It's only a short stroll from the airport building to the main road, where we (me and wife) came upon rows of small but pretty motels and inns with brightly-lit vacancy and price signs. They all looked tantalizingly cheap before we realized that they're in US dollars. After conversion (2.5 at the time), the price shot up to RM75, which was still reasonable considering that we'd nowhere to go. We just picked out the nearest one. As we strode up, the bored-looking black guy with Jimi Hendrix hairdo at the reception almost jumped out of his seat and, in no time, he's all over us, jinking and gesturing and trying his best to please us. He talked so fast that all I could figure out was our room number.
The First Week
Despite flying half the world, we're neither jet lagged or fagged out. We woke up the next morning fresh and fit. The Hendrix hunk checked us out, but he's surprisingly sober and subdued. Hard to tell whether he's sleepy or stoned, or both. We're now ready to invade Buffalo.
Did we say we'd nowhere to go? We fibbed. Actually we knew somebody in Buffalo. My wife's cousin was married to an Indonesian university lecturer who had a friend living in Buffalo, of all places. We had his home address and phone. For some strange reason, I still remember his address to this day: 185, Commonwealth Avenue, Buffalo 14214. His name was Harun Arrasjid. His wife, Doreen, was kind enough to prepare what looked like Malaysian/Indonesian fusion for our dinners throughout our short stay. They had only two kids, teenage boys John and Eddie. Both were half a foot taller than me.
After a week with Pak Harun's family, we moved into a house at No 4, Rounds Ave, off Bailey Ave, a walking distance from the university campus. Doreen had negotiated the rental and assured the landlady that we're genuinely nice people and we're not Mexican migrants and we left our shoes outside and so on. That shoeless scam clinched the deal.
Back To School
The official name of the university was (and still is) the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. But nobody in Buffalo knew where the university with that windy name was, because locally the university was known by its sexy moniker UB. With a student population of about 30,000, UB was the biggest public university in New York, but it's still considered small because Penn State had 100,000 students and University of Phoenix had 5 million. Among US college graduates in Malaysia, the university is known as SUNY Buffalo, where SUNY rhymes with Sunni.
My first day at the school passed without any rude shocks. My very first class was Economics (MGE 650). There were about 20 of us, mostly American whites, with a sprinkling of Asians (Indians, Koreans, me) and only one black. The class was taught by an Indian lady and a Columbia Ph.D named Ramaswami. My next class was Marketing (MGM 625). The teacher was ...an Indian. His name was Mittal. I remember him quite well because he called me Omar. Only two classes on my first day, and I was looking forward to the next day, partly to find out whether there's any non-Indian teacher in this school. It's Statistics class (MGQ 606) the next morning and I was dead certain that it's going to be another Indian. It's Professor John Boot, a Dutch.
I used to hate Chemistry with all my life but here's different. The teachers were passionate and knew their stuff inside out. They wrote textbooks. Some of them came to class dressed down and undone and you could mistake them for flood victims. Boot was the best of the lot. He used pornography to spice up his statistics class. Nobody missed his class.
I very rarely spoke in class, any class. On the odd occasion the professors had to seek my esteemed opinion, the whole class could be seen squirming to unscramble my thoughts and navigate my choppy English. My best friend was the lone black guy, who's exactly one foot taller. We hit it off at first sight. I wasn't sure why but my theory was that, in the absence of other blacks, he saw me as the closest thing. Of course there were Indians, but Indians were, well, Indians. He, like me, rarely spoke in class or anywhere.
Things took a comical turn in the third semester. We'd to write a paper at the end of a group marketing research project. The leader was so impressed with the part I wrote for the project that he secretly asked me to edit other members' write-ups on other parts. I declined. I simply had no stomach for a showdown with the guys once they found out that their masterpieces had been corrected by a Kelantanese. Hahaha
He didn't ask me to present the paper.
