The fortune-teller did a crappy job. It wasn’t totally her fault. I couldn’t recall the exact time of my birth, or even the general time of day, and as a Westerner, I didn’t have a Chinese name which could be deciphered. That didn’t leave her a lot to work with.

But I needed it. Or something, at least. Walking past the intricate pillar gates of LongShan Temple with their carved dragons, I’d been overcome with the desire to thrust forward on my knees and pray. Not pray for help, or forgiveness, or guidance. Just to profess the truth, and say “Yes, I’m totally out of control now.”

I fought the urge and instead ducked into the subway-like entrance of the temple area’s underground shopping complex, where I thought, what?, there’d be fewer people, anyways.

So, ambling around the well-kept tile avenues of crystal vendors, second-hand booksellers, and clairvoyants, I saw placards for divination and I just didn’t have any fight left. I chose a paper-paneled wooden door and slid it open half way to reveal a tiny office, which had just enough room for the fortune-teller, her desk, and a sagging stack of old books. She looked up with disinterested curiosity, as though I were a bird who landed too close to her seat at the park.

She looked like the sort of old Taiwanese woman I didn’t mind being around. She had a proud face, but without the rude thrust of someone who’d had to dust off that pride once too often (common here from the old days and their catalogue of hard bitternesses). In a simple brocade jacket, she wasn’t mounting some horrible attempt at remaining young. Nor had she any of the trappings of vain age - no gaudy, blocky rings, no burnished yellow gold bracelets, no claw-like fingers. She was, really, just a woman at desk, calm. This is probably why I found myself sitting there, getting divined. But, like I said, her reading was a disappointment.

She studied my hand for fifteen seconds and then said, “You’ll need to wait until you’re at least thirty to find love.”

“Is that all?” She turned to the computer at her side, and began manipulating drop-down menus on a crowded-looking piece of software. The program aggregated the yi-qing and god knows what other ancient texts. It looked like an html collage of tiny Chinese newsprint packed in her screen.

“What about work?”

“At least three more years there, too.”

“Fantastic.”

“Don’t get discouraged - you must toil for now.” You ever had someone give you conventional wisdom as if it were somehow an insight? It always inspires a great wave of pity in me, like that joke about the sad clown that goes to the doctor and gets told to go to his own show.

“Anything else?”

“It’s hard to read your face. Everything is different for foreigners,” she pulled a leather bound hardcover book from a groaning stack at her side, and showing diagram after diagram of stereotypical Asian faces reduced to unflattering line drawings, said “See what I mean?”

I frowned. I could have been rude, but why when I’d sought this out myself? Should she have turned me away at the door? “Sorry, I can’t do foreigners.” Right.

The truth is, my last oar had slipped out and sunk into the depths weeks ago. I sat waiting impatiently for any suggestion of the next wind’s direction. Any sign at all.

“I can tell from your teeth,” she went on, “that you had very good parents.” I considered this for a moment, hopeful. But that was all she had, that was it, and in response she was sitting stone silent, waiting for me to do the obvious thing and pay her.

I handed her a five-hundred dollar note - in the neighborhood of fifteen bucks - shook her hand, and climbed back out of her wood-paneled cubical.

The nest of cubicles that houses the licensed diviners was like nothing I’d ever seen before: immutable red signs, discrete, frosted windows, tight walkways with wood framed walls about six and a half feet high. It was how I imagined the love district in old Edo, only miniaturized.

It had been set up in an open plaza of the underground mall, and beside it the normal flow of of shopping went on. Or would go on if the place weren’t deserted. I returned briskly to the concourse. It had that timeless feeling fluorescent light gives off. All along the rim of the ceiling hung a long line of advertisements, like you’d see on the bus, only bigger. And there, wedged between longevity pills and a reputable, international bank, I saw her.

She was standing with the half-smile she had when forced to pose for pictures, something she hated. She’d been positioned between two men I didn’t recognize - a blonde foreigner and an unimpressive-looking Taiwanese guy - with her arms crossed over a grey skirt suit. Just barely in the foreground, like the lead singer of a band trying not to appear immodest.

She’d managed to find her way into a legal team, don’t ask me how. PR, maybe? But there she was, permed hair glossy, a fine dusting of makeup smoothing her features. Her eyes were fixed, and like they always seemed on film, looked into the camera almost frightened of what would happen. Her face, the depth of her expression, had wound up here, too, in the kingdom of last ditch efforts.

