My love of history began at the tender age of nine during a memorable week at Farnham Castle with my parents. At the time, my dad was working at ICL (International Computers Limited) in the North of England, and their expansion plans involved a move for him, my mum and me to Saudi Arabia. Farnham Castle was hosting an introduction week of Arabic culture and language.
Our move to Saudi Arabia promised a swimming pool, a large American car, and perhaps even a chauffeur. I endlessly bragged to my friends about the future swimming pool, but was secretly daunted by the prospect of losing all my school buddies and moving to the Middle East.
While my mum and dad immersed themselves in learning Arabic, I was left to explore the castle, wandering the ramparts and grounds, hiding in the chapel’s priest hole, and generally making a nuisance of myself to the staff. Each evening, course participants gathered in the grand hall, enjoying expensive whisky and other refinements they’d not find in Saudi.
Ultimately, the move away never happened, leaving me feeling a bit foolish as my swimming pool boasts came to an abrupt end. Despite this, the castle experience remained firmly etched in my mind. My stay at Farnham Castle was thoroughly enjoyable, with the only drawback being the creaking water pipes that my overactive imagination interpreted as ghostly noises.
Castles And Cartography
I always looked forward to our annual holidays. One time, we went on an epic (so I thought at the time) eight-hour road trip to Cornwall, setting off at 4 AM. To my young mind, this journey felt like travelling halfway across the world. We stayed in Tintagel, and I was naturally drawn to the stories of King Arthur. His castle, however, was a bit of a let-down after having previously experienced the grandeur of Caernarfon Castle in Wales. Still, reaching King Arthur’s castle involved a precarious cliff path that felt like a brush with death. My agile young self had no problem, but we nearly lost my dad in the sea below at one point.
That same holiday, I had my first introduction to “cuisine.” A white, thatched-roof cottage on the quayside of a quaint fishing village boasted a chalkboard menu with exotic dishes like fresh trout and hearty broth available. It didn’t take long for me to develop a taste for such finery.
When we weren’t on holiday, rainy days in Northern England were spent playing “News Reporter.” As an on-the-spot reporter, my job was to jet around the world collecting news stories to fill my newspaper. The game board was a spectacular three-fold map of the world. I learned about places like Caracas, Lima, Novosibirsk, and Vladivostok. Back at school, I became the unchallenged champion at naming capital cities.
On a Welsh camping trip, I played the amazing geopolitical board game Risk for the first time. It wasn’t long before I was regularly beating my dad. The key to winning, I discovered, was holding Europe and Old Siam at the same time. I became intimately familiar with the Urals, Siberia, and Kamchatka.
I also pored over maps of Middle-earth, captivated by Mordor and its natural mountain defences. While the Shire was Tolkien’s recollection of my home county of Lancashire, I pondered where the hell in the world was Mordor supposed to be? Afghanistan perhaps?
Heritage and Identity
Sunday nights on the BBC meant “The Chinese Detective,” a show about a Chinese-descended character named John Ho from Liverpool. He always cracked the case, but not without getting beaten up first. As someone also of Chinese descent, named John, and living on the outskirts of Liverpool, this was enough to earn me endless teasing throughout school.
I developed more than a bit of a complex from it. My nickname became “Ho,” much to the amusement of my schoolmates. My parents loved the series; I hated it for obvious reasons. During football (soccer) games, it was “Pass the ball, Ho!” or “Get the f*** out of the way, Ho!” as some screaming six-foot central defender charged at me.
Adding to my woes was my mad Chinese mop of a hairdo, or “bowl head” hairstyle – it wasn’t even a hairstyle – it just was. And so my complexes only worsened over time.
At school, the moment arrived, a pivotal juncture in my life: a career evening. It was supposed to be the fork in the road that would shape my destiny. The choices loomed large – the university path, demanding college first, or the leap into the workforce, which often meant the local Ainscoughs flour mill. There was a third option – a youth training scheme which appealed even less than going to work full-time.
My sights were set far higher, though, fueled by the film adventures of Indiana Jones, I decided to become an archaeologist.
So there I sat, flanked by my parents, facing the careers teacher. The exact words escape me now, but the essence of the exchange was “Alright, John,” she began, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
My answer, “I want to study Archaeology.”
