There are things I can say in Malay that English cannot quite hold. 

Not because they’re particularly intimate. Mostly because English changes their meaning. 

Sayang. 

People usually translate it as love, but that always feels incomplete. My mum still calls me sayang whenever we talk. If I translated it literally every time, she'd be greeting me with "love", which somehow sounds far more sentimental than she might usually intend. Sometimes, sayang means affection. Sometimes it means pity. Sometimes it simply is a pet name. English insists on choosing one meaning, maintaining an air of simplicity. Malay doesn't seem to mind that all of them can exist at once.

I don't think I realised the true extent of this until I left home.

Before that, languages were just...there. Like electricity or running water. I spoke Malay with my family, English at school, switched between the two without thinking, and never really questioned what either language was doing to me. I assumed they were just different ways of saying the same things.

But they never were. 

There have always been jokes that only make sense to me in English. Frustrations that have always arrived in Malay before they've become thoughts. And every now and then, usually after my Spanish class, I'll catch myself thinking, I don't think I'd have said that myself in English.

That sentence doesn't really make grammatical sense.

I'm leaving it there because neither does the feeling.

People often say that language shapes the way we see the world. That may be true. But I've started wondering whether language also shapes the person doing the seeing.

Or maybe it doesn't shape us at all. Maybe it simply reveals parts of us that were already there.

I still haven't decided.

….

Malay feels less like a language than a place. It's the sound of my mum calling me from the other room because dinner's ready. It's relatives talking over one another during Eid until nothing can be heard except laughter. It's the language I fall back into when I'm ill, tired, or startled. If I stub my toe, I don't swear in English. I don't choose that. My brain does.

Some emotions seem to have Malay homes. Not because English lacks the vocabulary, but because those emotions have always lived there. Distance was what finally made that obvious. 

Unlike Malay, English wasn’t something developed predominantly at home, but it grew alongside my childhood just the same, present since kindergarten through a bilingual education I took entirely for granted. I read English books. I watched English television. I wrote short essays in English long before I understood what an essay really was.

Somewhere along the way, English quietly became the main language I think in. I can't pinpoint when, which is in itself unsettling. Occasionally, I'll be halfway through explaining something to my mum before realising I've constructed the whole idea in English and am translating it backwards as I speak. It's like trying to remember where a song originally came from after hearing the cover too many times.

Mandarin arrived differently.

Not through family, but through classrooms. For years, it was just another subject. Vocabulary lists. Dictation. Characters that looked impossibly complicated until, slowly, they didn't.

Then something shifted - not fluency, but curiosity. 

I started watching Chinese dramas without really noticing that I was doing it to practise the language. Eventually, I wasn't just learning Mandarin; I was spending time inside a world that had previously been closed to me.

People often talk about language as inheritance, but Mandarin taught me that languages can also be adopted. You don't always need to be born into one for it to become part of your life.

I don't have Chinese heritage. That almost makes my relationship with it more meaningful. It wasn't handed to me - and that, I think, is why I keep choosing to come back to it, even after years of intermittent study.

Spanish, again, feels different.

Spanish is the only language I chose before anyone expected anything from me. Nobody said I ought to learn it. I simply liked the way it sounded, liked how it moved. I liked rolling my r's when nobody was listening. I liked how words I'd only ever read in novels suddenly belonged in my own mouth. 

In Malay, I’m someone’s family. In English, I’m usually someone’s colleague or friend. Spanish asks almost nothing of me. 

There's something strangely liberating about speaking a language where nobody has known you long enough to mistake you for an earlier version of yourself.

I don't know whether that freedom comes from the language itself or from being a beginner.

Maybe they're the same thing.

….

When I moved to Melbourne, the balance shifted. English became completely dominant, unavoidable, everywhere: the medium of university, friendship, and the market where I spend too many afternoons. Malay became rarer. There were fewer reasons to speak it, fewer people to speak it with, and in its absence, I noticed, for the first time, how much of myself had been living inside it.

