KOTA KINABALU — Perhaps to get away from the blazing sun during high summer in the more temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, some friends who had long emigrated to more developed countries came back to this part of the world to visit, and it was obligatory for those of us who stayed behind to somehow entertain them as part of their previously almost annual 'homecoming' trip, albeit punctuated by the dreaded pandemic. As they recounted their usually very stable, sometimes almost staid livelihoods overseas, kids, car, houses and all, it is frankly very hard, especially for those of us who had lived for a substantial period of our lives overseas, to not reminisce about our own often very memorable time overseas, and to surmise how lives would have turned out very differently had we stayed overseas and not made the fateful, often parentally prompted the decision to come back and settle here, with all the attendant reverse culture shocks that persisted in tickling and unsettling us.

Recently, some of these friends decided to not only visit their countries of origin but also a few other Southeast Asian countries, perhaps in a fit of binge or revenge tourism after years of confinement by the pandemic which spurned international travels. Interestingly, in contrast to their rather self-absorbed narrations in the past of their admittedly more than decent livelihoods overseas, they were apparently quite impressed with the returning hustle and bustle of typical Southeast Asian metropolises, with crowds of pedestrians legally crossing major downtown intersections not only perpendicularly but also diagonally as people in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. These friends could not help but observe that the social economy of at least the parts of Southeast Asia that they visited appeared to be recovering fast and taking off in a sharp trajectory, what with the relocations here of many high-tech factories, in stark contrast to what they had observed back in their 'new' homes, where the economy is allegedly still gloomy.