Why I Left Malaysia (And Why I Keep Going Back)

I grew up in Penang, which is a small island on the northwest coast of Malaysia. It’s famous for food — char kway teow, laksa, nasi kandar — and not much else, unless you count the George Town UNESCO heritage zone.

I left because I wanted to work on the hardest ML infrastructure problems, and those problems live in San Francisco. That calculus hasn’t changed. The density of people thinking about distributed training, GPU kernels, and large-scale inference here is unmatched.

But I keep going back. Not just for the food (though the food is a genuine reason). There’s something about the pace of life that recalibrates me. Penang operates on its own time. People eat dinner at 6pm. The hawker stalls close when the food runs out, not when the clock says to. Nobody is trying to disrupt anything.

I don’t think I’ll move back anytime soon. But I’ve stopped thinking of “here” and “there” as a binary. Both places are home in different ways.