“Jesus,” I said to myself. “If one of us had died, at least there would have been a proper funeral.”

I was stuck in the eco-tourism spot called Sepilok, home of the Orangutan Rescue. It’s a terrible fate to be broke in a tourist zone, but one that brought me closer to the actual substance of the place, its rhythms and attitudes. This piece details some of the people I met on the edge of what we call a wonder.

Read the full text article at Eclectica Magazine.

Read an excerpt, Citizen of the World (around 1,600 words).

The walk back to the resort was 3km long. All around me the dry banana trees sweltered, their broad leaves whipped to strips by the wind and hanging limply. I had just passed a brick bunker recently repainted and emblazoned with the slogan “Working Harder for Better Power.” It was such a strange thing to contemplate, the power company deciding the best message to give was “We’ll try harder.” It sounded like something a deadbeat dad would say.

The same site was repeating itself: towering green, weeds tall and thick as a wall of smoke, the air heavy with the smell of baking grass. Borneo in August.

All that green in sunlight fuming

I had come to see the apes of the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, but found instead an observation deck packed with sunburned shoulders and expensive cameras on tripods. Ecotourism is huge on Borneo, a fact I’d not known. Another fact unknown to me was how well-known the centre is in the UK, where a high-profile charity secures the pounds and pence that keep Sepilok open. I watched two apes fish chunks of banana from a plastic drum far out on a feeding platform, the crowd gasping whenever one of them slipped into a lazy swing to fetch a fallen morsel, then left.

That had been in the morning, but now I was walking back from the highway that connects this forested back road with Sabah’s vast plots of seemingly unpopulated farms and light industry.

Around a bend, I could see a long building. Wallless on one side, I made out low tables in its shadowy interior, and someone seated. The sign said in English Ming Ho Industries, but the Chinese lettering underneath included the word for “shop.” Coming up the driveway, I could see shelves of goods inside. As I walked in, I interrupted the conversation of the man I’d seen seated and the woman behind the counter. Passing by, I noticed another man had laid himself across the line of benches, napping. They were all Asian, which I didn’t notice until later, but in Malaysia should have immediately taken note of.

I walked to the cooler at the back of the store, and they resumed talking. I heard the woman say in Mandarin “He looks so sweaty!” Bringing a cold bottle of Plus100, a curiously carbonated energy drink, to the counter, I asked her in Mandarin, “Do I really look that sweaty?”

Thin, tan, hair pulled in a tight pony tail, she gaped at me. “Huh?” She didn’t seem to want to choose any language to answer with, so just said a second time, “Huh?!?”

I repeated the question, and the man at the table started shaking his head animatedly, “TingBuDong, TingBuDong” – ‘I don’t understand what your saying.’

“I’m sorry, I must have an accent because I live in Taiwan,” I said, giving them a chance to save face by changing the topic. They started asking questions: How long have I been in Taiwan, why could I speak Mandarin so well, the usual barrage I could expect from everyone, taxi cabs to call girls. We started conversing comfortably, all of us shaky at times, chancing here and there across a gap in our Mandarin. It was none of our native tongues.

When the seated man praised my Chinese, I said any average Malaysian is far more impressive with the variety of languages they can speak.

“I want you to listen to what I’m about to tell you,” the woman said, leaning her narrow torso over the counter to stare at me. “The Malay, you know, people from Malaysia, aren’t like that. They can just speak Malay, and a little English. Some can’t even speak that! It’s the immigrants that are really multilingual.”

“Sounds like America,” I laughed, trying not to look uncomfortable at the subject of ethnic differences. “Or anywhere, really.”

“You’re right!” she said, “The Chinese are no better. They only speak huayu,” the term Malaysian Chinese use for Mandarin. The word Mandarin speakers use for the language is different everywhere you go. In Taiwan, we call it guoyu, the national language, and in Hong Kong it’s called putonghua, common speak. On the mainland, I hear it called baihua, white words. The word she chose, huayu, is harder to translate. It references China’s formal republican name. It made me think of exile.