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Melayu Met Melayu
I was into the second week, and I'd yet to speak to another Melayu other than my wife. I jumped with joy when I finally found a name at the students association office: Razali Mohd Taib. He's listed as president of the Malaysian Students Association, with a contact number. I called the number but apparently it's out of service. I later learned that Malaysian students changed their numbers (and names) every semester as they moved around a lot. And got away with unpaid bills.
After three days of staking out, we finally bumped into a small-size girl in unmistakable tudung walking alone on Bailey Ave. She smiled, and it's the sweetest thing I'd seen in weeks. We knew we'd found what we're looking for. Her name was Mazni. We're so happy that we took her home and asked her "mana budak Melayu lain?" ten times. Word about a good-looking Malay family floated fast and the next few days we got to meet more Melayu: Fizal, Bakar, Anuar, Huda, Asiah (Hat), Haz, Jasmin, Kurshiah, Romi, Shimah, Sabariah, Pah and, of course, Razali Mohd Taib, now ex-president.
The following week, out of the blue, another three girls joined us : Yati, Marzita and Nazita. They all looked drained and confused. I forgot to ask these freshers why they came so late and why Buffalo, of all places.
I thought Huda had the natural pr personality and flair to sustain a healthy connection not only among us, but also with other Malay communities outside Buffalo, right up to far-flung Louisiana. Everybody in US called her Hud, except Fizal, who called her Huk.
The Melayu population swelled further as more migrated to UB the following semesters: Azam, Azman, Rahuni, Md Nor, Sufian, Sufian, Asmadi, Norazman, Tahir, Megat, Ruzila, Puteri, Asiah, Faridah and a few others (can't recall their fancy names). All of them were from the surrounding community colleges, except Tahir, who didn't come from Poughkeepsie or Spring Valley. He came from Singapore.
Beautiful Buffalo (I'm Serious About This)
To be sure, Buffalo isn't Bologna, even if you don't know where Bologna is. But it's pretty enough in a rather unshowy and understated way, with its own character and charisma, whatever this catch-all means. The city centre, or downtown, is located on the shores of Lake Erie, bordering Canada, which is a different country (in case you're not aware). It's a real pity that the city and its sweeping skyline can only be fairly admired from the lake, at night, in a boat. Problem is, nobody wants to be in a boat on a lake at night.
The main tourist draw is the nearby Niagara Falls, one of the world's greatest natural wonders. I'd learned about Air Terjun Niagara in standard six Ilmu Alam but I'd never imagined seeing it in the flesh. Anyway Buffalo is globally known for its very own natural wonder: snow. The first time I saw snow in Buffalo, I felt my stomach drop.
Our house was actually not far from downtown, but the journey by bus could easily take an hour as the bus would stop at every corner to pick up or drop off old ladies. These lazy ladies would more often than not make small talk with the equally old driver before getting off. They're so slow and hard on hearing that your dark, sadistic side might find it tempting enough to push the ladies (and the driver) off the bus. For this reason, I'd rather go to New York City (700 km) than downtown Buffalo (10 km).
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Baby, Born in The USA
It's life's little milestone as we welcomed our first baby in Spring 1983, in Buffalo, of all places. What an experience. For months the whole Malay community in Buffalo was buzzing with anticipation. For months everybody in the state of New York was eager and anxious. And why not, my wife and her baby bump had been sighted in all corners of the state: Downtown Buffalo, UB Campus, Niagara Falls, Manhattan, the Bronx, Binghampton, Syracuse, Rochester, Tonawanda, you name it.
To prepare for the baby, I bought a car. It's a 5 year-old manual-shift Mitsubishi Colt. For $2200, I didn't expect it to move like a red Corvette, but it's good enough for grocery runs and campus commute.
It's late evening of 11 April 1983 when I'd to rush my wife to Buffalo Sisters of Charity Hospital. I dragged along one of the girls (Yati) just in case. The doctor was an Egyptian named Fuad Darwish. With a name like that, he should be a poet. The nerve-numbing wait was soon over, and my heart leapt when I heard my baby scream.
