From the American Dream to the Malaysian Surprise

Four weeks before my flight to California, my visa was refused. My French classmates had all received theirs without a single problem. I was the only one left behind, and the reason came down to my Chadian passport...

I am from Chad and I moved to France after high school to study engineering. The third year of my program included a mandatory semester abroad at a partner university, something we had been preparing for since the first year. The spots were limited, so the school ranked us based on grades and gave the top students first pick. I had worked hard and was among the best in my class, which meant I could choose any destination I wanted. I picked UC Irvine without much hesitation. I wanted to see the American campus system, meet people working in tech, and spend a few months in a country that had shaped so much of what I had watched and read as a teenager.

For weeks, everything lined up the way I had imagined. I had the acceptance letter, the plane ticket, a clear budget, and the quiet excitement that comes with discovering a new continent. Then my visa was refused.

Needless to say I was extremely disappointed, and it felt both unfair and personal in a way I had not expected.

By the time the refusal came through, every other destination was already full, and a forced gap year started to feel very real. I spent a few days unsure of what to do next, asking myself whether I should simply pause my studies for a year and try again. Fortunately, the international office of my school stepped in and pushed to add me to my second choice even though it was officially closed. With only four weeks on the clock, we managed to get all my paperwork done in time.

And that is how I boarded a plane to Malaysia instead of California, still adjusting to a plan I had not made for myself.

Landing in Kuala Lumpur

Walking out of the airport in Kuala Lumpur, the first thing I noticed was the heat. It felt similar to the heat back home in Chad, which I kind of missed. I had actually been to Southeast Asia once before as a child, but my last visit was when I was seven years old and I remember almost nothing from it. So in practice, everything around me felt genuinely new, and I arrived with very few references to lean on.

The familiarity of the weather stopped at the airport doors. Kuala Lumpur opened up as a city of tall skyscrapers, wide highways, and car brands I had never seen before such as Proton and Perodua. It was a real contrast with the France I had gotten used to over the last few years, and it made me realise how little I actually knew about this part of the world.

I was enrolled at Asia Pacific University (APU), and the campus was really big and modern. We lived directly on it, which gave the whole experience a compact feeling I had not imagined beforehand. Class was a few minutes from my room, the cafeteria was a few minutes from class, and my friends were almost always within walking distance. That closeness ended up shaping the entire semester for me.

My first meal in the country was Nasi Lemak with butter chicken, shared with the group of students I had flown in with. We were all from the same school in France, but they had prepared for Malaysia together through workshops while I was doing the same on my side with the California group. I had only been added to their group at the very last minute, so they did not really know me and I did not know them. That first dinner was really the beginning of everything.

Once we had settled in, we did not stay on campus the whole time. On weekends we would head into the city and let it surprise us. One evening we would end up at a street food stall eating for a couple of ringgits, and the next we might be walking through a large shopping mall filled with brands I had never heard of. Kuala Lumpur holds both of these worlds next to each other, and nobody seems to care which one you choose on a given day.

A melting pot like no other

Beyond the campus and the food, one of the things that stayed with me the most from Malaysia is how mixed the country feels in daily life. Malays, Chinese, and Indians are its three main communities, and Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are its three main religions.

What struck me was how ordinary all of this felt on the ground. Coming from France, where religion in public life is a topic of constant debate, I was not used to seeing a temple, a mosque, and a church sitting within the same few blocks, or watching people show up for each other's holidays without treating it as anything exceptional. I do not want to idealize the country, because Malaysia has its own tensions and its own unresolved questions, but the daily reality of people sharing space with each other was something I had honestly not seen at that level before.

I visited the Thean Hou Temple with its dragon-covered roofs, and I went up to the Batu Caves where a large golden statue of Murugan stands at the entrance. These places did not feel like tourist boxes to tick off a list, at least not to me. They felt more like small lessons on how different communities build their own landmarks while continuing to share the same country with each other.

The people I met

Beyond the monuments, what really made the semester meaningful for me was the people I met along the way. I wanted to do more than take pictures of temples, so I tried to have as many real conversations as I could with people outside of my own student bubble. A few of them stayed with me long after I left the country.

A taxi driver named Hamad once explained to me how certain university spots and economic benefits are structured around ethnicity in Malaysia, and I could tell it was a subject he had thought about for a long time. It is a sensitive topic with strong opinions on both sides, so I mostly listened rather than offered my own view. I did not feel it was my place as a foreign student passing through for a few months to form a firm opinion on something so layered.

Beyond those individual conversations, people in general were kind to me in small and consistent ways throughout the semester. Grab drivers gave me life advice during rides to campus, and the aunties working at the cafeteria would regularly check whether I had eaten enough that day. Gestures like that added up over the months, and I never felt lonely during my stay even though I had arrived with no plan and no existing friends on the ground.

Traveling with a "poor" passport

While I was settling into life in Malaysia, I also wanted to see a bit of the region around it. My French friends could travel almost anywhere in Southeast Asia without thinking twice, but my Chadian passport made the same trips noticeably harder. It meant more visas to request, more paperwork to prepare, and more quiet waiting at border counters while someone disappeared to check with a manager. Even so, I managed to reach a few places I had planned to visit.

My first trip was to the Perhentian Islands on the east coast of Malaysia with a group of friends. We went snorkelling, got caught in a thunderstorm on the wrong side of the island trying to make it back, and spent the evenings laughing about things that probably would not be funny to anyone who was not there. The island was beautiful, but what I remember most is the effortless fun that only happens when nobody has a real plan.

After that, I went to Singapore, which felt to me like the Monaco of Southeast Asia. I was told the cost of living there is around six times higher than in Kuala Lumpur, and you can feel the difference as soon as you arrive. The city is extremely clean and orderly, and everything seems to have its assigned place. It was interesting to see, but I also understood quickly why many people I met prefer the warmth and imperfection of Kuala Lumpur just across the border.

I also spent a few days in Hanoi, where the atmosphere turned out to be very different from Kuala Lumpur. The city felt less polished and much busier, but the people were warm in their own direct way. Being a tall African man in Vietnam ended up being an experience on its own. For some of the children I crossed paths with, I was the first Black person they had ever seen in real life, and I ended up in a couple of family photos. I found the whole thing both funny and quietly touching at the same time.

Looking back

If I had gotten my American visa that year, I probably would have come home with a better line on my CV and a few photos of a campus I had already seen in movies. I am not going to pretend that would have been a bad outcome. But Malaysia made me think about things I was not expecting to think about. I had spent years imagining one version of the world, the one that starts with good grades, leads to a semester in a top university, and continues from there in a straight line. What I found instead is that the world is a lot wider than the path I had drawn for myself, and that some of the best things I have lived so far came from places I had never even considered.

I went back to Malaysia in October 2025, this time with my mother. I wanted her to walk through the streets I had been talking about since I came home. And being there again, I felt the same thing I had felt the first time, that in Malaysia, people looked at me before they looked at my passport.