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For twenty-four years I was a Hong Kong Belonger. It is a rather inelegant description of any ex-pat who managed to stay in Hong Kong longer than two or three years. I was much happier to call myself that than “ex-pat”. That term suggested one never really left one’s own country and was not willing to adjust to the culture of a new home. Either way I was always a “gweilo” - white ghost - to any Chinese who didn't know me.
 
I was quite pleased when an immigration official called me an “immigrant”, though back in Blighty such a term seems be taken as synonymous with someone wet and bedraggled climbing out of a dingy in the middle of the night. Thirty years ago a Chinese actress friend of mine was always complaining the UK cast her as some pigeon speaking boat person who never looked anyone in the eye! If anyone knows Cantonese women, trust me, they will look you right in the eye and tell you what they think.
 

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Similarly,”Refugee” seems to exclude a mobile phone and a pocket full of credit cards, and yet if there is a dodgy turn of government, your shifting money to an offshore account and grabbing a flight before the airport closes, can make you a refugee just as much as anyone running from a burning hut in a jungle. A large portion of Hong Kong’s population were refugees of all kinds and they taught me a lot about how to make it work for you. For that matter the colonial government also made it work for them. Hence the economic miracle of the seventies. Never underestimate the energy of refugees.
 
You could make it more romantic, or at least less needy, and call yourself an exile, with implications of self-importance and dissidence, but unless you are forming a government in exile, I would avoid the term. Of course, James Joyce announced in “Portrait of an Artist” that he was exiling himself. Which, as an artist of some kind, appealed to me when I first took flight to Hong Kong. I had a sense then that I was going to return to the UK but it did not take me long before I thought better of the idea. I decided to integrate as much as possible because it was much more fun. Hong Kong does that to you, or at least it does it for some of us. This made me FILTH - Failed in London Trying Hong Kong - according to expat bankers on three years overseas packages.
 
Expats melt away, ever replaceable, but energetic Belongers could end up with two-page spreads about them in Chinese papers and the government sending them off with Chinese actors and producers to international film festivals. The Belonger could even be pictured on red carpets with glamorous associates and frequently crop up on radio shows promoting books, films, whatever. Some high profile Belongers have even been known to be handed Chinese passports!
 
The Hong Kong I came to understand was completely misread by the UK. To truly understand what was going on one did better studying the Boxer movement and the Tai Ping rebellion rather than thinking in terms of struggles for democracy and free speech. After 1997 the City State was morphing into, as was warned, “just another Chinese city’ and it became apparent that local politics was not a fight that welcomed “gweilo” participation, despite my smattering of hard acquired Cantonese that could run into a convincing flow when drunk and talking to a cab driver. I was turning into a “Laowaii”, the mainland’s variant.

 
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In the end the youth of Hong Kong’s burgeoning confrontation with Beijing made putting one’s money into a property there somewhat problematic. My Chinese friends were hedging their bets acquiring overseas visas and property. So I turned my attention to my other spiritual home, Singapore. I had often visited and worked there, and like Jacky Chan, I even had a Singaporean apartment which I assumed I would be able to move into when it was needed.
 
I would fit right into Singapore. English was spoken much more than Hong Kong, and Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, was honoured, if only ironically. Erecting beside him a rather buff Super Heroish statue of Sang Nila Utama, the man who founded the 14th Century city of Singapura, was however indicative of changing times. Singapore was extending their foundation myth to embrace a local origin rather than a purely colonial one. And despite Sang Nila Utama’s mythical origins being a bit of a positive spin on the Sumatran’s murderous acquisition of what was called Temasek, it meant the Singapore Government wanted everyone to know that Singapore sort of existed before the British came. So they changed their visa requirements and my owning property gave me no special privileges. I was, after all merely an “Ang Mo”, which means Red Haired, despite my very not red hair. It was reminiscent of the Hong Kong New Territories warning cry of “Hung Sou Ngaan Sik!” – Red Beard, Green Eyes. Apparently, it was a warning of approaching Scottish troops during the Opium Wars. History cuts in all sorts of directions.

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I still had my hopes though, because I felt that I belonged there. I was honoured rather than alienated by my drinking friends lapsing into Singlish. It felt like acceptance but the government saw me as too old and somewhat freelance, despite writing two drama series for Singapore TV. Or perhaps because of writing them. Singapore TV drama is not noted for high production values.
 