We're back home after three days at the hospital. "Home" now was no longer the "shoeless" house at Rounds Ave. We'd actually moved to another house, on a narrow cul-de-sac off Bailey Ave, sharing with Huda, Yati, Marzita and Nazita. It's a huge property with an uncanny Bates Motel architecture. (We named it Rumah Rados, after the landlord). Lucky thing we had these girls around, who helped us with the baby. We could never thank these instant aunties enough.
We'd befriended a Vietnamese lady who owned an oriental store not far from our house. This Makcik Vietnam was our baby care "consultant" whose invaluable A to Z of baby bearing and baby bringing helped us and our baby brave the harsh Buffalo winter. On her advice, we immediately enrolled in WIC program, a state social (OK, welfare) program that handed out baby-food coupons to "deserving" families, like most black families, Makcik Vietnam and my family. It's not much, but it helped. We sometimes used the coupons to buy our own breakfast cereals (Hahaha, Melayu tetap Melayu).
Lovely Sambal Rainbow Trout
Ah, rainbow trout. Smooth, silky, savoury. Fabulous food. I didn't miss home cooking because we cooked, I mean my wife cooked. Every weekend I'd prowl Wegmans, Bell or other grocery stores for rainbow trout on the cheap. Fried rainbow trout in sambal prepared by my wife for deep winter dinners is the best food I've ever eaten.
Fizal would occasionally drop by at mealtime to ask about our baby. This ploy worked every time. If he's in luck, he'd be rewarded with my wife's trout trophy. I can still recall his kind words like "Sedak miseh masok" etc. Very clever.
On The Road Again, and Again
We liked to travel and, boy, did we travel. Days and nights and days on end. We'd spend every semester break and long weekends on the lam somewhere far from Buffalo. Normally we'd travel in two or three rented cars with our housemates (Huda, Marzita, Nazita, Yati) plus a few other girls, with Fizal and Bakar as our drivers. Nobody drove like these two guys: they could drive without any sleep. And when they finally slept, they slept in the cars !
I think I'd covered more than 30 states in US plus the eastern provinces of Canada (different country), seeing not only the famous places and iconic landmarks, but also the lesser-known treasures like Yale, Old Montreal, Prince Edward Island, Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Navajo Indian Reservation. There were of course some forgettable duds I chanced upon, you know, places like Tallahassee, Baton Rouge and Kalamazoo, which didn't quite live up to their funky names. By the time I left Buffalo in June 1984, I would've easily logged 20,000 km, longer than Marco Polo.
Travel in US was cheap because car rental was only RM25/ day and fuel was 80 sen/litre. Divide that by four or five persons in one car, you actually paid a pittance. Lodging was free because Malaysian students could be found in every state (except Alaska, but you didn't go to Alaska). I can still recall, on our trip to Florida, we stopped off at Charleston, South Carolina. The Malay students there lived in trailers and they welcomed us with plenty of food and Mountain Dew. We're so hungry that we only talked to them after we're done with the food. That night I slept in the trailer home like a log. These people weren't rich and famous but they're just kind and proud to provide fellow Melayu with enough rest to recover for the next leg.
There's one trip that's absolutely out-of-mind in every sense. It's a 900 km drive to Orchard Beach, Maine. Nobody knew where Maine was, let alone Orchard Beach. Bakar and I were obsessed with photography, not so much with picture-taking skills, but with the hardware (cameras, lenses). Things got out of hand as we decided it's time to upgrade our cameras to capture the full glory of frozen Niagara Falls and the Adirondacks foliage. The cheapest place to buy cameras in US happened to be Orchard Beach. We reached the town late evening, parked our car in front of the camera shop and slept in the car until the store opened the next day. I bought a Nikon FE2, a real beauty and an excellent workhorse. Bakar bought a Nikon F3, top of the line model, and one up on me. I still have the FE2 with me in perfect condition but I'm using a mirrorless Fujifilm digital now. I heard Bakar lost his F3 in a flood or a fire.
