COMMENT There are no girls for Jack now where he is living - a small city in US north-west.

Jack is now in a small city in the north-west of the United States. I wrote about him last year as he was about to leave for the US. He now often complains of boredom. He is also lonely.

He is a Kachin refugee from Myanmar, and therefore locals do not pay much attention to him. He mows lawns for a living while he attends school. Back in Bukit Bintang, he used to be popular with Kachin girls. In reality, I often used to see him with a girl by his side.

Alas, there are no girls for him now where he is living. Many people do not realise this, but parts of Bukit Bintang have dense networks of Kachin residents, often people who are related to each other, come from the same villages or towns, or else used to be neighbours and friends back in Myanmar.

There is even a Kachin school for refugee children, not to mention Kachin restaurants and shops. A couple of venues on Changkat Bukit Bintang are staffed with Kachins, often people who know each other. Community life is therefore dense, varied, and diverse. Typically, Kachins in the US are spread over a huge country.

Jack puts plaintive messages on Facebook with pictures of himself cycling around well-manicured, but completely empty parks, resting on benches, and that also show him shirtless while mowing somebody’s lawn.

Friends back in Malaysia confirm to me that there are no girls for him where he is now, while in Bukit Bintang there were plenty of them. In fact, some people actually prefer not to go the US because of the lonely life and social isolation there.

A Shan friend - the Shans are a large ethnic minority in Myanmar, but only a comparatively small number of them become refugees in Malaysia - decided against going to the US. Instead, he went back to his hometown in Shan state, where he started a business catering to tourists, profiting from a wealth of experience acquired in Bukit Bintang as a bar tender.

He told me that several of his friends who had gone to the US lived now on their own (in Bukit Bintang, they usually lived in overcrowded, derelict tenements, often together with other people from Myanmar). After work, they go home. If they go out for a drink, hardly anybody talks to them, as they are Asian refugees. Their neighbours are polite, but generally distant.

In this way, nobody is interested in them. They then make long phone calls to friends in Bukit Bintang, complaining about life in the US. Another important, clinching argument for not immigrating to the US, in the case of my Shan friend, is that over there he would always be somebody's employee. Namely, he would never be able to start his own business.

Travelling long distances

Some refugees, however, particularly groups of Chins - currently the largest refugee population in Malaysia - may find themselves in fairly dense hubs, where there are many relatives, friends, acquaintances, and former schoolmates and neighbours from Myanmar. Indianapolis is one such place. They therefore have a modicum of community life that replicates the one they were used to in Bukit Bintang.

They therefore live very different lives from that of Jack in his small city on the West Coast. I often see pictures of various formal and informal gatherings, and excursions - to New York City, for instance. People will also often travel many kilometres to meet each other.

In one case, several young men gathered in Indianapolis, a city with a large population of Chins, particularly but not only Mizo (a Chin sub-group). Some came from neighbouring Iowa, while others came from as far as Baltimore and Kansas.

Besides, I know someone who moved from the interior of New York state - namely, Buffalo, on the Canadian border - to Indianapolis because he wanted to be near friends and acquaintances.

Two friends, Tuk and Herbert, are both Kachin. They are both also recent arrivals in the US. Herbert lives in Florida, while Tuk lives in neighbouring Georgia. They meet every week when they are off work. However, as one of them lives in Tallahassee in Florida, and therefore very close to the Georgia state line, meeting every week does not involve a long trip.

Unfortunately, in many cases, meeting a friend can involve not only driving for hundreds of kilometres, but also planning ahead. Some people live so far apart from each other - say in the East Coast and California - that meeting once a year is all they can aim for.

Zacharia for instance is now in Michigan. He used to live in Bukit Bintang, where in fact he stayed for several years. His closest friends in Bukit Bintang are however now in Texas and New Delhi (sic). Of course, eventually he may be able to meet his friend in Texas, or even his friend in New Delhi; nonetheless, the distances involved are all the same enormous, even inside the US.

Incidentally, his friend Abraham was called to Delhi to take over his father’s business there, and therefore going to the US is no longer an option for him; while his other friend, Anne, together with her young son, joined relatives in Texas.

A hub for refugees

Zacharia’s case also shows something interesting: Bukit Bintang is a hub, especially for Chins and Kachins. Namely, the neighbourhood acts as a powerful magnet; holds many people in its bosom for quite a few years; and next these same people find themselves dispersed literally all over the world.

Night revellers, tourists, and visitors do not realise it, but they are often waited on and served by Myanmar staff who routinely have close family, assorted relatives, and friends, all the way from Oslo, Norway, to Maryland and Melbourne. They are therefore clearly one of Malaysia’s most transnational populations.

In Herman’s case, he is now living with his sister in Des Moines, Iowa, where he works at an assembly plant. He however lived in Bukit Bintang for four years, where he left behind his wife, who is still waiting for permission to join her husband.

(As it happens, they got married just a couple of months before Herman was called by the US embassy to go. Had he wanted his wife to go with him, he would have to wait for a couple more years before he could immigrate. He decided instead to go ahead, in the hope that eventually he will be able to bring his wife into the US.)

Herman has two sisters back in his small town near the Indian border in Myanmar; one of his best friends in Bukit Bintang, John, is now back in India, in Aizawl, Mizoram state, just across the border from Myanmar. He is a taxi driver there.

Another of his good friends, Burt, is now in Philadelphia, where he his hoping to go to college, whereas several of his friends from the same small town remain in Bukit Bintang, waiting to be called to go (a wait that can take years in some cases, or may never happen, as some people choose to go back home instead. They may simply get tired of living a harsh life in Malaysia, or else do not get accepted as refugees due to some bureaucratic hurdle).

Bukit Bintang is therefore the hub from where people disperse, either to move on to what are for them (but not necessarily for their relatives, friends, and neighbours) new destinations in the West, or else back to familiar places in Myanmar and India.

It is therefore like a turning plate, sending people off in different directions at the same time that it regularly welcomes new arrivals on board.

FRED ROSEN has been gallivanting around South-East Asia for quite some time now. He is interested in foreign communities in Malaysia’s large cities. He has also been writing about Malacca, both in the present and the past, as well as other ancient port cities in the Indian Ocean.