How to adapt to the expat challenges of everyday life in Malaysia

Although I no longer live in Malaysia, I did live there for 12 years.

As far as challenges are concerned, there were no really bog ones, since Malaysia is pretty westernized and people in the cities nearly all speak good English. Also procedures as far as visas, opening bank accounts, buying a car, healthcare are all quite straightforward.

Aspects of daily life that were challenging - nothing really. I suppose that we were always very conscious about have our car stolen and we were especially conscious about the risk of our kids being abducted, since we often read about such cases in the local newspapers, that means kids being trafficked to places like Thailand or sold off for organs. We were especially careful about the kids and our car.

Well Malaysia is generally a very friendly place and the people so nice. However, I remember driving into the car park in Pavilion Mall in Bukit Bintang. We were driving around looking for a place to park when suddenly a group of high school Malay boys in their school uniform shouted F*** You Mat Salleh! I remember stopping the car and opening my door and those four boys ran off as fast they could into the mall. I thought that was really funny.

Another thing I always found quite funny was going into Parkson Grand department stores. For some strange reason there were always a lot of gay sale assistants working there and they'd always give me the eye, so whenever I wanted to buy something I'd always look for a female sales assistant. It was such a creepy feeling in that place.

On another occasion, I was waiting outside KLCC shopping mall waiting for a taxi but there were not many, so I went down to the roadside and asked one of the taxi drivers if he'd take me to my home in Bukit Bintang, He just said RM50 and I asked him if he could do it for RM20. He then immediately got out with some kind of extending stick, a bit like those old car aerials, and started to chase me to hit me. I remember quickly moving up to the crowd outside the mall and I stood behind a security guard. But the security guard did nothing and just moved out of the way. The taxi driver was a big Indian. Anyway, the Malay woman suddenly came forward and yelled at the driver that she was a policewoman (she was actually a translator for the police). She chased the driver off and as he tried to drive away she ripped of part of his rear number plate. After that she took me to a hospital to get a doctors report. The next day I went to KLCC and spoke with management to complain about the guard doing nothing to help me. The building manager proceeded to show me the control room where with monitors of all the CCTV cameras.

On another occasion, my wife took a taxi in the taxi queue outside Mid Valley Megamall. The driver was another big Indian guy. What happened was that the driver didn't see me get in and thought he was just picking up a young woman. Then as the taxi pulled away out onto the main road I spoke to my wife and the driver suddenly realised she wasn't alone. He immediately pulled the taxi over and said we had to get out because he didn't have enough petrol. We could only imagine what he was planning to do.

These kinds of things happened before Grab became popular in Kuala Lumpur and we and I think everyone knew that there were many bad taxi drivers around, some were like gangsters too. that was back in 2003 - 2008. In 2008 I got married and bought a car which was a big relief because we hated taking taxis in those days.

And in 2003 when I first moved to Malaysia I stayed in an apartment in Bukit Bintang. It was a nice one bed-room place, about 700 sq ft. Since I was retired, I was often travelling around the Asia region. So one day I came back from an overseas trip and found that my apartment had been broken into. The thieves stole clothes, a video camera and my Mini DV tapes of my children in France, and stuff like that. I also had a stamp collection with about 200 penny reds and lots of mint sets of Malaysian and Singaporean stamps I'd bought on ebay. The collection was valuable to me as I'd spent quite a bit of money on it. It was something I planned to pass on to one of my kids. Well they stole that too which really pissed me off. My landlord was very sympathetic and installed a second grill door to my unit.

I really enjoyed living in Malaysia in the beginning, but finally didn't feel that Malaysia was a particularly safe place to live.

Wyngrove,

Im thinking about your safety comment. In my 24 years I never once felt unsafe. Wait, thats not true. ONCE, I was riding my motorcycle through kampungs in the northeast region, people would stop what they were doing to stare at me sourly and harshly. Since I was a long way from any city, anything could happen among dense trees and I was scared. But no other time.

However.......i think about this often and it may seem an odd comment to people, but if there was something to feel unsafe about its ongoing racial tension. I have always felt riots or fights could break out at any moment and sometimes they did. Once, I was in a neighborhood market and a chinese lorry driver parked in front to unload goods. An indian who was leaving the market was blocked by the lorry and words exchanged. This escalated into a fight that went into the market, with the men throwing items at each other, cursing, screaming and people getting hit. When you talk to races individually, the tension they feel towards each other is palpable and heavy. Malaysians are a very peaceful lot -- until they arent -- and it can spill onto anyone.

Ok, on all the questions there is a common denominator. In my experience anyway, any difficulties basically come from the expat not wanting to invest time and energy to understand the mind of the malaysian. He or she expects the local to put that energy into the expat and while they often will, its the very slowest way to blend in and get along. Hence, the expat feels like an outcast or lonesome so they tend to hang around other expats because its easier. But this isnt the way to solve anything.

Its possible to spend decades in Asia and still not understand it but expats create most of their own limitations by their behavior. The better way is to sit down with locals, listen more than you talk, ask more questions than making statements, and soon the list above starts to fade away.

While I might not succeed in all my projects, im able to chat, make jokes and talk seriously on the locals' terms, whether its a cop, govt person, business person or a random person in a coffee shop and thats the way to progress and happiness in this place. Ive solved so many problems by first getting a basic knowledge of how the local thinks. It made all the difference.

