Like Long Lost Siblings

Southeast Asia covers the gamut of life’s possibilities and is rich beyond its wildest dreams for it.

by Cat Bugayong

The first time Southeast Asia became less of a concept and more of a reality for me was the summer of 2008. Despite splitting my childhood between the Philippines and the United States, the summer of 2008 was the first time I traveled to a country I wasn’t tied to by family or by history.

I went to Malaysia and it was different from anything I’d experienced before. Where the Philippines was Hispanic, Catholic, and just a little American, Malaysia was Islamic and British in its colonial leanings. Filipinos drank coffee; Malays drank teh tarik. We looked the same, we shared a few words, but we couldn’t be more different. And yet I felt such kinship, like meeting long lost siblings for the first time. This could’ve been me, I thought, just a few miles and a few centuries of difference apart.

Seven years later, in 2015, I went back to Malaysia. I visited other Southeast Asian countries for the first time too: Buddhist, tonal-language-speaking Vietnam with their fresh, delicious noodles; the ancient, crumbling temples of Angkor Wat in stricken Cambodia; quiet, unassuming Laos, the land (so it seemed to me) of the lotus eaters; busy, commercial Thailand; shy, smiling Myanmar in awe of its rare, foreign visitors; Malaysia and Singapore stalwart and seemingly unchanged from my last visit. (I didn’t make it to Indonesia, sadly.)

That feeling of long lost siblings, however, was still there. In my bones, I knew these were my people. Only my people could come up with such a variety of religions, colors, languages, writing systems, food, even economic levels– a dizzying array of ways people could be and, in fact, were. Southeast Asia covers the gamut of life’s possibilities and is rich beyond its wildest dreams for it. And beneath this façade of differences, a kinship.

This could’ve been me, I thought, just a few miles and a few centuries of difference apart.