She turns to the man at the table and tells me he’s Cantonese. Before he can add anything more on the subject of how different we all are, a tall white man, tank-top soaked with sweat, hurries to the counter and begins speaking the owner in fluent Malay. As she gets him his order, he tells me his name is Colin and that he’s working at the Rainforest Research Center across the road. He’s here studying a specific species of tree that’s been all but wiped out, save patches of protected land around Borneo. He points out one of his trees in the distance, it’s spindly trunk rising far above the canopy, alone in the blue sky. It’s branches stretch out unevenly, sparse like dry-brush clouds in a Chinese ink painting.

Colin's trees of particular interest"We work on ecology, replanting the sections of forest that have all been logged out, and on the Heart of Borneo project."

“The what?”

“The Heart of Borneo project is where Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei are working to link the protected areas in central Borneo together in one continuous ecological zone.” The effort would ensure 200,000 square km of forest would remain safe. The WWF website boasts that it is the “only place remaining in Southeast Asia where tropical rainforests can still be conserved on a grand scale.”

“Sounds difficult, politically.” I wondered what the shop owner thought of Indonesians or the Bruneian.

“Right now they’re just mapping the territory, so that’s a ways away still.” He was impatient for his change, and I could tell he wanted to leave, but I kept asking questions to keep him. I told him I was here working on a story about the Orangutan refuge, and he responded with the same unimpressed air I’d gotten the whole of my trip.

We talked about the shop, and the owner (whom Colin had introduced to me as Ms. Zhu) interrupted occasionally in either Mandarin or Malay to ask what’d just been said, grasping at the thread of the conversation. Colin mentioned his Dad spoke Mandarin, and would sit out here drinking beer and talking to Ms. Zhu all night.

“Does your father work at the rainforest research center as well?”

“No. Occasionally I need to go back to England to do part of my research at my university, and at those times my parents come to take care of my wife and daughter.” I looked at him skeptically. “My wife is a non-citizen, even though she was born right near here in Sabah.”

“Huh?” I said, and Ms. Zhu laughed.

“Well, you know that citizenship in Malaysia is traced by the bloodline…” I shook my head. In my research online, the closest thing I found to a discussion of citizenship was a note never to bring it up. “Right, well, the way it works is, if your parent is a citizen, then you’re a citizen, too. But if your parents aren’t, then even if you are born here and spend your whole life here, you aren’t one, either. This can go on for generations, obviously.”

“What about your ancestor’s countries?”

“That’s what makes it really complicated. See, my wife’s parents are Filipino, but since the Philippines still claim Sabah legally belongs to them, they have no embassy here. So, there’s no way for her to get a passport to leave and come back, or even register as a citizen. She can’t go anywhere.”

“So, wait, she just falls through the cracks?”

“Not just her. There are 1.4 million other people, actually. None of them can leave Sabah. They have no nationality. It’s a big issue. Of course, there are many people who say they can get them citizenship, papers, a passport. Mostly they just take your money and then nothing happens.”

“So they’re non-citizens, or, what, citizens of no-where?”

“They’re citizens of here, obviously.” Colin prickles at my comment, and in that moment I can see in him the trace of long, frustrating debates in humid wood-paneled rooms.

I finally let up long enough for him to excuse himself. He grabbed two large, sweating bottles of Plus100 and jumped into a worn-looking blue pickup and drove clamorously away.

I turned back to Ms. Zhu. We talked about the place, Colin’s father, the weather. I finished my drink, and bid them good day.

As I walked, I imagined how Ms. Zhu would explain the situation Colin finds his family in. I should have asked about her passport, and the Catonese man, too. But the next morning, I flew out, back to my own life in Asia.

The concept of foreign nationality never much mattered to me, nor does it seem to matter to most of the expats and traveler’s I’ve known. But I can’t even imagine the strangeness of being born into expatriation, affiliated with a people you’ve never known, kin to a country you’ve never seen. How impersonal identity can become.

In smokey bars, I have a habit of telling a quote from the movie Casablanca. Rick’s just been bidden by the French police captain to sit and drink with the two SS officers that arrived in Morocco that morning. In the background, foreign nationals of a dozen countries are drinking, gambling, hooking up and getting grifted. Everyone is stuck in the same burning desert limbo. The Nazi, removing a note pad, says sharply, “And what, Mr. Rick, is your nationality?”

Rick’s face is a total deadpan. “I’m a drunkard.”

Captain Renault speaks quickly, trying to smooth over Rick’s unflinching response. “That makes Rick a citizen of the world. ”

Miles of inscrutable forest