Another trip that's massively memorable was the coast-to-coast drive from Buffalo to LA and back to Buffalo in a two-week blitz in spring 1984. Until today I still wonder how in the world did I ever conceive the suicidal idea. The risk was so real. Imagine, our Mitsubishi was a near-junk, it could decide to break down and fall off any time during the 10,000 km drive, while we had our one-year old boy on board. We stopped and slept literally anywhere, including one nice rest area in Alabama. But it's fast and furious all the way as we crossed more than a dozen states, passing pretty sights like Grand Canyon, Mojave Desert and Las Vegas Strip, and sneaking into Mexico (another different country, haha) just for the hell of it. We got booked by police in Tijuana for no reason and had to pay $20 on the spot. We lived to fight another day, and were back in Buffalo in time for more classes.
Wrapped Around My Finger
It's hard not to notice that a lot of the students here listen to a lot of music. For the serious student, music would calm his or her nerves after the daily grind of classes and winter flurries. For the more serious one, it's the other way: classes are calm and comfort after a whole night of high music.
The biggest source of free music was the radio, and some radio stations played music, mostly the rockish and rubbish variety, around the clock. Some of the guys (not Azam or Azman) even wore loud rock t-shirts, attended live gigs and so on, which I thought was fine since that would inspire them towards better grades in their studies (don't ask me how). Md Nor upped the octave when he bought a guitar to impress all of us although he couldn't even hit the simplest chords.
I had a radio that was perennially preset to the station that played only 60's and 70's oldies. Boz Scaggs, Three Dog Night and the like, hahaha, which I turned on whenever I was up late toiling on my homework. The strange sound would fill the whole house, but Huda and the other Rados residents never made an issue of my choice, probably out of respect.
I'm no music maestro, but I thought the music tastes among the Melayu here weren't strikingly sophisticated or wildly imaginative. They're pretty much straight-line: the boys loved Bruce Springsteen, the girls would die for Rick Springfield. And that's that. Today Bruce Springsteen is still at it but is largely ignored. I don't really know what's become of Rick Springfield. Maybe he's a senator or prime minister of Australia, who knew.
I still have a radio now but I only listen in fits and starts, in between my two lovely grand-daughters. 80s music is mostly aired by the light-and-easy station, which also plays California Dreaming by the Mamas and the Papas. Whenever the likes of Wrapped Around Your Finger or Come On Eileen come on, they would shake my senses and conjure up the moods and memories of my Buffalo break. Nothing spectacular about these numbers, but, somehow, they're just.... there.
Bye Bye Buffalo
Time flies, even in 1980s. It's June 1984 and it's time to pack our bags and leave on a jet plane. Before that, on May 19, I had my convocation, or commencement, as it's called in US, a straightforward, low-key affair. The one I had at UKM five years earlier was really grand, as it was broadcast live over Radio Malaysia. Every graduate's name was announced, so the whole country knew I graduated that day. It's something to celebrate as there were only five universities in Malaysia and all graduates were locals. The radio stations have stopped this practice now that Malaysia has more than 100 universities and half of the graduates were born in Nigeria.
But there's still time for one final fling, the proverbial last kopek. Yes, one last road trip. This time to the New England states and eastern Canadian Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Quebec. Exotic names and pure, pristine places. Add them to your your bucket list.
It's very early morning of June 18 and I can't recall who drove me to Buffalo Airport and saw us off. Probably Bakar and Rahuni. It's a short flight to JFK before a long, multiple shut-eye flight to Tokyo, and then another flight to KL the next day. We landed at the old Subang airport finally, and as I was waiting for my bags, a sister-in-law came in from behind us and snatched our baby away. It's her first nephew and she's not going to wait.
To prepare for the baby, I bought a car. It's a 5 year-old manual-shift Mitsubishi Colt. For $2200, I didn't expect it to move like a red Corvette, but it's good enough for grocery runs and campus commute.
It's late evening of 11 April 1983 when I'd to rush my wife to Buffalo Sisters of Charity Hospital. I dragged along one of the girls (Yati) just in case. The doctor was an Egyptian named Fuad Darwish. With a name like that, he should be a poet. The nerve-numbing wait was soon over, and my heart leapt when I heard my baby scream.
