COVID-19 took my mother and father. So I turned to mother nature

Walking in unbearable humidity, clothes soaked with never-ending sweat, I could pull the long, dark nails of remorse out of my heart and let them slip all the way down to my feet. Like an oil leak, that black anger dripped out of me and into every footprint I left in my wake, nursed back to nature by cleansing jungle soil.

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To make a long and sad story short, after my parents passed away, me and my Malaysian wife, Kit Yeng, were stuck in the village of Cabanaconde, Peru, for almost a month before we could return home to Penang. We eventually hopped on a repatriation effort coordinated by the Malaysian Embassy in Peru, which took us halfway across the world from Lima to Brazil to Kuala Lumpur via Doha. Sprayed, sanitized, and hauled onto a ‘sick bus’, we were forced into two connecting hotel rooms for two weeks of five-star quarantine.

Holed up in that useless cosiness, the feeling of not having been there for my parents when they needed me most frankly shattered all the excuses I had made up to stay away for years trying to make it as a ‘travel writer’. And with two weeks alone with my thoughts, there wasn’t much I could do to stop that evil black hole of remorse from growing bigger.

Despite being named after a far-flung sub-arctic region, my mother, Tundra, never fulfilled her desire to travel as much as she had wanted to. Even though her command of the English language was limited, she relished the crazy adventures of her hitch-hiking travel-writing second son by enrolling in language courses and using translation devices.

My stories from hidden Asia brought some curiosity and solace into her small-town northern Italian world, where I had always stood out as a perniciously inspired freak of nature anyway. But to her, I was a strange, courageous hero—and her words of support towards my now-insignificant achievements had always helped push me forward on that unconventional path.

“‘No more words. Stay where you are, it’s too bad here. I’m not sure I’ll make it,’ was the last thing [my father] ever wrote to me on 22 March 2020. The next day, he passed away, sealed behind the gates of a hospital.”

My father Maurizio was a different kind of beast: Comfortable in his small-town home turf, he was suspicious of anything foreign, and yet open-minded and far too compassionate. But that deeply conservative ghost—a monster scarier than COVID-19, I still think— could possess him in ways that would make me feel like he got the whole world upside down.

“Your life in Asia is difficult. You have no security, no stable job, you eat strange food and are surrounded by people who are not your own,” he had told me once, making my blood boil. “I don’t know how and why you wanna do it, but if you came closer to home, you’d make everyone happier”.

But in the end, there was no real struggle between us: He was made of that same stubborn master stone I’ve been cut from, and had taught me everything about resilience, hard work, and the value of staying true and honest to myself.

“No more words. Stay where you are, it’s too bad here. I’m not sure I’ll make it,” was the last thing he ever wrote to me on 22 March 2020. The next day, he passed away, sealed behind the gates of a hospital that kept failing at preventing this new disease from ripping through the Italian Oltrepò Pavese like a trail of burning gasoline.

My mother had died three days earlier on March 20, separated from dad in the women’s ward. I don’t think dad ever realized that she had died before him— I’m positive they’ve caught up by now, and are possibly enjoying the best of whatever sort of paradise, nirvana, or cycle of reincarnation that awaits us all.

I also do believe that one of the landlords of those afterworlds must have had some mercy for me, because once we arrived back in Penang in early May 2020, the COVID-19 situation in Malaysia felt like stumbling from Peruvian mountain jail into tropical parole.

Countrywide, the daily cases were in the lower two digits, businesses were open, and life was still boisterous, yet careful, on the streets—the opposite of Europe and Italy, where my holed-up brother used to end our phone calls with the grimy reports of thousands of infections and hundreds of deaths every single day.

“We should make the best out of it,” I told my wife. With all the international travel we had done in the past several years, in truth we had always treated Penang island more like a much-needed rest stop, rather than a proper destination in itself.

