escape to sala besar
a practical consideration of the line between travel and running away
Welcome to the Friday Long Letter! Every two weeks-ish, I write a longer post about “a topic”, versus the shorter Monday Five Things essays. Thanks for spending time here, and if you know of a friend, comrade, bitter rival or common acquaintance who might enjoy it, please consider sharing this with them.
If you’ve found your way here by a doorway in a wardrobe or magical happenstance, please consider subscribing to receive more of the good stuff.
There is a version of this essay that has all kinds of personal details about my life — a name, a date, an inciting incident, an almost-call to emergency services. In the short decade I have spent writing about my life and its various fictitious permutations, I’ve thought over and over again about what details meant to the value of a story. I don’t have any answers to these thoughts, but I think there is still value to the writing itself.
There was a (long) moment in 2023 when the only things I could write were sprawling epistles to friends and loved ones, or the mundane (sometimes interesting) boilerplate for work. I’ve been trawling through them recently, hunting for pieces of where the last year went.
So much of that time was spent abroad, and I’ve been thinking about whether that was “travel” or “escape.” The line between them is blurred. I’m still picking my way through.
Some time the week before [redacted], Kate came home.
By then, it’d been years since we’d last seen each other in person, and so we talked about going to Penang to eat, walk around and breathe in the much-missed humidity — and then the plans changed and she and George were suddenly (randomly?) going sea-fishing. She asked if I wanted to come.
Something curious happens to my biology when plans change: my chest constricts, and my nervous system leaps with panic — a physical manifestation of the feeling of control slipping. This is how everything falls apart.
I nearly said no to the fishing trip, firstly because that’s an activity I largely associate with middle-aged-to-retired men or uncle-like young men. What the hell did I know about how to catch fish? And, more to the point, why would I spend hours on a boat with no way off? But then, the alternative was staying in KL, where I was getting the usual three-month itch to leave, and there was also [redacted]. The inescapable wanting and the claustrophobia of this city of five million people — it’s always felt overwhelming.
So I said yes to Penang.
In the end, we ended up on the road to Kedah.
I don’t know how it started but travel has become a practice of escape for me.
In 2014, I went to Florence for the first time — my first trip to Europe as an “adult” — and it happened largely because I was trying to run away from the bad-and-worsening feelings I was accumulating as a result of homesickness, interacting too much with English people, and loneliness. I’d decided to fall out with a friend from home because I’d felt she’d abandoned me in big and faceless London — a culmination, really, of all the things that were not right about our friendship — and was hungry for something outside of the routine.
Winter had left me sadder than I knew what to do with.
Someone I knew from church mentioned going on a trip to Florence with other friends, and I asked if I could come. If I could leave London, maybe I could carry the mistakes I had made with me in a suitcase and leave them unattended in an airport. If I could just get away from these people, this cold, maybe things would get better. Maybe then I could breathe.
When my friend’s friends said yes, I felt the tight coil inside loosen.
That trip I walked through chilly, shadowed streets in the direction of Ponte Vecchio. One of the other guys had taken charge of deciding on our dining options, for which I was grateful — the only thing I wanted to see was the Duomo and the painting of Dante’s La Divina Comedia in Santa Maria del Fiore.
When we broke past the buildings, our small group burst into the sunlight glinting off the Arno and the busy thoroughfare of the riverside. Spring had finally come, and I felt free.
The night we were left for Kedah, I went to a yin class with Zane, after which we ate tacos on a Bangsar sidestreet. I told him [redacted] and he replied [redacted]. Maybe, I theorised, being away would let me focus on something else instead of [redacted]. My mind has always had a tendency to hook claws into all my anxieties at the same time, a persistent talent for worrying at some thing over and over until I start skipping meals, rotting in bed.
Yoga and climbing, for a while, became another way to escape my own brain. Better the aching body than an incessant worry about phone calls and text messages and IG stories.
Zane dropped me off at Kate’s hotel, where we napped — or at least tried to — until her dad arrived at 2.00am in a giant Hilux, an old gassy beast packed with gear and a large cooler box. I thought you might appreciate that I think I would easily fit inside — my body, in pieces, surrounded by clouds of ice.