The jokes and comebacks that only worked in Malay. The texture of certain family conversations. The way some emotions had always had Malay homes, and now, in English, felt faintly homeless. Mandarin became something I had studied rather than something I inhabited, time for it quietly swallowed by the busyness of my new life. Spanish got tangled up with university life, maintained through electives and accompanying me during late nights in the library.

Language, I began to understand, is not just about words. Each one carries a world with it. When a language falls away, even partially, some portion of the world it holds falls with it; not cleanly, but in pieces you only notice later.

We talk about putting down roots when we move somewhere new. But nobody mentions that transplanting a plant usually damages its roots first. The soil is different. The light comes from a different angle. The plant has to survive the transition before it can begin to settle. And it has to do that alone, often without being told how. 

I find myself thinking about how often international students are expected to make that transition look seamless. To arrive, adjust, and flourish, as if the change were only geographical. As if nothing else is being rearranged in the process.

Nobody hands you a care guide for the first winter.

….

The first time I went home after moving to Melbourne, I expected everything to feel the same. It did, and it didn’t.

The street outside my house looked exactly as it always had. The food tasted right; it tasted like home, which is a phrase I had understood abstractly and now understood in my body. My mother spoke Malay, and I answered in Malay, and for a moment it felt as though all of it had simply not happened. As if I had stepped out of a room for a short vacation and stepped back into it unchanged.

But other things had shifted.

A café I had loved was gone - the chairs, the menu, the specific afternoon rush I had associated with it. Relatives felt further away in ways I couldn’t fully locate, even as I saw them again. The neighbourhood shops I had grown up frequenting had been redeveloped into something I didn’t recognise. Friends who had promised to stay in touch had drifted, in the gentle, blameless way that people do when life carries them elsewhere.

I understood all of this. What I hadn’t anticipated was something subtler: finding myself reaching for English words in the middle of Malay sentences. Not because the Malay wasn’t there, but because English had become so habitual that it arrived first.

I noticed myself code-switching in ways I hadn’t before - translating thoughts back into Malay, like subtitling a film I had once known by heart. Pausing mid-sentence to locate a word that should have come naturally. Watching myself do it with a slight sense of distance, as if I were not entirely the speaker.

I had changed in the course of becoming myself. I had simply not noticed the moment it happened.

People who move between countries often claim a second home. I understand that impulse. But there is something that rarely gets said: having two homes can sometimes feel uncomfortably close to having none. Not because either place is unwelcoming. But because you are never entirely where you are.

Part of me remains in Malaysia - in my grandmother asking when I am coming back, in the language I now speak mainly on phone calls, in the version of me that still belongs to that neighbourhood. Part of me remains in Melbourne - in the people I have built a life with here, in the person I became in my first years of independence.

I am never fully absent from either place. But I am never less for it either. Malaysia has always been certain. What Melbourne gave me was not division, but expansion - more ground to stand on and more selves to draw from. 

This is not a complaint. It is simply a condition I think many people quietly recognise. You build two lives, and both are real, and both are yours, but they do not always translate cleanly into one another.

For a long time, I thought roots were places — a city, a country, a street, a kitchen where someone used to cook. Now I am less certain.

Perhaps roots are not where we come from, but what continues to shape us after we leave: a language spoken at the dinner table, a phrase that survives translation, a joke that only works in one tongue, a word we reach for instinctively when we are angry, or grieving, or in love.

Malay is a root. English is a root. Mandarin, imperfectly learned and still growing, is a root. Spanish, chosen freely and entirely my own, is becoming one.

I used to think learning languages meant adding something to myself. Now I wonder if it revealed something else — that there was never a single self to begin with. There were always several, waiting for the right context, the right words, the right voice.

So when people ask me about my roots, I answer without hesitation: Malaysia.

But I also know the answer is larger than that. It begins to touch on what has made me who I am today. 

Siapaku? Who am I?

Maybe the answer is like sayang: it can hold more than one meaning at once, and doesn’t need to choose.