Anyway, I settled in Johor Bahru, just across the Malaysian border, which any Singaporean would tell you is a dangerous crime ridden third world backwater populated only by rogues that Singapore wanted nothing to do with. That opinion might have been true circa 1960s when it was where Singaporeans snuck off to indulge in gambling and prostitution, but nowadays, by virtue of cheap studio space and Singapore’s ambiguity about those involved in the creative arts, it has become a ramshackle lively place with a lot of energetic people making it up as they go along. Singapore on the other hand, has its Casino and Geylang, supposedly where people go for authentic cuisine rather than the other tastes it caters for. If you have never heard of the place, essentially it is where Singapore’s conscript teenage army loses its virginity.

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Thus, I became a Malaysian immigrant and entered into the spirit of Johor Bahru. At first glance JB is a rough steaming pot hole challenged place but there are pop up experimental restaurants advertised by word of mouth. They happen in the back gardens of random houses, hidden up bumpy jungle driveways. There are also mystery cinemas showing arthouse movies on a sheet hanging from a washing line, with a selection of bean bags, upturned crates, and old armchairs, to sit on with some home brewed beer and popcorn. Lion dancers, drum circles, painting and sketching groups, student fashion shows, and talks by journalists and cameramen in living rooms can be found. Rogue hairdressers at sustainable rainforest festivals will let you know where it all happens. And on the more official side of things, there are various associations of all sorts from the Red Crescent to schools for stateless refugees. It may be wonderfully baffling to accompany Lord Murugan for his annual wash in the sea, but if there is one thing one can say about the clash of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, in this country it has produced some of the nicest people there are. And a whole world of surprises, not to mention a cat restaurant where one can take tea and scones surrounded by several hundred cats. JB’s most international famous artistic production is probably Ernest Goh’s book entitled: “Cocks”. It is an extraordinary collection of photos of prizewinning cockerels. Raising them is something of a hobby in Malaysia.
 

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Obviously, Malaysian TV is dodgy, and there are even states in Malaysia where cinemas are banned, but there is no end of absorbing activities if you conceive of yourself as an immigrant! And it probably helps to be a bit of a hippy. The politics might be murderous with billion-dollar scandals and drive by shootings of inconvenient Gulf State bankers, poisonings of eccentric brothers of far Eastern dictators, dynamiting of loose tongued mistresses, but then what country doesn’t have a drop of novichok seeping into their diplomatic endeavours? The joke my Malaysian friends made in talking about their politics was that they learnt everything from the British! And on close examination one did see that Frank Swettenham, an infamous Governor General of Malaya, did an awful lot to create the Bumi Putra policy and harboured a deep distrust of the Chinese, despite some, let us say, interesting business associations with them. He literally drove his wife mad and had her sectioned. She was good at arranging tennis parties though.
 
Malaysia was my home for seven years. I had a ten-year visa and thought it would be easy to extend it, especially given that I once shook the Sultan of Johor’s hand and my wife was given a certificate recognizing her contribution to JB by none other than the Sultana herself. Nonetheless I was a Matsaleh, a name derived from a transliteration of Mad Sailor, which has echoes of their early encounters with East India Co. employees. I took no offence. I embraced it.

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Then came Covid and the borders closed. If I had been in Singapore on the day they closed, I would not have been let back in. We knew people whose spouse was one side of the border and they were the other. Others with the ten-year visa were also blocked from returning to their homes. And then Malaysia decided to change the visa requirements. The government decided to make it more expensive to recruit a better class of people because those they had now were, as one government minister put it, crooks and criminals. Those damned immigrants! Those damned refugees! Those damned matsaleh!
 
I probably deluded myself into thinking that I was at home in these places. In truth I felt rather attracted to life in Australia. If their visa requirements for aging Brits had been less expensive, and my experience of government’s ability to kick you out whenever they felt like it, my retirement pad would have been in Byron Bay. In fact, at one time, following my Hong Kong Chinese friend’s advice, I had a flat in Melbourne and that alone would have got me a residency. They changed the rules needless to say. If only I had some children attending a university there clocking up points on the family connections criteria. But aging Poms are not high on their list of approved immigrants.
 