Most know Penang island for the UNESCO World Heritage Status of its multi-cultural capital George Town, its world-renowned street food, and the consequential wave of gentrification and mass tourism that followed after Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic kick-started a street art mania by painting a series of mural installations on the walls of the heritage city in 2012.

Penang is also famous for its 833-meter-high Penang Hill, the first British colonial hill station established in Malaysia in 1787, which is connected to sea level by the famous Funicular Railway opened in 1924, one of the steepest in the world. In 2019 alone, the train whisked 1.38 million tourists to Penang Hill Upper Station, but few visitors ever venture much farther than the top of the main hill, beyond which a series of uninterrupted peaks covered in million-years-old rainforest stretch across the northeastern corner of the island all the way to the sea.

We started reconnecting with our backwoods by going on short loops to the popular hikers’ rest stop Station 5 on the lower flanks of Penang Hill three times a week. On weekends, we’d strike on longer hikes connecting the dots between the island’s other lesser-known peaks: Bukit (which means “hill” in Malay) Olivia, Bukit Cendana, Carla’s Peak, Bukit Batu Ferringhi, Bukit Cempedak, Bukit Laksamana, among others.

It’s hard to put into words, but of all the places I have visited around the world, I still think that the tropical rainforests hold something uniquely soothing. It’s akin to stepping into an ancient, purer world that makes one ponder about the transiency of human nature and our problems. The sound of myriad species of weird insects in Penang— including some of the world’s biggest cicadas, as loud as alarm bells from outer space—was almost like a language in itself, whispering to let go of the past, and only focus on the essentials of surviving.

“It was by standing at the bottom of these slender, ancient trees that I could slowly heal and put things into perspective and, more importantly, behind me.”

My almost daily hikes for healing, however, came to an abrupt halt when the delta COVID-19 variant started burning through India like another uncontrollable fire.

By the time the infection had spread to Malaysia in January 2021, and the surge in cases prompted the closure of the country’s interstate borders, we had already hiked all over the island. What crushed me again was the closure of all parks and nature trails and the limitation of movements to a 10-kilometer radius.

The following weeks turned into long months of semi-withdrawal symptoms—like a hiking junkie, I couldn’t get my fix of soothing greenery by just running around my block. Deprived of that safe escape into nature, I began sliding into anxiety again while on the other side of the world, Europeans and Americans restarted living and forgetting about the virus.

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There wasn’t much else I could do but wait: Malaysia’s national vaccination campaign kicked off only in June this year, and by the time I got my first jab and Penang Hill reopened to foot traffic, we were already into late July. Like many other Penangites who had taken to the hills because they had no chance to travel out of the island, I also flocked to the local trails as soon as I had gotten my first jab.

Returning to that green embrace after an enforced break, one thing became crystal clear: Throughout all of the chaos, the forest had barely changed. And the key to letting go of my cargo of remorse and finally go forward was simply to learn to imitate the forest’s endearing patience and stillness.

My epiphany seemed worthy of celebration, but what happened exceeded all my expectations: In mid-September, Penang Hill and its surrounding 12,481 hectares of marine and terrestrial ecosystems were recognized as Malaysia’s third UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. After two years of suffering in a world that still seems hell-bent to bounce back at full speed—despite the alarming signals of climate change—that nomination came as a ray of hope for this very special and yet very endangered island—one where the state government still hopes to carry on its much-opposed gargantuan development plan of raising three artificial islands off the southern coast to sell prime real estate and “boost the economy”.

Maybe their representatives should take a walk in the local forests to truly understand the value of this ecosystem. It was by standing at the bottom of these slender, ancient trees that I could slowly heal and put things into perspective and, more importantly, behind me. Looking up at the rays of light beaming upon me from the cracks in the canopy overhead, I understood that mom and dad have found a similar place of purity and wisdom where they can happily spend the rest of their eternal ethereal lives.

I hope that Penang State’s policymakers may experience a similar level of enlightenment, and keep this timeless environment safe for the benefit of us all.