5:45am. My alarm buzzes, I hit snooze. 5:55am and the obnoxious chiming starts again, I hit snooze all over again. At 6:05am, I finally start my day
with my terrible habit of scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, and my email
inbox, to see what happened on the other side of the world while I slept. Not surprisingly, Trump said something offensive, global warming is still an unaddressed
threat, but thankfully, Planned Parenthood is
still fighting for access to affordable health care. I throw off my
sheet and get off my mattress that sits on the floor with no bed frame and is still wrapped in the plastic I bought it in, results of the
horrifying bedbug incident.
My tile floor is cold to the touch. I’ve finally given in
and have begun to use air conditioning at nighttime. It turns out that I am a
slightly happier person if I don’t wake up multiple times each night dripping
in sweat. I wish I had realized this seven and a half months ago when I moved
here, but I felt the need to prove something. Prove what? I don’t know, that I
am tough enough to sleep through the night in 80-degree weather and 90%
humidity? (I’m not, and it shouldn’t matter if I am). And prove it to whom? I
don’t know… My LinkedIn connections? My future employers? Oh that’s right,
literally no one cares that I slept in a self inflicted torture sauna for
nearly eight months. That was dumb.
I put on a bright red baju
kurung, a traditional Malaysian outfit which is a baggy floor
length skirt topped with a long-sleeved top that goes down to my knees, and I tie my hair up in a bun, the only
way I ever wear my hair here because of the heat. It is 6:20am now and I have
class at 7:00am, so I’d better grab some food and walk to school. I hope that
the neighborhood dogs are not out to harass me, because they are
vicious and I despise them and there is a rabies outbreak in my town
and I’d love to avoid that.
I go to open my door. My right hand grasps the knob and
turns and pulls, the way my muscle memory is trained to open doors, but nothing
happens. I am locked inside my own bedroom. I use a credit card and a bobby pin to try to open the door. It doesn’t work; I am still locked in. Maybe
the door is only locked from the inside and my roommate can open it from the
outside for me? I begin to pound on the wall and call for my roommate.
“Josephine! Wake up! I’m locked inside of my room!” It is only 6:30am. If she
doesn’t hate me already, she certainly will after this.
Josephine cannot open the door from her side either, and we
try a few different ideas to open my door. None of them work, so I call our
landlady for help. It is a shameful thing to have to call someone and say you
are locked inside your room, even if it is not your fault at all. You can hear
it in their voice as they question your intelligence. The landlady is busy but
thankfully, she sends over her brother, who arrives in incredible speed on his
motorbike, steering with one hand and carrying his toolbox in the other (or so
I imagine, I couldn’t actually see since I was locked inside my room).
I also call the person I am supposed to co-teach with, to
inform him that I am locked inside my room and probably will be late to class.
He asks, “Are you turning your door knob correctly?” Of course I am! I have
been opening doors since I was a toddler. If I have suddenly forgotten how to
open a door, there is more going on here and I probably shouldn’t come teach
your class. Ever again. But I don’t say that, I just say “Yes” because
sometimes when you are locked inside your bedroom at 6:45am, you don’t feel
like proving your ability to perform a mundane, everyday task.
My landlord’s brother (sadly, I don’t know his name. I will
refer to him as “my hero”) begins to remove my doorknob, but he needs my help
from the other side of the door. Unfortunately, my hero does not speak English.
He only speaks Mandarin. My roommate and I don’t speak Mandarin. Besides
English and my Spanish, we only speak sikit-sikit
Malay and mimit-mimit Iban. Not
so helpful for verbal communication, but by now Josephine and I are damn good at communicating important things to people through the universal
language of Charades. So Josephine and my hero, bless their hearts (as my
grandma Leber would say), begin miming to one another the things I need to do
from the other side of the door to ensure my freedom. Josephine yells
instructions through the door, and I follow dutifully.
The whole exchange is hilarious. I can hear them laughing on
the other side of the door and I imagine how silly they must look – a tall,
middle aged Chinese-Malaysian gentleman and a small, blonde lady who is still in
her pajamas doing exaggerated movements and nodding enthusiastically to one
another when the communication is successful – and I laugh, too.
Everyone is laughing and banging on the doorknob and miming
instructions to try to set me free. Josephine kindly delivers me coffee through
my little bedroom window (which has metal bars over it so no, I couldn't have climbed out) and finally, at about 7:54am, my hero swings open the
door of my bedroom. I say, “Thank you! Terima kasih! Xie Xie!” and run off to school to attend the last 20 minutes of
class, where my students laugh like hyenas at my morning’s misadventure, and my
co-teacher rolls his eyes and raises his eyebrows in disbelief.
Malaysia has thrown me some curveballs. Some of them
infuriating, some of them heartbreaking, many of them in the form of surprise
fish in something that I expected to taste sweet. Luckily, this curveball was just
plain hilarious. For once, the curveball was definitely not my fault (turned
out to be faulty doorknob mechanics, who knew!), it was easy to fix, and it was
super funny example of practicing cross-cultural communication. I have two and a half
months to catch more of Malaysia’s inevitable curveballs. If I’m lucky, they
will stay easy and funny. Or maybe I’m just getting better at catching them…
This blog, "Uprooted", is not an official Fulbright Program site. The views expressed on this site are entirely those of its author and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.