With the writing on the wall, it looked like I had no choice but to live out the twilight years in shivering Blighty. Even then I wondered where in the UK should I go and live? My mother always talked about “going home for Christmas” whenever we left London to visit my Grandparents in Bridlington. For her that was home. And for some reason my father always concurred. He never called going off to Gateshead to visit any of his family, “going home”, but wherever my mother was, that was pretty much his definition. They drove each other nuts of course, but that seems to have been their thing. My mother modelled herself on Vivien Leigh and my father on Clark Gable.

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Given that whenever people asked me where I was from, I would say “Bridlington!” Just to see their bewilderment. Nobody in Asia has heard of Bridlington. And Bridlington property is cheap, but Bridlington was where I came from, not where I was going to! For that matter London, for all its lures, was where I had hunkered down in dismal bedsits in the seventies and eighties, where there were dole queues, riots, class warfare, endless nighttime commutes across London to teach evening classes in Brixton. London was the wintry Dickensian grind of my early years that Asia had liberated me from. I was indeed FILTH! So London could not possibly be where I belonged now.
 
But then where? My father, who would be over a hundred nowadays, wrote letters to his MP complaining how Britain was now not the country he fought for! My reply to his complaint was always that it never was. He fought for a fantasy, a national myth concocted to make him volunteer for the army and fight for King and Country, or in other words a privileged class who made the laws and filled their pockets. The brief flourish of post war social mobility that had upset him had actually given me the opportunity for a university education. It also gave me ideas well above my station. He, needless to say, did not think much of my reasoning, despite his complaint about how his army career was stymied by posh officers failing to back his desire to become an officer. He complained about the “educated idiots” who caused more deaths than any Panzer Tank. My father had a brother who was killed. And in another war, my Grandfather was shot twice and sent back to the trenches. The Menin Gate has an uncle’s name inscribed on it. Blood and guts spilt for the country lurks in the background of many British family histories. But other than that, my father enjoyed his war. He was a teenager given a tank to drive around Europe, blow up things, and then be swamped by very friendly liberated women. The only medal my father was given that he was genuinely proud of was The Legion D’honneur. His home was the army and then the police, with a stint in Belfast. He decided all sides were nothing but gangsters stealing whatever they could. His account of the Troubles was that it was a murderous Irish version of “’Allo ‘Allo!” On retiring, the chips on his shoulder about the decline of the nation just grew and grew.

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So here I am back in that nation and hoping that it is not the Britain that I left, hoping that it is a foreign country for me to explore and discover a self-created sense of belonging, rather than the three-day week, strike bound, un-employed, Angry Brigade haunted, spy infested train wreck that haunts my imagination. Given the bizarre twists and turns of post Brexit politics, its zero-growth economy, and bankrupt city councils, I sense that the UK is at least as maddeningly misgoverned as any of my beloved South East Asian states, bar Singapore of course, who just about have a grip on things. And I have no fear of muslim mayors. In fact, the colour of the present batch of politicians is something I am used to. I’m rather hoping the UK and India open up their borders to each other, though I suspect that smacks of Empire which is not very PC. Or is it?
 
Anyway, I learnt from my Chinese friends a healthy indifference to incompetent power that I cannot do anything about. No frothing at the mouth or angry Xeets for me. I learnt from my Malay and Singaporean friends that good friends and good food are the essence of a good life.  But most of all, the UK is one place where I do not need a visa and it is one place where free speech and tolerance are heralded as a national trait. Except, of course, when Doctor’s are being told they should inform their patients of their preferred pronoun – I suggest Dr – and when everyone demands a safe space where they can exclude those they do not like, which smacks of self-righteousness and bigotry disguising themselves as morality and spirituality. Sounds positively Victorian.

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Obviously, I am now just some Old White Boomer one rant short of my father’s genes kicking in and an angry letter to my MP declaring: “This is not my country!” But then I was never under any illusion that it was. Hunkered down in TOWIE land that I am, and thinking about buying a beige tracksuit and getting myself a tanning subscription, I am as identity free as ever and bewildered by identity politics. Which I suspect is very English. I blame the Normans.
 

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