The other day I cleared out the vast quantity of web pages that had accumulated on my phone, filed under "must read".

So much of it was so genuinely worth saving that I thought a couple of posts would be apposite.

First up, I found Deepak Unnikrishnan's essay on the experiences of "temporary people" -- migrant workers in the Gulf -- immensely resonant.

He describes his initial discomfiture when his hosts in Berlin also described themselves as "temporary people". Their temporariness hasn't exposed them to the sting of racism, he thinks, so how can their experiences be comparable with mine? But, as he realizes, there is much overlap. They too had aging parents in other countries. They too "treated cities as what they were, ephemeral spaces, places to pass through, where the first priority was gaining contractual employment, not finding a permanent home."

If you replace "contractual employment" with the legal right to stay in some other shape or form, then you have us too. Kuching is home, for sure. But for the government, it will always be our "second home", not our first -- as the recent shenanigans with the pandemic have made clear. People here in the UK (our temporary home) ask me how long we'll stay in Malaysia. How long will my lack of health insurance prove sustainable? That's your answer.

What, for me, is the "emotional toll" of transience, even if elective? I don't know. It hurts to have family and friends so far away, that's certain. And the funny kind of belonging that the "tradition of displacement" leads to is indeed harder to sustain in unpredictable times.

The coronavirus has turned our British Isles visit into a fiasco. We didn't get to see my family at all. We spent a mere two weeks with Nigel's. Soon we'll be heading back home, and our prolonged, isolated sojourn here is already beginning to feel like a strange yawning gap -- something incomplete and interrupted and wholly unsatisfactory.

Yet, if I ask, like Unnikrishnan, whether our mobility -- from the UK to New Zealand to Australia to Malaysia to Indonesia and back to Malaysia -- has been worth it, then I would have to say "yes". I am so much richer through what I have experienced on this strange life journey.

Unnikrishnan writes: "English needs new words ... to explain ... people like me, because I am not an expat or a guest or a migrant or a contract worker. I am not a transnational, a global or world citizen, or a nomad. What I am is temporary, dispensable, a vulnerable state I was born into, and a condition I have normalized. I don’t put down roots by default, and I refuse to love cities or people too much. I am always thinking about the next move wherever I go. As a result, I am frank and wear my heart on my sleeve."

I identify with a lot of that...


Abu Dhabi, 2014









But at least he -- and we -- had choices.

If you're a refugee, you're cruelly dependent on the physical and emotional support of others:

"In 2019, as the cold season drew near and UNHCR launched its winter emergency appeal to help Syrian refugee families survive their eighth below-freezing winter away from home, [Neil Gaiman] invited his sizable Twitter following to share memories and meanings of warmth. Fully aware of the general mediocrity of crowdsourced art, he approached the challenge with an artist’s soaring ability to see the larger pattern tessellated from the constituent parts. Out of the nearly one thousand responses from around the world, out of their cumulative 25,000 words, out of the cabinet of commonplaces -- boiling kettles, burning stoves, grandmother-knitted scarves -- he wrests something entirely original and beautiful and alive: the sensitive insight that memories of warmth spring not from a quantity of temperature but from a contrast in quality of feeling against the cold -- a contrast most memorably kindled by the small kindnesses that make us human.

"... [The result is a] free-verse poem, which stands as a testament to Ada Lovelace’s insistence that the hallmark of creativity is the ability to compose something cohesive, original, and symphonic out of disjoined, seemingly dissonant parts."

The whole poem is lovely, but the last few lines grip your heart:

"Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,
to hold out a badly-knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say
we have the right to be here, to make us warm in the coldest season.

"You have the right to be here."

_*_*_

An estimated 120,000 of Tibet's 150,000-odd refugees are today located in various camps and settlements in India. McLeod Ganj, a small hill town in the north of the country, is famous for being the de-facto capital of the Tibetan community and the home of the Dalai Lama. But the largest concentration is in south India.

As this beautiful photo essay on the monasteries of Doeguling in Karnataka explains, the settlement not only embodies the record of more than a half century in exile, but also preserves the cultural memories of centuries.

The author quotes Namgyal Choedup: "The majority of the original settlers were from the road construction camps in Dharamsala, Kulu, Ladakh, Simla, Dalhousie, and temporary refugee camps in UP. A small group of Tibetans were also sent from detention centers in Rajasthan and other places."

The essay starts with lines from Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's poignant Home, a transitive:

"Belonging: a verb and
a strip of hope I fed with orchids on sale and recipes
brought from a country I now hover over in virtual maps..."

Many Tibetans now feel insecure in India: "But it isn't easy to go anywhere, being a refugee. No country wants us."


Tibet, 2018











Even those with settlement rights sometimes struggle with belonging, as this account recalls. A voyage replicating the journeys -- thousands of kilometres across open seas -- made by Muslim Makassan sailors from Indonesia to trade with Aboriginal people in the far north of Australia has reportedly helped young Muslims in Australia understand that their "religious ancestors had a connection with the First Nations people in Australia from well before 1770".

Connections, connections...


Sulawesi, 2013











And finally, food journeys. This fascinating piece from Saigoneer documents the career of cans and the foods in them -- whether it be sardines, butter, or milk:

"Canned foods serve as a good reminder that the food we eat, and hence our bodies are inextricably linked to the political-economic system that conditions one's life and communities and the uncomfortable history behind them. The stories of canned food also weave a common thread between people who are on the receiving end of imperialism and global capitalism -- the Moroccan laborers on the ports of Safi, the poor Tamil migrants that were pushed to poverty by European colonizers, working-class French people and Vietnamese living in the country and overseas all share a page in history, a taste of the presence and a path to the future."

Movement is such a huge part of human experience, for better or for worse.

I wonder, therefore, what this virus-enforced inertia is doing to us all...