The USA has never really been on my list of countries-to-visit, for several reasons.
Firstly, I have had the absolute honour of having been born in Southeast Asia—a region that offers the best variety of culinary delights one could ask for (and I stand by that). I have had the luxury of spending four years of my life in the UK, with some travels to Europe, and I have seen a lot of the region’s wonderful architecture like the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre-Dame, Arc de Triomphe, and Buckingham Palace. I have also visited Australia and more importantly, New Zealand, which offered me the most beautiful views of nature that I could imagine (Switzerland and Austria come close).
But when I think about the USA…there was no (real) draw for me.
I know that the USA is home to a lot of wonders. The Grand Canyon is there. It’s also home to a lot of giant forests like the Sequoia National Park. The Niagara Falls are also on the USA side, which I shall talk about in my next post.
But apart from that? Little.
I could have all the culinary delights here in Southeast Asia.
I would not choose the USA to view architectural delights.
I would sooner go back to New Zealand to enjoy views of nature, or plan a trip to see more of Switzerland. Or visit Iceland, Norway, or Italy for the first time.
The only reason why I was even going on this trip to the USA was because of Emily. Emily was in the USA, and that was my draw. So even though I had planned to stay there for around seven days (minus travelling days), apart from our plans to drive to the Niagara Falls, I had zero expectations and decided to just enjoy the trip for what it was, and see what I could observe was daily life was like there in Pennsylvania.
And that’s what I did.
Before I go into this post, I should probably give a bit of background about this (strange, I guess?) friendship I have with Emily, and our mutual friends.
If you read my post about my PhD viva, you would recall that at thirteen years old, I had sought for and developed very close online friendships because I was a very socially awkward teenager who found herself enrolled in a school in the United Kingdom, far, far, far away from my homeland in Malaysia. What I didn’t mention in that post was that Emily was not my only lifelong friend I made. I made several more. Two, who had maintained the friendship longest with me (apart from Emily), were Felicia and Meredith. The four of us got to know each other within the span of just several months in an online forum and at one point in time in my teenhood, we spoke to each other every single day. That forum was our little online haven separate from “real life”.
When I told Meredith and Felicia that I was finally making a trip to visit Emily in the USA, they arranged their schedules and decided that they were going to come visit, too. I had met Emily once before when she came to my wedding, but this would be the first time I would be meeting Meredith and Felicia, who also lived in different states from each other.
It would be my first time meeting them after twenty years of friendship. It’s kinda crazy to think about.
I don’t have much to say about the actual flights that got me from Kuala Lumpur, to Doha, to New York. They were LONG. I am kinda-somewhat grateful that I am so accustomed to long travel (thank you 10-hour Eid traffic jams in Malaysia). I hardly slept throughout the 35-hour trip, but that was because I was so high on adrenaline and excitement of meeting my friends.
I kept in touch with hubs, my family, and Emily (and our mutual friends) throughout the trip. Qatar Airways was quite comfortable, and allowed in-flight internet access that made WhatsApp and Discord messaging possible, though I kept my phone mostly on airflight mode to conserve the battery. I spent my time in flight reading books and watching movies, and staring outside (at least from Kuala Lumpur to Doha).
I’d say that the trip from Doha to JFK was the most interesting. It was a 14-hour flight—we took off at 2AM but arrived at JFK at 9AM. I remembered, as I was preparing, how I could not wrap my head around the weird timing. 2AM to 9AM sounds like only seven hours, so how was it a 14-hour flight? Which prayer would I need to pray, and when? It was so bizarre to me, until I was actually on the flight and saw the flight details on Qatar Airways’s screen.
The 14-hour flight was us travelling against the rotation of the Earth. It meant that we were chasing sunrise, and the only prayer I needed to pray was Fajr because the flight was largely during dawn and sunrise as we flew across the many Middle Eastern countries and the North Atlantic Ocean separating Qatar to the USA.
It was beautiful.
As soon as my plane landed at the JFK airport, I sent a message on Discord to my friends saying that my flight had landed safely. I landed at 9AM, and within an hour, I was past customs and security check. To be honest, I was extremely surprised with how efficient the security check was. I was only asked about why I was visiting, for how long I planned to be there, and where I was going to stay. Then they waved me away and I was free to go.
Which almost surprised me, though I had expected that that would be the case.
In my heart, I knew that I would face no issues at customs.
Despite all the horror stories, Reddit is an echo chamber and the internet is a place where you only get to see the worst of the worst. Things that are within the norm would never be reported, while anomalies tend to go absolutely viral. So there is a lot of fear mongering on the internet. A lot of posts about how travellers to the USA are detained, their laptops and mobile phones checked, some even deported back to their home countries. But these are very, very isolated cases, and nobody talks about the tens of thousands of visitors and tourists that make it through security just fine.
Knowing how dramatic Malaysian netizens are, I knew that if any Malaysian had faced any issue at USA security, it would have gone viral a long, long time ago. So I found that my experience spoke a lot about how damaging fear mongering can be. My experience was fine. Absolutely fine. They didn’t ask to check my phone or laptop. When I brought my luggage for customs check, they didn’t even ask me to open the bag. There was a dog that sniffed my bag, and then I was waved away.
I could have just made do with a 3-hour stop.
My stop at JFK was four five hours. I had four hours to kill, and I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. Having landed on USA soil, my first quest was to find coffee and a bagel, and coffee and bagel I found.
