I feared this morning’s rain would mean I’d be sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow for a couple of extra hours, but the sun’s out, now, just in time for flying east.

I was talking to Mowmy on the phone this morning while we figured out how we were going to get from Kuala Lumpur to Port Dickson after feasting it up at my grandmother’s for Chinese New Year. “The Internet says we have to take a bus from KL to Seremban, and then from Seremban to PD,” I said. “Come, let me see where Seremban is.”

I Googled-mapped Malaysia, then – distracted by adventure – navigated north for Taiping, the town where my mother was born. “Hey, Mowmy,” I said, noting its proximity to the peninsula’s west coast, “did you go to the beach all the time?” “Hah?” she said, “Beach? No lah!” “Kuala Sepetang?” I said, reading off the Google map and picking out a nearby village on the waterway. “The beach at Kuala Sepetang?” I imagined my mother and her brothers and sisters on a beach vacation in this Kuala Sepetang, tanned, gangly children in funny, too-big swimsuits and bowl-cut hairstyles. I imagined my grandmother in a light sarong kebaya and sunglasses under a stripey umbrella, and my grandfather grinning widely in thick, black-rimmed spectacles.

“I was born in Kuala Sepetang,” Mowmy said. “There was no beach. There was a mangrove swamp.”

Shits and giggles, kids, shits and giggles.

And awaayy we go!