This is a story about Malaysia and Singapore—or Malaya, if you will.

I use “Malaya” because I grew up thinking of the two countries as one. As a little boy, I remember travelling from Singapore to Malaysia, sitting in the backseat of my dad’s car, swerving through Malaysia’s old single-lane highways, evading smogemitting trucks piled high with oil palm fruit. We would visit relatives, sometimes five or six homes in a day, popping our heads in to sip tea, nibble cakes and watch the oldies play Cupid—“Is there a nice boy for her in Singapore?”

We would stop...

We should have given up two hours ago. In that time, we had travelled only five kilometres. We had started counting each push of the pedal, like dazed soldiers still mouthing a drill. The sun was scorching our skin, and a stream of sweat burning our eyes. Our water bottles felt like little radiators, the water inside too warm to drink. We eased around one bend only to find another steep slope staring down at us with indifference. We were tired by the slopes, angry at the sun, fed up with the countryside. Six months ago Sumana, my best friend,...

Waking up on Day 3 was easy. The whole night, mosquitoes had been whizzing around our faces, while an array of lights—yellow, white, fluorescent—strove to pierce our closed eyes. We had been trying to sleep on the hard concrete rows in the grandstand of the football stadium in Mersing, a sleepy fishing town on Malaysia’s east coast, which is best known as a gateway to a number of holiday islands such as Rawa and Tioman.

Cycling out of Mersing at 9 am, we heard the familiar lyrics of an R&B song, blaring out of a boom box from...

“This is what it means to be a Malaysian!” Yap Mun Ching screamed, her voice swollen with pride. She was glowing, having finally found the answer that might shut us up. For days Sumana and I had teased her because she couldn’t quite define what it meant “to be Malaysian”. To be fair, we had the same problem with “Singaporean”. But for some reason, the lack of clarity bothered her more.

We go back a long way. Short, sharp and defiant, Mun Ching stood out in junior college Malay class. Even before saying hello, we had suspected that she might...

Over the course of the past eight years, while shuttling between Malaysia and Singapore, one of the biggest differences I’ve noticed between people is in their willingness to speak up. Malaysians are generally much more eager to tell you exactly what they think, whether the topic of conversation is food, football or politics. I often had to pull myself away from chatty strangers, who had so much more to share.

We Singaporeans, on the other hand, are much more reserved. For a multitude of reasons, we tend to water down our opinions, or wrap them in a protective layer of...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) decided to hold their annual 2006 meeting in Singapore. For Singapore, it was a thrilling coming out party, seen as another step in our bid to become a truly important global city. For the two multilateral institutions, it was a perfectly executed event—and the first time they did not have to worry about kooky anti-globalisation protestors.

A few months before the meeting, Singapore suggested that it would not allow any sort of protest. We also said that we are ready to cane or imprison any protestors who engage in...

“Well, in a funny sort of way, I benefited so much from the oil crisis in the 1970s,” Mohammad Zamin said.

Sumana and I were sitting in a small coffee shop in Silibin, a little neighbourhood on the outskirts of Ipoh. People kept shuffling in and out, some on tea break, others aimless; the hungry streamed towards the prata man in the corner for some of the dough he was twirling, theatrically, like a circus performer.

A fat lady in a pink baju kurung waddled towards us. She walked with her hips—they led, her feet merely followed. She stopped...

There are a fair number of things that Malaysians don’t like about Singapore. Some feel that our society is unfair—“It’s a Chinaman’s land, right?” or “Singapore’s a home only for the rich.” Some think that we’re snooty. More still that we have no soul, lifeless, boring, devoid of fun, culture and spirit.

But there is one aspect of Singapore that every Malaysian I’ve spoken to admires, is even envious of—our economic development.

“You know when I walk through your Changi Airport, it feels so great, so fresh, I can go into one of the toilets, they are so...

“What race are you?”

Whether it be the old, regal ketua, village chief, in the humid kampung in Kota Tinggi; the sinewy Malay tobacco picker in Pahang, with blood-shot eyes and homebrew in hand; the sharp-tongued Chinese businessman in Kuala Terengganu, who juggled three mobile phones while offering us “girls from anywhere in the world”; or the chatty, chic twenty-something-year-old Malay bank executive in Kuala Lumpur, who had been “wild” while studying in the UK, but now, back in Malaysia, had become more pious, and had decided to wear a tudung to “protect her modesty”.

All of them, and many...

One week before we set off on our cycling trip through Malaysia, we met two Buddhist monks at Sumana’s house. The monks were from the Sri Lankaramaya Temple, a Sinhalese Buddhist temple in Singapore where Margaret Rajarethnam, Sumana’s mum, does a lot of charity work. “Aunty Marge” was very supportive of our trip, and she thought it prudent to have the monks bless us and our bicycles.

The ritual itself didn’t last too long. There were chants and blessings where the monks patted our foreheads with holy water and tied thin blue-red-white holy strings around our wrists and on our...

In mid-2008, I attended a lunch with Mahathir. The lunch was organised for 20-odd CEOs of companies doing business in Malaysia.

Ahead of the lunch, I tried to find out about his legacy. “India has Gandhi, South Africa has Mandela, and we have Mahathir,” gushed an elderly Malay taxi driver. “When he speaks on the international stage, I feel proud to be a Malaysian. He put us on the map,” says a young Indian friend.

Others were far less gracious. “He ruined this country,” says a Chinese banker at a Malaysian brokerage, lamenting the bumiputera policies which Mahathir had vigorously...

Rural Malaysia has always fascinated us. There is something mystical and charming about it. It conjures visions of a simpler life, of a forgotten age, of padi and wild oxen, of waterfalls and mountains, of bits and pieces of life which we do not know in Singapore, which we’ll never have in Singapore.

Malaysia’s urban centres, however, do not really inspire us. Many of them, especially KL, are dense, poorly planned heat sinks. They feel like less pretty versions of Singapore: more smog, more heat, more people, more traffic. No thank you.

Still, romanticising the countryside while lamenting urban decay...

For the past six years, I have gone jogging in Malaysia at least once a week, sometimes more. I do so because I want greenery and solitude. There are few spots in Singapore where you can leave the urban jungle behind and just lose yourself.

Sure, there are many parks around, most notably the East Coast Park. “Nowhere in Asia can you find such a long, uninterrupted green stretch that close to downtown. It’s a runner’s dream,” says Mike, an Australian friend, when I asked what he liked most about Singapore.

But even then, whichever Singaporean park you’re in, condominiums,...