Upon consuming this cup of coffee and rather cold and hard bagel, my first thought was…how I missed Malaysia. The coffee made me long for a deep, rich Kenangan Latte. The bagel reminded me that even in the UK, and apparently in the US, no bread or pastry would ever come close to the softness of Malaysian bread and pastries. The bagel at the airport was dry and cold and its pecans were not crunchy. I was disappointed.
As I was eating my bagel, a couple walked over to me. They were probably in their early sixties, suntanned and friendly, looking for conversation.
“Indonesian?” They asked me.
“No, Malaysian,” I said, smiling. The way we Asians wear our headscarves are always a dead giveaway of our Southeast Asian roots.
“We just came back from Indonesia,” the husband said.
And so I had my first (of many) friendly encounter with strangers in the USA. They asked me about my trip, thinking I was a foreign student. I asked them about their trip (they had spent an entire month in Indonesia, what luxury) and by the time I had finished my coffee and bagel and as they left, another hour had passed.
Thankfully, waiting is a very easy activity to do now, with the wonders of the internet. I had a video call with hubs while I waited at the gate for the next and final flight to Pittsburgh.
The flight from JFK to Pittsburgh was only an hour and a half. By the time I disembarked from that last plane, I was giddy, high on adrenaline and sleep deprivation. Emily and Meredith were waiting at the baggage drop area, and I saw Meredith first. It didn’t matter that I had never met her in person before. As soon as we saw each other, I let out a ridiculously high-pitched squeal, ran across the hallway towards her, and gave her the biggest hug ever (we call it a ‘glomp’). People walking past gave us odd looks, but I. did. not. care. I hugged Meredith, and then Emily. Felicia arrived soon after, and my first thought was that she was much taller than I expected (she’s the youngest of the four of us). And then we went on our way.
I will not give a day-by-day rundown of the trip, because this does not have to be a slice-of-life novelisation (it could very well turn into one). But I do want to note some of the things I observed there.
Let’s talk about the places we went to first.
The first one I want to talk about is (of course, how nerdy) the Carnegie Library that we stopped by in Pittsburgh.
The visit to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh was unplanned. We happened to park our car right in front of it to get to the scenic viewpoint across the road that gave us a view of Pittsburgh.
(This was the view)
We ventured into the library for a bathroom break, and as soon as my feet crossed the threshold, I was amazed by how…nostalgic it felt to me. Emily, Felicia and Meredith were all bookworms (otherwise we probably wouldn’t have developed such a nerdy and fast friendship). The library reminded me of my school library back in the UK, which I will write about someday soon. It was a small building, quiet, with the smell of old paper. And it was just so…quaint. So homey. With its wooden beams and wooden shelves, the library made me long for a place that was warm and inviting. Because no matter what library I go to in Malaysia, what greets me is metal shelves and air conditioning that is so cold that any form of reading would freeze my fingers.
I put a silver dot on the map.
There were board games and puzzles and coloring pages. It was just such a warm, welcoming place. For four years of my life, the library was my safe haven, the one place where I could hide out with my books and chess pieces and where school bullies would not bother to find me. No library in Malaysia had ever evoked that feeling in me since I left the UK, until I went to this one. It was like coming home, and I genuinely missed it.
As we walked around Pittsburgh, I also saw some really neat indications of how the reading culture was inculcated there. There was a small bookstore that we went to, for instance, that had this shelf where the bookstore employees would display their handwritten reviews of their recommended books, which was really, really neat.
Needless to say, none of these books were wrapped in plastic. NONE of them, which is a far cry to how Popular, MPH and Kinokuniya in Malaysia treat their books, all wrapped and pristine. That’s the problem with Malaysian bookstores. They’re too pristine. I mean, how are people supposed to flip through and read books if they’re all wrapped up in plastic? It’s an abomination. (Though I do get that books are actually expensive items in Malaysia, but let’s not talk about that).
We also went to this suuuuuuper big Barnes & Noble. I find it offensive that this super big building was a single-storey. The nerd in me demands a double or triple-storey bookstore with all this square feet.
I picked up a super nerdy book there, because of course I did.
All in all, is it any wonder at all that this post centers around books? It is no wonder. Even at Emily’s house, a lot of our conversations centered around the books we had read, were reading, and were planning to read. I was introduced to Emily’s wonderful group of friends and family, and they all loved books. I even received books as gifts from Emily’s dad, and that’s kinda what I love most about this trip.
Isn’t this so nice of him?
If I were to think about my trip to the USA, it was a trip of nostalgia. My life in Malaysia is vastly different to the environment I grew up in back in the UK. In the UK, my life centered around books and writing. I would go to the library almost every single day, I would read until I fall asleep, and my friends (both online and offline) were all book lovers. We would go to the library where it is warm and cozy, not sterile and freezing. We would leaf through yellowed pages that may or may not smell faintly of tobacco (these books I got from Emily’s dad definitely smell like that). And there is just such an appreciation for a reading culture, at least where I had been to, that I miss a lot when I’m in Malaysia.
I started this post saying that I had no real reason of going to the USA, because Malaysia—and many other places—could offer me many things that the USA cannot. But one thing I know I can count on the USA—and even the UK—to offer is its love for books and reading. I hope that never dies down, nor that the culture will never even shift to what it is like in Malaysia. I miss my old Hinde House school library every single day, and when I think about why… now I remember why. I miss the warmth. The conversations. The way books had brought me lifelong friends, and a love of writing. These are things that the UK reminds me of, and what it had given me. And I was blessed to have been dipped back into that world in the USA during my short visit there.