well, hi again.

i don’t know when was the last time i actually wrote here. well, ok fine i do. i literally did not even try writing anything when i was in cambridge. to be honest, i am not sure why looking back. i think it’s a sign that i was actually a lot more detached from myself when i arrived. well, of course it was exciting that i ended up there and to be caught up in the fervour of being officially recognized as a historian.

the first few weeks were rough because i was very lonely. i missed home and the comfort of being with my close friends. i missed my mom the most. i had difficulty connecting with people. even after getting hungover at the many drinking parties organized by my college, i found little connection with anybody and more so, i realized that no one was really interested in connecting with me. so, you can imagine how someone like me bursting with stories and ideas felt like a caged bird at some point. i was also wary about falling back into my comfort zone and potentially old mental patterns. but i thought this might change when i started attending seminars with other fellow historians at the beginning of michaelmas.

but it turns out that i was not a historian in anybody’s eyes. not only did my background of being a local (although british university) graduate in international relations disqualified me from being taken seriously, but my lack of ivy league essence, unsavory accent and passion for southeast asia would render me as a far from a sChOlAr Of WoRlD hIsToRy! my knowledge and understanding of critical theory, passion for its application to transforming historiographies discounted my identity as a properly-trained historian. what more, it was a strange feeling when you’ve been groomed and nurtured to view yourself as a historian, especially since you have done the hard work of uncovering new narratives and underexplored archives. heck, you could even have your undergraduate dissertation published as a book chapter in amsterdam university press but nobody did not see you as a scholar in your right. why is that you may ask? because we were just a bunch of kids doing our masters.

honestly, nothing has been more infantilizing, patronizing and excruciating than the cantab experience. there. i won’t lie. there were many times i had try to fool myself into thinking that this has been extremely rewarding and i would not have gotten the same kind of exposure that i would have if i stayed in malaysia. it turns out that the cambridge experience is a superficial and limited one. haih. it feels good even saying this right now. i am so exhausted of gaslighting myself and denying the institutional trauma and betrayal that i would have to carry as scars on my soul.

it was a rather debilitating intellectual experience because i didn’t actually have the opportunity to critically engage with key historiographical texts in the ways that i expected to. instead, i spent most of my classroom hours on how “this is not what historians do” or “at the end of the day all of us in this room are just bullshit masters right” or “i know everything about the world what about you i bet you don’t” or “well nobody cares about southeast asia so i guess you might as well give yourself an easy one-up in the academic route by studying this” or “students trained in area studies are simply just not as qualified as ba-s in history”. so honestly, what the actual fuck. it is hard to believe that this is where the chris bayly-s, tim harper-s, rachel leow-s, mark frost-s come from.

i know each one of them have told me (except bayly la because i didn’t get the chance to meet this giant) that life as a postgraduate student, a southeast asianist in cambridge can be a rather intellectually and socially isolating one, but nobody warned me that i would also be placing myself in a very vulnerable situation, assaulting myself with a tide of extremities. well, racism is something i could compute. as much as it hurts my feelings it didn’t hurt as much as being treated as a failure because of my illnesses. in some ways i could say that i was doing this to myself but if i did examine more deeply, was it really, really, REALLY just me being too in my head? i don’t think so. besides my health deteriorating to a scale i thought i had long overcome, i had to deal with so much of unnecessary bureaucracies and threats to my position as a disabled student. honestly, it was like a nightmare that had sprinkles of good tidings.

one thing i cannot deny was finding kampung kembrij though. this fornightly reading group on malaysian studies had been the kind of space that i longed and expected in this crazy, peculiar place. meeting malaysians in the humanities and social sciences had been the highlight of my very brief time in cambridge. and in many ways, it has also been the source of inspiration, safety, validation and creativity that i needed to find a sense of belonging in a place i could hardly reach. now that i have made my abrupt return, as i grief through the vagaries of hitting the restart button, confronting chronic pain and reconnecting with my spiritual and intellectual roots, i think a lot about whether i deserved to have attended cambridge, or that i was ever meant to be in cambridge. today, i think i found the answer.

no, cambridge was not meant for me. because i was meant for more. at this point, i only owe it to myself to produce the beautiful, thought-provoking and transformative work that i aspire to. and at the end, it is not where you are that will make you successful, it is what you offer to your environment and how you build meaningful connections in your academic community. i deserved more than i got, and it is okay. i did get something out of this bittersweet experience, learning to hone my inner strength and not trying to compromise for the cambridge mystique. i do what i do best when i stuck true to who i was and cambridge was nothing like me.

rant over. see you soon.