At this time of night, KL is dead quiet and the roads belong to speed junkies and nightowls. As we turned off onto the highway, the dark night went grey and a cold mist rose all around us. The curved spine of the north-south highway lit with halogen lights that glowed eerily in the vapour.
I drifted in and out of sleep. The old Hilux’s suspension probably gave up some time in the last decade, making for a bumpy ride. My head kept smacking against the plastic interior. Next to me, George jerked awake every so often as the fishing rods bifurcating the backseat stabbed him in the cheek. Once I woke to a quiet conversation between Kate and her dad, but I only half-understood what they were talking about. I plugged my headphones in and fell asleep listening to Billy singing about lovers and souped-up cars and better endings. I dreamt of a bike ride up a winding, fogged road to somewhere else.
I kept travelling. Kept running.
Christmas 2014. I scrimped and saved for months to fly out to New Jersey to spend Christmas with my ex, his mom, and his sister. We took buses to New York and drank hot chocolate in the cold, and he held me as I let the pain of the past six months ebb away. My first snow, falling in heavy drifts. Back in London, El Niño kept the weather wet and warm.
In the spring of 2015, I was single and went to Paris by myself, my bravest attempt at independence. I paid for the trip with the money I’d saved from tutoring kids in a Battersea comprehensive and temping at a startup on Old Street. I didn’t like Paris that first time, and accidentally ended up skipping out a bill. Rain poured as I drifted down the Seine on a night-time boat tour. The Musee d’Orsay was amazing, but the best time was spent staring at Monet’s water lilies.
Christmas 2015. I ran home.
Reeling from exams and bad friendships, Nicky, Sunita and I escaped to Berlin in 2016, and it was the most beautiful time of my life. After graduation, home felt like a balm and a pair of shackles.
After that were the years of being broke, and unable to run, I spent much of it drinking and being reckless, all the way across the city. Which, if you think about it, is basically the same thing.
In 2019, in the wake of true heartbreak, Weng helped me run to Ho Chi Minh City before I depleted my savings running back to the delusional comforts of London. I came back knowing I could never live there, but it was nice to visit.
Sometime around 6.00am, we got to Sala Besar, a district in the Yan region of Kedah. Drive half an hour north and you’ll find yourself in Alor Setar. Another hour, and you could get on a ferry to Langkawi.
Above, the midnight sky was going navy as the sun rose somewhere I couldn’t pinpoint. We pulled into a large car park where we’d hoped to find breakfast, but the only other people awake were a handful of gerai operators setting up for their day, and the sellers in the morning market. The stink of fish and dried sundries and soil-crusted vegetables rose up in the air, and taking deep inhales makes your brain buzz alive with stimulation. Petai in large coils, small combs of rastali bananas, days-old kangkung.
In a far corner of the lot, a couple peeled apart their van like it was a steamer trunk, hooked up to gas generator-powered neon fluorescents. We got close and saw mountains of gold-wrapped joss sticks, some illegal firecrackers and new year decorations. A shining neon compass spun like a ferris wheel in the dark.
7.00am. Kate, George and I stood awkwardly to one side, half-asleep. Her dad wandered between the market stalls across tiled floors wet with water, mud and fish effluvia. His contact, Cikgu, was late. We crowd back into the car to catch a few more winks.
7.30am. Cikgu finally arrives with a broad smile that makes his balding head stand out. He takes us to a small gerai near the docks where George — pale and extremely English — turns every head. Breakfast is chicken and rice, and this will later turn out to be a mistake, but the boats have an ingenious solution for stomach aches at sea.
8.00am. We take our last toilet break at a nearby masjid where Kate and I wonder if we’ll get kicked out for being dressed in shorts. When I emerge from the toilet stall, a sea of small school children has flooded into the compound, their tiny bodies dressed in white and green. They stare at us as we go.