We're back home after three days at the hospital. "Home" now was no longer the "shoeless" house at Rounds Ave. We'd actually moved to another house, on a narrow cul-de-sac off Bailey Ave, sharing with Huda, Yati, Marzita and Nazita. It's a huge property with an uncanny Bates Motel architecture. (We named it Rumah Rados, after the landlord). Lucky thing we had these girls around, who helped us with the baby. We could never thank these instant aunties enough.
We'd befriended a Vietnamese lady who owned an oriental store not far from our house. This Makcik Vietnam was our baby care "consultant" whose invaluable A to Z of baby bearing and baby bringing helped us and our baby brave the harsh Buffalo winter. On her advice, we immediately enrolled in WIC program, a state social (OK, welfare) program that handed out baby-food coupons to "deserving" families, like most black families, Makcik Vietnam and my family. It's not much, but it helped. We sometimes used the coupons to buy our own breakfast cereals (Hahaha, Melayu tetap Melayu).
Lovely Sambal Rainbow Trout
Ah, rainbow trout. Smooth, silky, savoury. Fabulous food. I didn't miss home cooking because we cooked, I mean my wife cooked. Every weekend I'd prowl Wegmans, Bell or other grocery stores for rainbow trout on the cheap. Fried rainbow trout in sambal prepared by my wife for deep winter dinners is the best food I've ever eaten.
Fizal would occasionally drop by at mealtime to ask about our baby. This ploy worked every time. If he's in luck, he'd be rewarded with my wife's trout trophy. I can still recall his kind words like "Sedak miseh masok" etc. Very clever.
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We liked to travel and, boy, did we travel. Days and nights and days on end. We'd spend every semester break and long weekends on the lam somewhere far from Buffalo. Normally we'd travel in two or three rented cars with our housemates (Huda, Marzita, Nazita, Yati) plus a few other girls, with Fizal and Bakar as our drivers. Nobody drove like these two guys: they could drive without any sleep. And when they finally slept, they slept in the cars !
I think I'd covered more than 30 states in US plus the eastern provinces of Canada (different country), seeing not only the famous places and iconic landmarks, but also the lesser-known treasures like Yale, Old Montreal, Prince Edward Island, Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Navajo Indian Reservation. There were of course some forgettable duds I chanced upon, you know, places like Tallahassee, Baton Rouge and Kalamazoo, which didn't quite live up to their funky names. By the time I left Buffalo in June 1984, I would've easily logged 20,000 km, longer than Marco Polo.
Travel in US was cheap because car rental was only RM25/ day and fuel was 80 sen/litre. Divide that by four or five persons in one car, you actually paid a pittance. Lodging was free because Malaysian students could be found in every state (except Alaska, but you didn't go to Alaska). I can still recall, on our trip to Florida, we stopped off at Charleston, South Carolina. The Malay students there lived in trailers and they welcomed us with plenty of food and Mountain Dew. We're so hungry that we only talked to them after we're done with the food. That night I slept in the trailer home like a log. These people weren't rich and famous but they're just kind and proud to provide fellow Melayu with enough rest to recover for the next leg.
There's one trip that's absolutely out-of-mind in every sense. It's a 900 km drive to Orchard Beach, Maine. Nobody knew where Maine was, let alone Orchard Beach. Bakar and I were obsessed with photography, not so much with picture-taking skills, but with the hardware (cameras, lenses). Things got out of hand as we decided it's time to upgrade our cameras to capture the full glory of frozen Niagara Falls and the Adirondacks foliage. The cheapest place to buy cameras in US happened to be Orchard Beach. We reached the town late evening, parked our car in front of the camera shop and slept in the car until the store opened the next day. I bought a Nikon FE2, a real beauty and an excellent workhorse. Bakar bought a Nikon F3, top of the line model, and one up on me. I still have the FE2 with me in perfect condition but I'm using a mirrorless Fujifilm digital now. I heard Bakar lost his F3 in a flood or a fire.
