A new continent...

Jacques' boss from England came over to visit the office and had some big news for Jacques. I was away at the time, on holiday in Langkawi with my mum and sister. Jacques rang and said he had been offered the American CFO job based in Chicago. I was totally stunned for a moment. Jacques sounded excited and wanted my reaction. ‘OK’ I stalled ‘But when?’ ‘As soon as possible' he said and chatted on about his new role, which he had wanted to do since he joined the company five years ago.

I told the kids straight away, not wanting them to overhear confusing conversations. ‘What will you miss?’ I asked Marc and we sat on the edge of the pool. ‘My friend Adam’ he said immediately. Nina said the beach and the tropical life. Then I told my mum, who said she thought it would be a good move, and at least we would be nearer to them. I thought how faraway we must be to them and that seemed one good reason to go to America, although I couldn’t think of any other reasons…apart from that we knew we would have had to leave Asia sooner or later.

It was soon confirmed and before we knew it we were applying for visas and working out what to do with all the furniture we had accumulated in three years. It seemed too soon though and my heart was aching as I broke the news. As news spread round the KL grapevine I found out I was not the only one. Liz, my Indian friend from the condo was off to Singapore, Audrey to Dubai and several families were returning to France.

The reaction to our news was very nationalistic. The Brits or anyone who had American connections said great things about Chicago and everyone knew someone who had lived there and loved it. The French were mortified we would go to country run by George Bush. Such was the strength of anti-American feeling among the French, after their President Jacques Chirac had refused to join in the war against Iraq, which in retrospect had been a good decision, but who was to know?

The children looked up Chicago on the map and Jacques optimistically told them wew would be living on a new continent, which sounded exciting.

All we could do was make a list of things to do before we left and begin to imagine our new life in USA…

Surprise guests

To my surprise my mother said she was coming to visit in February, with my sister. My mum didn’t want to travel alone, after being seriously ill on an airplane, and Jayne didn’t want to travel alone either with her son, now 16 months old. I felt excited yet somewhat nervous, after last years run-in with my mother-in-law and my family I wasn’t sure how it would go. We hardly knew our one and only English cousin, Brayden, and I was unsure how he would fit in with my unruly and over-active trio.

My mum seemed happy to be in KL and with us. Jayne was battling with the west-east jet-lag and having a young child awake most of the night, but once she got over that she liked it. Our children absolutely adored Brayden, fussing over him and playing with him and there seemed to be a good bond between Gabriel and Brayden already. I have always been so grateful for the easy friendship between the French cousins (Marc and Francois & Nina and Manon). Later on realized it was not automatic or guaranteed. As more cousins popped out on the French side, now twelve in total including our children, the inter-cousins relations were not always warm and could even get aggressive or nasty. So we were happy Gabriel had found a friend and encouraged it.

But I found myself feeling jealous of the way Brayden ran to my mum, while my kids looked on, thinking how just a few years ago they had been the ones to cuddle up to her. I was having problems adjusting to my sister with a child and listening to her ‘first-time mother’ moans irked me since I was doing everything in threes these days and no one seemed bothered anymore. It felt like a lot of time had passed since I was in the same boat. Like when Jayne first fell in love with her husband-to-be - I had been married for five years, and I felt so old and boring. Now I felt I was on the way out of having young babies and toddlers, while she was just starting...

Little devil or angel….

January is birthday month for the boys but they did not want to share a party this time. Marc would be nine and chose a pool party with pizza, which was relatively easy. Gabriel’s would be three this year and old enough to understand it was his special day. He would celebrate his day at school on the Thursday with a cake, and then we would have a party for friends at the condo at the weekend. We considered a clown, or a puppet show, or a dress-up party and made long guest lists of everyone we knew and then two weeks before the birthday he bit his one of his closest friends, Macauley…

Miss. Tim rang me at home and told me it was not the first time. I knew Gabriel had bitten a boy at the playgroup a year ago and had bitten his condo playmate, Anael, several times. But I had put it down to lack of language skills and being young. Now it was more serious. Miss. Tim reported that she had done a role-play and made Macauley pretend to bite Gabriel. She was sure this would help and Gabriel would feel sorry. To my horror when I picked up Gabriel he said ‘Macualey bit me!’ In his mind he had erased the real memory (it was true, he was the biter, I saw the marks) and recreated this false version. I talked to Macauley’s mum, my good friend Victoria and we didn’t know what to do. Gabriel needed pulling into line and the only option was to cancel his birthday party…

The next day I talked to Miss.Tim about him and she mentioned that he often referred to himself as a ‘devil’. I laughed and said it was a joke…with his name, blonde hair and cherubic look he had been our ‘angel’ since he was born. But over the last year we had begun calling him a ‘little devil’ at home, since he was often naughty in the family. Miss. Tim was shocked and told me it was becoming a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and we must stop right now!

