ‘white faces’ as part of the regular permanent residential mix (as opposed to say Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Malay, Mayanmar and any number of other ‘Asian’ nationals).

By contrast, here on our little rock (10 miles by 5, population just under 100,000) we do have a mix of people from most parts of the world, all living and working here rather than just tourists. I doesn’t mean we’re all one big happy family, of course, nor that culturally diverse either; but at least we’re more used to the idea that the person on the bus next to us could be just as much a ‘local’ as we are, whatever their outward form.

Super photos. Got more?