AS I entered the classroom – the kind I had only seen on television up till then – the teacher, Mrs Zulpo, introduced me to the varied, foreign faces turned my way. “This is Azmyl, let’s welcome him! He’s from Malaysia.”

The smell and layout of the room was disorientating. “Is this really school?” I wondered to myself.

Mrs Zulpo then pulled a big map of the world from the top frame of the blackboard. “Can you show us where Malaysia is on the map?” she asked. I scanned the southeast and pointed to the familiar peninsula whose illustration I had encountered in my favourite subject back home, Geografi.

A voice piped up: “Is Malaysia like a village, man?” The question came from, funnily enough, an Asian-American boy, whose name I later learnt was Oscar.

I remember vividly my first day of fifth grade (equivalent to year five in Malaysia) in a county northwest of San Francisco, California. It was a mix of excitement and fear; excitement because I was in the country where The A-Team and Transformers (the cartoon TV series, not the monstrosity by Michael Bay decades later) came from, and fear because I was in a new school in a new place and had to make new friends.

The school didn’t look like those in Malaysia, whether public or private. Single-storey buildings were spread across the compound, and you were out in the open air once you stepped out of class. My classroom had dark, tinted windows facing a gravel field where everyone played and hung out during recess.

The first friend I made was Andre, a tall African American with a pretty girlfriend (I couldn’t figure out her ethnicity) in the same class. “Andre, can you show Azmyl around during recess later?” said Mrs Zulpo, to which he replied: “Yes, ma’am, sure thing!”

After my brief introduction, I was shown to my seat (the tables were in clusters of four, with us pupils facing each other – an alien thing to me, being used to Malaysian classrooms where everyone faced the same direction) and class proceeded as, what I assumed to be, normal.

It was a cool, sunny spring day when Andre showed me around. “That’s the principal’s office over there. Be careful, don’t run around here. If he catches you running, you’ll get punished.” I did run around later in the semester and was punished by the principal, a friendly, soft-spoken, bespectacled, middle-aged Caucasian man.

The punishment? He made me and a friend stand at the exact spot where he caught us until recess was over. “You call that punishment?” I snickered to myself. Punishment in school in Malaysia involved long wooden rulers, feather dusters with a rattan handle, and a teacher calling us “mangkuk”! I could get used to this.

On my second day, Mrs Zulpo accompanied me to a remedial English class while my American peers had their regular English lessons. Presumably it was because I was a foreigner, and perhaps, my command of the language was inferior. Maybe, it was also an exercise in assimilation through segregation (a curious thing).

She opened the door to a smaller class, who collectively greeted me with a “Hello!”. This was a class for kids with foreign passports and visas – Japanese, Korean, Middle Eastern and Latin American, among others – and was kind of like Pendidikan Moral/Pendidikan Agama classes back home. Here, I developed a crush on a Jewish girl who was friendly to me, and I looked forward to the class every week. The cool of spring and the indoor heaters made her cheeks rosy, more so when she blushed.

My family’s six-month sojourn in the west coast of the US in 1988 was to fulfil my parents’ academic sabbatical. In our first few weeks there, we lived in a motel in Berkeley that had a Taco Bell nearby – remarkable to young me, who had never seen a taco or a Mexican in real life before. In fact, we were often mistaken for Mexicans because of our similar complexion and height, which I found amusing.

As an 11-year-old already fed a steady diet of American TV shows and Hollywood films, motels had a dingy reputation in my mind, and I often caught myself looking behind me each time we went out. My brother was just 3, and I felt protective of him.

I came to realise early on that identity, be it personal or national, becomes more pronounced when one is in an unfamiliar place abroad with other competing actors; my remedial class was a mini United Nations, and I felt strangely proud to be “representing” Malaysia and made sure I was heard. The American pupils, though predominantly Caucasian, were also quite racially diverse (Oscar being one of them).

It wasn’t the America I had seen on TV, and I’m sure this holds true for any country in the world. What we get in the mass media (even in this noisy digital age) is what the powerful want us to consume, and for their own interests, not necessarily the people’s. Ironically, I suspect that the US we’re seeing in the news now may be more authentic than how Americans see themselves in their own media – international news was (and probably still is) not a big thing there. – August 7, 2020.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.