A genuine bewilderment took over her face. It was clear no one had ever uttered such a desire before. The poor woman fumbled through brochures and folders, a desperate search for anything related to my chosen path. Eventually, she gave up, and with a resigned plea.”Why don’t you go work in the mill?”
That answer was a defining moment in my life at the time. While I never did go to work at the mill, not being able to pursue my career of digging in the dirt in Egypt for a living sent me off on a bit of a wayward tangent.
Outside of school, I was fortunate to visit many restaurants. My parents were schooling me well in the art of eating out. We’d eat food of all types; there was zero discrimination in our house when it came to food options.
We also had a steady parade of Asian guests at our house over the years; usually, my mum’s friends from Malaysia who’d married Westerners, or friends of friends from my mum’s homeland. I remember one gentleman wielding a samurai sword in our cramped living room, slicing satsumas in mid-air. I think he had been on the whisky too at the time.
My mum would receive airmail letters, one at Xmas and one in Feb. I’d pore over photos of people I’d never met, all named “Ah” with a one-syllable name attached to the end of it. Typical Chinese names, I guess. But what did it matter? I’d never meet any of them. Each letter in February contained a red packet called an Ang Pow, and inside, a tidy sum of Malaysian Ringgit as a gift for Chinese New Year. Money didn’t particularly excite me at that time, though. I could hardly exchange it for boiled sweets at the newsagents’ outside school, could I?
My mum would teach me phrases in her native Hokkien, while my dad, the Bahasa Malay aficionado, taught me phrases like “Nanti Sikit Jam” (wait a moment) and “Lagi Satu” (one more please). My dad, I swear, knows at least one phrase in every language that ever existed. If any of the waiting staff were from abroad in a restaurant we were at, he’d ask where they were from, and then start speaking their language – it was funny but cringeworthy at the same time 🤣
I didn’t want to know about this other side of my heritage, I guess. I just saw myself as British. I was living in the cold, wet north of England, and was skinny as a rake compared to my mates; I just wanted to play football, run around castles and look like everyone else. But try as I might, I couldn’t escape the heritage thing. My problematic hairstyle on its own was enough to make me feel radically “different.”
An Unexpected Journey To Malaysia
Then, at seventeen, my world shattered. My parents announced that we were going to Malaysia for our annual holiday. I mean, how could they? My whole summer holiday, my friends, all of it, gone. I was gutted.
My mother, an amazing woman, had worked her way up to an impressive position at Girobank in Bootle, Liverpool, after arriving in the UK seventeen years prior. It couldn’t have been easy, but she’d done it. Now, with finances easier, she was going home to visit family, with me and Dad in tow. The thought of meeting all these relatives I’d only ever heard about filled me with dread. I, in my teenage wisdom, suggested I stay behind to save them money. No joy. “Two weeks only?” I pleaded. Overruled again. We went for a whole month!
On the plane, I was apprehensive but made the best of it. Flipping to the back pages of the in-flight mag, I found a map of Southeast Asia. Dad told me how fascinated he’d been with the Indonesian Archipelago as a kid, referring to it as “Nusantara,” a term he still uses. I admit those maps intrigued me, especially seeing all the destinations Singapore Airlines flew to, marked with big red arrows. To top it off, I watched minute-by-minute live updates of our plane’s location as it spanned half the globe: first Europe, then Turkey, Iran, India, before hanging a hard right at Myanmar, then on to Changi Airport, Singapore.
I wasn’t a particularly outgoing child, thanks in part to “The Chinese Detective” and my mad mop of a hairdo. As an only child with parents who worked as much overtime as humanly possible, I didn’t interact with many people. I grew up insular, comfortable in my own company, and, to put it mildly, more than a little shy.
You can imagine my anxiety at the thought of meeting family I’d never seen. And so I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. It wasn’t just a few close relatives there to greet us. It was every sister, brother, cousin, aunt, uncle, second cousin, probably even neighbours and the village headman, all there waiting at Penang airport. I counted over sixty people at one point. I think the airport staff were as shocked as I was.
My dad was trying to identify my mum’s youngest brother, whom he’d last seen as a young boy. By now, he was a fully grown man, spoke great English, was the most outgoing, and put me at ease in a way only a Malaysian can. I met my gran, who had tears in her eyes. Everyone surrounded me like I was famous or something. To say it was overwhelming was an understatement; I felt embarrassed, elated, intrigued, and shy all at the same time.
