Every blog written by somebody living abroad has the same problem. They have already decided. They moved, it worked out, and now everything they write is quietly arguing that you should do it too.
I am going to try not to do that.
I moved to Kuala Lumpur having not left Britain for twenty-two years, without ever having visited. It has been, on balance, the best thing I have done. But there are people it would be wrong for, and nobody ever seems willing to say so, presumably because it makes for a worse advert.
You probably should not come if you drink like a British person
I want to start here because it is the one that catches people out and nobody mentions it.
Malaysia is astonishingly cheap. Alcohol is not. A bottle of gin that costs a fiver on offer at home is closer to twenty-five quid here. A pint is around RM35. Everything else in your life gets cheaper and this one thing gets five times more expensive.
If a few drinks is just what an evening is for you, that habit will follow you here and it will eat the savings you came for. You will be sat working out why you are not better off, and it will be that.
You probably should not come if you need the seasons
Some people are more attached to weather than they realise.
Here you get roughly twelve hours of light and twelve of dark, every day, all year. No long summer evening. No dark afternoon in November. No first warm day in March that makes everyone slightly mad with joy.
It is warm and green and pleasant and it is the same. If a lot of your sense of a year is built on the light changing, be honest with yourself about what removing that does.
You probably should not come if you cannot cook without an oven
This sounds trivial. It is not.
Malaysian kitchens frequently do not have an oven. Not a small oven. No oven. When we were flat-hunting we ended up choosing between a place with an oven and a place with a spare bedroom, and we picked the oven, which tells you how much it mattered to us.
There is no Sunday roast here. There is no roast potato. If those are load-bearing parts of your week, that is a real loss, and no amount of very good nasi lemak replaces them.
You probably should not come if you are running away
Here is the honest one.
The first few months are a holiday. Everything is new, the food is extraordinary, the money goes further, and the sheer novelty carries you.
Somewhere around eighteen months, it stops being an experience and becomes your life. The novelty runs out. You are just a person, living somewhere, with the same head you had before.
Whatever you were unhappy about will still be there. It will just be there in a warmer place with better food. Moving abroad is not a personality transplant and it is not therapy. It is a change of scenery, and a change of scenery is worth an enormous amount, but it is not worth that.
So who should come?
People who like being a beginner.
That is genuinely the whole thing. You will be incompetent for a while. You will get the wrong terminal, order the wrong dish, misread a queue, stand in the rain because you did not understand how quickly it arrives. Some people find that humiliating. Some people find it the most alive they have felt in years.
I am the second sort. I had not been a beginner at anything for twenty-two years and I had forgotten what it did for me.
Come if:
- You are genuinely curious about food. Not “I like a curry.” Curious. This is one of the great eating countries on earth and it will reward you daily.
- You can be comfortable being the only one who does not know. Every day, for about a year.
- Warm suits you. Some people bloom in heat and some wilt. My wife and I stood in the same air on day three and reached completely opposite conclusions. You will not know which you are until you are in it.
- You want your money to buy time rather than things. The real luxury here is not the pool. It is that a normal budget covers a good life without you working yourself into the ground for it.
The thing I would say to myself, a year before
Do not come to escape. Come to be interested.
If you are coming because your life at home is intolerable, fix that first, because it will be on the plane with you. If you are coming because you want to be somewhere that surprises you every day for a couple of years, then go, and stop reading blogs about it.
You will get the terminal wrong. Everybody does. It is fine.
