We received our housing assignment in Kuala Lumpur this past Sunday. I was putting my phone away for the night when I saw the email that I’d secretly started to hope would come soon pop up on my screen. I didn’t actually think we would hear about our future home until May or even June, so this was a happy surprise. I nervously clicked on the notification and opened up the email that promised to add a shade of clarity to the blurry picture of our life ahead, something akin to one of those lenses sliding into place during an eye exam.
Now we know the name of our building, its location, and our apartment number. We know that we have a good amount of square footage and multiple bathrooms, ALL of which seem to have adequate counter space. We have a Malaysian-style wet kitchen and dry kitchen, and a tiny windowless un-airconditioned room attached to an equally tiny bathroom that together comprise the maid’s quarters. We will use those for storage. In the email were pictures that I have looked at about a thousand times, comparing them to the floor plan and trying to peer around corners in the photographs to get a sense for the overall flow. I am perhaps most excited about the double vanity in the master bathroom and having the whole apartment on one floor. The apartment complex has a pool (a necessary amenity since any outdoor recreation in tropical heat likely needs water), tennis courts, and access through its back gate to one of KL’s many malls. Best of all, the cost of our housing is fully covered by the US government, so come August, our bank account will register some immediate gains when half our income doesn’t vanish to pay our rent.
I have been mentally placing artwork on walls, figuring out which rugs might go where, and assigning bedrooms to children. I’ve thought about where to put appliances in the kitchen, what items to tuck away in the storage area, and how best to set up our family spaces. This will all likely change when we actually occupy the apartment and get a realistic sense of what works where. There seems to be a small study near the foyer which Emma immediately claimed for herself as a craft room. Funny girl. I pointed out that her poor father has been crouched over a tiny high-top table in our kitchen, his “office space,” for the past three years, so if anyone is going to get the study, it will be Dan. Or me. But most definitely not her.
I deeply appreciate having this information early. I find it immensely comforting to be able to drop a pin on a map from which I anticipate will radiate many circles of activity and connection. With our itinerant life, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reading about how we create homes wherever we go. Dan and I are not tied to particular ideals around the physical structure of our home because that changes so often, and we have little say in where we live outside of the United States. (This does not in any way keep us from daydreaming about what home we would buy in which neighborhood here if we ever had the funds. Which we won’t.) We take comfort in our conviction that the things that make our home uniquely ours travel with us, both as material goods, but also as the rhythms and routines that we set up as a family that define how we exist within our new space.
But having a physical, defined, static home MATTERS. A home is at the center of a web of interconnected parts of life whose health and balance rely on keeping this center intact. Matthew Desmond wrote a powerful article for the New Yorker in 2016 on housing vulnerability among the poor, prior to the release of his acclaimed book Evicted. Rarely has an article had such staying power for me as this one did. I don’t know why I hadn’t made the connections before on how housing vulnerability so profoundly affects every single aspect of life, from childcare availability to educational opportunities to employment consistency to community connections. We don’t remotely experience housing vulnerability like that depicted in the article, but after reading it, I thought a lot about all the disorientation and loneliness and rootlessness what we feel when we move before we are able to make inroads into our new communities and get settled in. I can’t imagine how that would feel as the permanent rather than temporary state of being.
When we move into our home in KL, we’ll start with getting to know our neighbors in the complex. We’ll figure out our first steps to the grocery store and other markets that we’ll need to visit to set up our pantry and kitchen. We’ll find the nearest mobile phone shop. We’ll try out the drive to the embassy to see what Dan’s commute will be. We’ll make our way over to the school and get to know the new campus. We’ll venture out on Sundays to church. We might get invited to someone’s house in a different area that we’ll need to figure out how to get to. We’ll plan weekend outings into the city to visit some of the main attractions. We’ll start trying restaurants that we hope can become part of our meal rotation on occasion. Some places we won’t return to, others will become integral to our existence. Bit by bit, we will spin out the silk of our new life that surrounds the place we get to return to each day, the new place we will call home.
Jessica Robertson Wright 