There is an analogy to this which I tend to remember. Its said that when you have a house cat, and the cat is on the floor and you are standing over it, it behaves a certain way; when you lay down on the floor to be next to the cat at its own level, it behaves differently. There you go.

I understand your point of view. I've lived most of my life out of the UK and mostly in Asia.

I remember when I lived in Singapore it felt very safe at all times. Same when I lived in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Malaysia is the only country where we have had to be extra cautious. I'm sure back around 2008 onwards you read about a very young girl being kidnapped and raped and being dumped in a sports bag in KL, and the woman who was abducted in the car park beneath Bangsar Shopping Centre and found stabbed and dead in a roadside ditch out of town, and the school kid that was kidnapped outside Mont Kiara International School but later found unhurt on a roadside out of town. All of these and many other similar stories were always in the news. Then there was that horrific paedophile who worked in a school in KL, was he British? I think there was a documentary made about him.

Since we moved to Indonesia we feel a lot safer, but of course with kids we still have to be careful. Children are abducted here too, sometimes from shopping malls. I remember my wife telling me once that while she was in a mall with our kids, a woman took my sons hand and started walking away with him. My wife suddenly noticed and confronted the woman and she said she thought it was her own son. There was a boy nearby which was apparently her son or possibly an accomplice. And in Indonesia, if you get into a car accident with someone on a motorbike, then it is your fault even if it is them at fault, and you could be beaten up by all the other motorcyclists if you are not careful.

I am sure lots of places in Asia are quite dangerous, and I'd be worried these days to even send my kids to school in the UK with so many stabbings happening.

Yes Malaysians are really nice people, friendly, and I have or had so many friends when I lived there, Indian, Malay and Chinese and just one expat friend who was married to a Malay. I rarely hang out with expats in my 40+ years in Asia because they are often right dicks. But I still started to feel unsafe. Here in Indonesia I feel safer, but maybe that's because people tend to not bother foreigners so much or maybe because we fit in to the local community better here. However, there is always the potential for things to get bad here.

Wyngrove,

Maybe I would be more afraid or cautious if I had kids. That does make a difference and the world is becoming crazier all the time.

There is a law in physics about attraction in which two dissimilar objects can attract each other when one if putting out attractive energy. In other words, if a person is constantly afraid, thats being picked up as attractive by a robber or killer. Even if you are afraid of a dog, the dog picks up the fear and may well bite you. The best way to deal with a strange dog is to relax and not allow the dog to sense your fear which they can smell. Thats how I got along throughout Asia and perhaps why I never once actually had a problem.

Still, things can happen anyway. A tactic I have used is to disarm someone you are afraid of by filibustering. In other words, you change the subject. "Excuse me, which way is the police station?" Anything you ask throws the situation off-balance, enough time to get out of there. Once, I was walking trails in a KL park with a friend. As we passed by a group of teens, one of them called out, "Hey, whats your hurry?" Laughably, I saw a malay movie in which those very words preceded rape, robbery and murder. Without hesitation, we indeed hurried away and into a group of tourists. Stay aware, even in the best circumstances.

As to news of rapes and murders, so few are random. Most are situations where the parties knew each other. Could be a family dispute, business dispute, love triangle, jealously, revenge, retaliation. They dont involve me or the general public and so such news doesnt make me feel unsafe.

Hey CVCO, well I didn't actually go around scared shitless while I lived in KL. I had a great lifestyle, wasn't working while I lived there and just enjoyed my life. However, those are real incidents that happened while I lived there and there were plenty more that I have not mentioned.

But more importantly, I am just answering Cheryl's questions.

Each of us has different experiences and those are some of my own with my own feelings about Malaysia. Even though I am a Brit and lived here permanently from 2003 to 2015, my own history with Malaysia is quite long and goes back to 1980 when people like Najib's brother and the late Noor Farida Arrifin were family friends, and since then when I lived in Singapore in the early to mid 80s I'd keep in contact with them and often stay with them when I visited KL. My father who was a history teacher in the 1950's at Victoria School in Singapore and who played for Singapore Cricket club often played cricket in KL against Malayan teams.

Anyway, how about yourself? My experiences are my own. How about yours? You are originally from Greece? Which part? I visited Santorini a few years ago, and back in the late 80's met with Hellenic Steel in Athens to purchase steel plant equipment from them for reselling to China. We, my wife and I, really like the country.

In business the whole giving "face" can be an issue,  as well as rampant corruption- at least in Banks that are riddled with corruption in Malaysia.

My ex wife even had death threats at work as she trampled on a  few corrupt toes!

Face is hard, it creates massive inefficiencies as the "higher" rated person gets to decide regardless of ability or talking twaddle such as a certain IT director I came across at a large Malaysian company who didn't know how to use a mouse.

The funniest thing I ever had to sit through was a training session talking nonsense about lizard brains.... all the other traders said privately how bad it was but they couldn't say out loud. The young "consultant" was connected.

And I once found out my main job at a large investment bank in Malaysia was simple. Find out for the CFO was getting his "cut" in bribes.... lol

Malaysia Boleh!