But I couldn’t cancel his birthday party. He was the baby of the family and certainly my last child, how could I cancel this special day? After several chats with friends I came to the decision to have a Sunday afternoon tea-party with only close friends (i.e. only those who knew that Gabriel was rather naughty). I had long chats to Gabriel about biting and the badness of it and tried hard not to call him a devil anymore.

A few days before Gabriel and I went across the road to the appropraoty named Angel cake shop and he picked a big cake with a Batman design for the school and a chocolate one for the weekend. I told him if he bit anyone he would lose the cakes. The school party and the simple Sunday party were a success in the end. Nina organized the little ones into crafts activities and Marc played games with the older brothers and sisters. The kids all played nicely and no-one was bitten, thank goodness and Gabriel seemed to enjoy his special day. But it made us all take a good look at our angelic little boy and wonder would he live up to his name….

Downhearted down under

We went to Australia for Christmas. I had heard great things about Australia. Two French friends had lived there and raved about the cool lifestyle and Brits loved it. We flew to Brisbane and then took a short flight and boat trip to Lindeman Island, where we would spend a week on a Club Med resort for Christmas.

Our first impressions were negative, after empting our snacks into the bin at the airport and losing our luggage. The service staff seemed particularly bad-tempered. Rules were rules and we were thrown out of our hotel room at 10am, forbidden to snorkel without signing a million forms, and not allowed in a bar after 9pm with the children (something we always did in Asia, where kids are accepted till midnight). But the kids were happy and enjoyed the Australian entertainment and Santa arriving on the 25th on a sea-plane loaded with gifts. I hoped that Christmas would be more ‘English’ and I was pining for roast turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce with Christmas pudding. But this was a true Australian Christmas and it was an open-air barbecue and beer in the sunshine. Most fellow holidaymakers from Europe were delighted to be on the beach on Christmas Day, but we wished we had gone to Bali or Thailand.

We flew back to Sydney and rented a car and did a road-trip around the Blue Mountains. Here we saw English-style houses and ate great fish and chips. The children loved visiting the caves, trekking in the blue-green forests and petting a kangaroo and koala at the zoo. In the local supermarket I bought Christmas crackers (glossy cardboard tubes with a small gunpowder strip that bangs when two people pull it open and a gift falls out). This is typically English but had the effect of making me very homesick!

Back in Sydney for the last few days we met up with friends from KL, Sasi and Bruno, who were also there on holiday. We ate Chinese food in Chinatown together and Sasi confided that she missed Asia and would not want to live in Australia. I agreed that it simply did not impress me either. Had I become a snobbish asiaphile? Or was it because we were so used to the soft kind of smiling friendly tourism around Asia? We had had high expectations and the reality didn’t live up it. But what was reality? Why were we not happy when millions of tourists loved Australia? Would we ever be able to leave Asia now and go back to normal life?

Dress up party

The last cooking session of the year was in December and was to be a joint Indonesian buffet lunch. Three ladies would cook each part and we were promised a true feast celebrating the end of the Muslim fasting month. As I sent out the usual sms and email I added on the line ‘Dress code: Asian style’ as a little joke, thinking no one would take it seriously.

But it seemed like we all had a hidden wish to dress up as one of the local cultures and everyone came in ‘Asian style’. We had about twenty guests that day, a great turnout. Everyone squeaked as a new person came in, looking totally different, and the cooking was postponed for ages while we all admired our dress-up. Some ladies were in Indian saris, others in Chinese cheongsams, one was wearing the familiar batik uniform of Malaysian Airlines (she used to work for them I think), while most of the Europeans were in sarong beach style outfits. Everyone looked great, it felt like being six-years-old again and invited to a your best friend’s dress-up party!!

