This journal mostly covered my first job upon returning to the country which was working primarily as a Health and Safety and Environmental Officer for three separate major construction companies running for three years. The job as located at the Petronas Refinery complex in Kerteh and Gebeng area of Terenggnau and Pahang states on the East Coast. At the same time my late wife was a lecturer at a local college; Kolej Ugama Sultan Zainal Abidin or KUSZA as it was better known. We lived in Kuala Terengganu where we rented a house in the Bukit Kecil Area the children went to their first Malaysia school s nearby and suffered their way through being bullied by the locals because they could not understand a word of Malay or Bahasa Malaysia. I felt sorry for them but i also know that they will have to bite the bullet and take the crap till they learn to throw it back, (the punches). I remember my daughter running home from school crossing a major junction and being spotted by another school teacher who happened to be my eldest brother's friend and recognized her, so he took her into custody and handed her back to the school; she was four or five years old and fresh from having spent three years of her childhood life in Japan, a country where children were pampered like little gods and goddesses.
Sometimes when I look back at the mistakes I have made in my life, I felt like this was my biggest, moving back here especially to Kuala Terengganu where the mentality of the people was then and perhaps still is as a term they aptly calls it themselves"Bodoh Sombong" or my interpretation Stupid and Arrogant.But such is, even if life was all peachy in Japan it was not going to last and when I realized that i could not understand or explain why to my children that I was mad at them, it was time to make a move. They picked up Japanese like children do fast and down to the ground and my wife can understand them but not me and I was the one having to deal with them at home. I remember an episode that triggered my decision for the move. It happened when I was trying to put them to bed after a long day and my wife was out teaching in Nagoya somewhere a few hours away by the bullet train,; just to teach six students! My daughter was then still in kindergarten and was whining back and forth something i could not understand and it got on my nerves. I yelled at her to shut up, and It was a real angry yell that even shook me inside. Then my son, a year older said softly like an adult, "All she wants is a drink of water." I cried as I got up and fetched the water which she drank and fell asleep. Never again, I told myself.
It was not an easy decision to make and i could not depend on my wife who loves Japan and the Japanese way life, but I saw different and perhaps I was wrong but i was afraid that there will come w time when we have to leave and then we will not be prepared to do it like returning to the US as it would be too expensive for us to start all over again. So I confided with my brother back in Malaysia and he offered us a choice of my wife teaching at the College I mentioned. I thought also that it would be another adventure for all of us to experience being in a new place and tasting new life styles. A place i can understand everyone and most speak a good amount of English for my wife and kids. A place where my family will be there to offer any support i would need, a place where my children would get to know their roots, so to speak and learn a language that they can communicate with their relatives and friends, Bahasa Malaysia. And last but not least, for them to get to know Islam as a religion of their father and their grandfather and great grandfather before him. My bad!
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