Another trip that's massively memorable was the coast-to-coast drive from Buffalo to LA and back to Buffalo in a two-week blitz in spring 1984. Until today I still wonder how in the world did I ever conceive the suicidal idea. The risk was so real. Imagine, our Mitsubishi was a near-junk, it could decide to break down and fall off any time during the 10,000 km drive, while we had our one-year old boy on board. We stopped and slept literally anywhere, including one nice rest area in Alabama. But it's fast and furious all the way as we crossed more than a dozen states, passing pretty sights like Grand Canyon, Mojave Desert and Las Vegas Strip, and sneaking into Mexico (another different country, haha) just for the hell of it. We got booked by police in Tijuana for no reason and had to pay $20 on the spot. We lived to fight another day, and were back in Buffalo in time for more classes.
Wrapped Around My Finger
It's hard not to notice that a lot of the students here listen to a lot of music. For the serious student, music would calm his or her nerves after the daily grind of classes and winter flurries. For the more serious one, it's the other way: classes are calm and comfort after a whole night of high music.
The biggest source of free music was the radio, and some radio stations played music, mostly the rockish and rubbish variety, around the clock. Some of the guys (not Azam or Azman) even wore loud rock t-shirts, attended live gigs and so on, which I thought was fine since that would inspire them towards better grades in their studies (don't ask me how). Md Nor upped the octave when he bought a guitar to impress all of us although he couldn't even hit the simplest chords.
I had a radio that was perennially preset to the station that played only 60's and 70's oldies. Boz Scaggs, Three Dog Night and the like, hahaha, which I turned on whenever I was up late toiling on my homework. The strange sound would fill the whole house, but Huda and the other Rados residents never made an issue of my choice, probably out of respect.
I'm no music maestro, but I thought the music tastes among the Melayu here weren't strikingly sophisticated or wildly imaginative. They're pretty much straight-line: the boys loved Bruce Springsteen, the girls would die for Rick Springfield. And that's that. Today Bruce Springsteen is still at it but is largely ignored. I don't really know what's become of Rick Springfield. Maybe he's a senator or prime minister of Australia, who knew.
I still have a radio now but I only listen in fits and starts, in between my two lovely grand-daughters. 80s music is mostly aired by the light-and-easy station, which also plays California Dreaming by the Mamas and the Papas. Whenever the likes of Wrapped Around Your Finger or Come On Eileen come on, they would shake my senses and conjure up the moods and memories of my Buffalo break. Nothing spectacular about these numbers, but, somehow, they're just.... there.
Bye Bye Buffalo
Time flies, even in 1980s. It's June 1984 and it's time to pack our bags and leave on a jet plane. Before that, on May 19, I had my convocation, or commencement, as it's called in US, a straightforward, low-key affair. The one I had at UKM five years earlier was really grand, as it was broadcast live over Radio Malaysia. Every graduate's name was announced, so the whole country knew I graduated that day. It's something to celebrate as there were only five universities in Malaysia and all graduates were locals. The radio stations have stopped this practice now that Malaysia has more than 100 universities and half of the graduates were born in Nigeria.
But there's still time for one final fling, the proverbial last kopek. Yes, one last road trip. This time to the New England states and eastern Canadian Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Quebec. Exotic names and pure, pristine places. Add them to your your bucket list.
It's very early morning of June 18 and I can't recall who drove me to Buffalo Airport and saw us off. Probably Bakar and Rahuni. It's a short flight to JFK before a long, multiple shut-eye flight to Tokyo, and then another flight to KL the next day. We landed at the old Subang airport finally, and as I was waiting for my bags, a sister-in-law came in from behind us and snatched our baby away. It's her first nephew and she's not going to wait.
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| UB's Engineering Students |
Niagara Falls When It's Not Frozen
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| My Boy Showing Off His Snow Skills |
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Second From Right Is Clint Eastwood. |
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| Doreen Preparing Nasi Padang For Her Malaysian Guests |
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| Historic Place. Historic Hair |
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| Ottawa, Japan |