As we sat around on the floor cushions eating our spicy curries and rice, homemade peanut sauce with satay and other such delights from Suhita and her team we laughed at each other. At the end I announced that the next session would be Brazilian cooking and with a smile I added ‘The next cooking session dress code is Brazilian beachwear!’ The look of horror that crossed some of the faces was hilarious!

The one and only birthday party…

My birthday is on Christmas day, which means I don’t usually celebrate it with friends. As a child I have only one strong memory of a birthday party at my Nanna’s house with all my cousins. I can’t remember ever having a proper birthday party with school friends. Generally it was just my parents and sister and we celebrated Christmas in the morning and my birthday in the afternoon with a cake. Later on I found myself working on birthdays (cooking in a ski-resort or teaching English in Japan). For my 30th I was at Jacques’ parents house and everyone totally forgot until I started weeping at 6pm. On my 29th and 35th birthday I was hugely pregnant and ready to pop, with Marc (born 8 days later) and Gabriel (24 days later). So it is an emotional day for me.

Having children certainly has helped, and they love preparing a surprise for my day, but understandably they are rather busy with their new toys to really pay much attention to my birthday. It’s not that I feel sorry for myself (well I do to be honest!) but that’s how life is. I can’t even blame my mother since she didn’t expect me arriving either that day!

So imagine how delighted and amazed I was when some of my KL friends decided to organize a mini-party for me. I would be 38, not a great age but memorable as the only year I really truly had a party arranged in my honour. My Filipino friend Maribeth booked us a table in the English-style hotel bar where her husband worked. We did it a week early since some of us were leaving for the holidays. Maribeth invited Hilary, Yuen-Chi, Sasi and Fred. I was close to tears when a surprise cake arrived, iced in pale lilac with my name, made personally by Maribeth's pastry-chef husband. The girls presented me with a bracelet made from yellow stones, which was good luck for my Chinese birth year of the Goat. It was the perfect gift, I am not a jewellery person but I loved the asian bracelets I found in markets and wore at least one a day. I was truly touched and we danced till 1am to the Filipino band singing along to Abba hits and my favourite song ‘I will survive…’

Wind of change

As the year ended contracts finished and families were on the move again. Yossy from the ‘French Husband’s’ club had left for New Zealand and Yuen-chi was returning to Korea, Nina’s amour, Dorian, went to Paris, a French family from the condo went to Vietnam and a Chinese-Malaysian friend, Maureen, from the cooking group returned to Canada.

There were several goodbye lunches, dinners or parties. KL social life revolved around goodbye parties. They were a chance to meet old friends, who were all connected in some way, and find out how long we all had to go (like comparing prison sentences, someone joked!).We usually contributed towards a joint gift, chosen by the departing person’s ‘best friend’ - a cookbook, a local painting, or a set of Chinese ceramic bowls. It was an important part of the ritual of saying goodbye, closing the departure and allowing people to move on.

I noticed how many expats simply replaced one departing person with another, the fourth person for the mah-jong club, a tennis partner, the PTA mother and so on. But I found it hard to replace close friends so easily. Certainly the groups I was part of could not be replaced. The diverse mixed expat families from our first condo, the French mercredi club, and the ‘French husband’s’ club were unique. We had tried replacing lost friends with new expats or a friend of someone in the group but somehow the fragile balance of characters, background and connections was broken and eventually the group drifted away or re-formed somewhere else.


Mahes and me just before she left for Kiev
There was one person leaving who was truly irreplaceable, Mahes, my Malaysian friend. Mahes had battled with breast cancer most of the year, but was recovering well. Mahes was married to a Frenchman who had been posted to Darfur in Sudan and had three children. Her husband came back when she was diagnosed and stayed with her, but his compassionate leave ran out and he was posted to Kiev, Ukraine. Their departure was hard for me and Marc, who was losing his friend, Danton. I had never seen anyone as brave as Mahes in the face of such a horrible disease, and her wit and spontaneity always made my day. On her last day we went for a last coffee and shopping in Megamall, picking out warm clothes for her arrival in -30 degrees Kiev. Someone told me later that people only spend their last day with a good friend and I was touched that she chose to spend it with me.

As Mahes left we exchanged gifts, I gave her a painting of some Chinese bowls, as a reminder of our lunches together, and she gave me a bamboo wind chime, which I hung on my balcony to tell me when a storm was approaching. For the first time since we had touched down in Malaysia I began to wonder how long it would be before we were leaving too and I felt the wind of change began to blow in our family too…