8.30am, and we were on a boat, drifting out along the narrow inlets of Sala Besar. I don’t think of Kedah as a fishing state — that’s more Terengganu territory, where Chang Fee Ming has spent years painting the bright batiks, sands and sounds of the east peninsular. And yet here, on the coastline along the Andaman Sea, boats in party colours line both sides of the waterway, three vessels deep. Yellows, blues, greens, a flash of purple or pink. Huge crowns of fist-sized fog lights designed for night-fishing or wrestling with a darkening storm adorn the boats’ hulls and shelters.
Fishermen watched us go; curious or suspicious, it’s hard to tell, but maybe (probably) both. After all, we’re a group of three Chinese people and a white man; our boatman and guide, Chik, is the only Malay face. Likely, they knew we were tourists, though how many of us they get in these parts I’m unclear on. Our boat reached the lip of the river and slipped out into open sea.
In the US in 2022, I found myself chasing water. On a boat in Boston harbour, watching a catamaran full of young men with wind-tousled hair, wind in my ears. The humid swamp of New York’s Central Park, and a slow ferry promenading past Jane’s Carousel. In DC, I dipped my hands in the waters of the reflecting pool, seeking relief from the heat, worried someone was going to yell at me. I think of water and you rise to the front of my mind like a dream.
As we left Sala Besar behind and headed into the embrace of the ocean, the sun spread quietly across the horizon, draping light across the waves. As the boat sped towards the edge of the world, Kate and I sat on a cooler box at the prow of the ship, salt and wind whipping through our hair. This is the first time we’ve been together since 2019, and it felt like slipping back into the familiar comforts of a warm bath. We talked a bit about what had changed in our lives, about her cat Bertie, work disappointments and the joys of ageing. I talked about growing older, and the uncatchable wisdom they say comes with it.
Towards the back of the boat, George helped Kate’s dad and Chik finagle rods and reels and lines and bait.
We got the first spot after about 40 minutes. We could have been anywhere, really, if not for the tall lengths of white-painted wood, hung with dried palm fronds, that protruded out of the water. They looked like god-sized quills dropped into ocean ink, waiting for someone to pick one up and begin writing. Kate’s dad told us these were where fishermen had set up artificial reefs that teemed with fish. Chik, the guide, dropped anchor as the boat bobbed in the waves.
I wish you could have seen the water: it looked like velvet, slipping against sunlight and current.
I did so much escaping in 2023.
First to Melbourne, a deep sea dive to a place where we could hide in the anonymity of tourists.
Then London, which is funny because I had spent so long running from the memories of this place. I associate London with depression. With bad, bad, bad decisions. With late nights wrestling with essays I can’t even find now. But Sunita is in London, and so is Nicky and Krish and Amar and Kit — and now Kate and George and Lily and Tippi and on and on and on. II ran there hoping for relief. And for the first time in a long time, I wondered if escape to London was possible.
When I came home, my big sister and I escaped to Cambodia and Thailand, then Vietnam and New Zealand. She is an old hand at this flavour of flight, but is now turning over the thought of finally coming home.
We left Aotearoa New Zealand in the quiet hours of the morning some time in early October.
I always get this jittery feeling just before I go home — like I’m turning tail, gone cowardly. Foregoing the freedom of disappearance for the familiarity and comfort of a place I know well. James, our guide in Aotearoa, told me about the summers he spent by lakes and mountain sides and the infinite joy of the potential of what might/could/would come. It all sounded wonderful, but also like a young man’s game. I kept thinking about home. Maybe it’s being a Taurus, maybe it’s turning 30. Maybe it’s like what my ex once said about KL: you have to leave regularly to be able to live there, to remember why you love it.
We left Sala Besar extremely sunburned, but happy.
If growing up is a process of learning yourself, then I learned that I really loved fishing, especially when someone else was doing the hard work of laying the bait, driving the boat, and finding the fish. I took that love with me to Franz Josef, where I fantasised about disappearing into a life where the most important things were morning fog on the lake and a small cabin with a large dog named Pluto.
As we wound our way to Penang, exhaustion pulling on our bones and nerves, I was already thinking about home.
Much love,
Sam.