It remains, to this day, the most defining day of my life. I’d been well and truly pushed out of my comfort zone – travel has a habit of doing that, I guess.
My First And Last Overstay
Within a year, I was back in Malaysia, surprise, surprise, this time for longer. I wanted to experience everything I’d missed. One day, months into my stay, I did what was common for Malaysians back then (and now).
Going across the border to Hat Yai in Southern Thailand.
While most tourists get overstays in Thailand, few ever do in Malaysia. But, silly me, I ended up with a two-month overstay that I only discovered when trying to cross into Thailand. I hadn’t even checked my departure date stamp until that point – how naive was I?
The Malay officials put me in a cell. Through the barred, open window in the door, I could see my frantic uncles negotiating with the officials. They let me out, and we crossed onto the Thai side. But I wasn’t allowed to re-enter from a land border and had to take my chances flying back to Malaysia to catch my return to the UK flight.
It very much soured my time in Hat Yai. Instead of enjoying it, I was in a constant state of panic, obsessing over how I’d get back. The unfamiliar Thai script and the city’s seemingly “backward” nature compared to Penang only made things worse. I let my mind get in the way, thinking “too much” (คิดมาก) and turning what should’ve been an amazing adventure into an awful memory.
Back in the UK, I got depressed that I had to settle down in the real world and was unable to travel for the foreseeable future. The idea of going back to my newfound home, even on an annual basis, simply wasn’t satisfactory enough. I had been awakened.
Then, the rave scene emerged. Manchester, UK, the epicentre, was a stone’s throw from where I was in Lancashire. While I likely overstayed the rave scene too, it provided me with a distraction from Malaysia for a few years.
Ironically, during those ‘rave’ years, I somehow found myself at university studying hospitality management, a field I later worked in. I took a managerial role at a London establishment, a Thai restaurant with a full English pub attached (or vice-versa). That’s where I truly began to grasp Thai food and pick up some of the lingo. For six years straight, while still in the UK, I ate Thai food every single day.
In London, I was fortunate enough to invest in property, and after so long of hearing people rant on about how great the Land of Smiles was, I uprooted my life in the UK and headed to Chiang Mai. Lol – yes, just like that. To be honest, my first choice was to go to Indonesia. But bombings were going on there, and so to appease mum, I chose Thailand instead.
Breaking News: My Decade in Digital Media
My initial plan was simple: arrive in Chiang Mai, and earn some cash somehow – it wasn’t that solid a plan, I know. After a year in CM, I had decided to go back to the UK temporarily to earn some extra cash.
I was quite literally booking my flight home when a friend I’d made in Chiang Mai called with an unexpected job offer. The company he worked for was looking for a news aggregation editor for a financial e-newsletter, catering to institutional clients – it sounds more impressive than it was, but in the days before widespread internet adoption and smartphones, it was a pretty cool gig.
Over the years, I built and managed a team of around 20 Thai staff. This role was insightful; it was here that I truly began to grasp the potential of the internet. I held that position, or similar ones within the same field, for over ten years, shaping my understanding of digital media.
Heritasian.com
Since then, I’ve been my own boss, I’ve worked in e-commerce, other media roles, and various odds and ends. My home base has rotated between Chiang Mai, Penang, and, most recently, Hat Yai. What began as a daunting experience for a naive first-time traveller in Thailand has blossomed into a profound appreciation for the country; in fact, Hat Yai is these days one of my favourite cities.
Over the years, I’ve considered combining my three passions: Southeast Asia, history, and digital media. But I always found excuses or got sidetracked. Then, one day, during a routine beach walk in Penang, I realised it was now or never.
Heritasian.com is where I try to bring these interests together. It’s a genuine labour of love and very much a work in progress; I often just put ideas out there to see what resonates. What you won’t find much of in the blog posts, though, is me. Unlike many travel blogs that centre on the author, that’s simply not my approach. I don’t believe anyone needs my opinions, my “fuzzy feelings” about a place, or other common travel writing clichés. My focus is on the history of a location, not my personal journey through it; though, ironically, this very article has been one of the exceptions!
