May 22nd (2020)

 

May 22nd
I am awake at 7am

First they came for the Rohingya, then the other immigrants, the Bangladeshis, the over stayers, then they came for the Expats, denying their long term visas, claiming quarantine, then they came for…...

The news from Malaysia, the callous way they are treating foreigners is making me unwell.

9.56am
I am feeling despair, unable to concentrate on tonight’s class. I feel not Zepplin’s black dog, or Harper’s black cloud but an existential weight, an unbearable weight of ‘being” pressing down on me, my head, my shoulders, my whole body. I know that it too will pass, but at the moment it is difficult to shift all that constant negativity.

The Khmer Times reports that….”The Health Ministry reported yesterday that a Cambodian man has tested positive for the coronavirus after he returned from the Philippines on Wednesday.” So where there were none, now there is one.

I know that I am not the only one going through a severe upset to their life, but this is so difficult to go through alone. Others have life much worse, I know, but it is different when it happens to you. At this moment I don't know which way to turn.

Looking at the way foreigners are being treated across the world, the xenophobia and the re-drawing of tribal boundaries makes me realise that many of us expats, immigrants, are only allowed to exist on sufferance  outside the countries we are born in. I have to ask myself  “is my15 year Asian dance finally over?” Am I to crawl back to my motherland, tail between my legs, experienced but fiscally impoverished. It is as if culture and being cultured is being cast aside by the world order of neo-fascists, and this has precipitated a spiritual backlash (pandemic) by unseen forces, sadly it is always the poor who suffer most.

I really am tired from today’s ‘Project’. We ‘talk’ about Jack London’s ‘The Call of the Wild’, in a little more depth, looking at the vocabulary used and begin some Q&As about the story. I am so glad that these young adults are willing to tackle these classics and strive to overcome the obvious difficulties in language. I am proud of them and their tenacity.

I shower, and am about to start reading. Yes, reading in bed has been my habit since I could read but now, with the advent of digital books, I can carry so very many books around with me. When I was younger I would carry a whole series of books up and down stairs, just in case I finished one book in a series and desperately needed to start the next (back then it may have been John Creasey or Michael Moorcock). Recently I had them on my iPad, but had to transfer them to my Samsung Edge S7, and read from that. It’s smaller, true, but I seem to manage.

It is serendipity. I was writing about that period of my life when I would take a series of books up and down stairs. I was 19, newly married, with a small child. We lived in a small house with an outside toilet. Memories of those difficult days rushed back to me. Thoughts pushed aside because they were too painful. Then, a strange thing happened.

I received a WhatsApp message. It is my long lost daughter from England. We had been out of touch for a decade. She has grown with her own family.

We ‘talk’ and ‘talk’ until I am so tired I only read a fraction of my normal reading, but I go to sleep happy that I seem to have gained a daughter. She and I, from different times, share an interest in our family history. She has researched, as have I, and it is interesting to share our different knowledge. I hope this will continue as I want to continue with my English stories now. I have shared so many of my Asian stories, it is time to look back, but not in anger (John Osborne, 1956).