A reflection on the invisible people holding our world together.
A reflection on the invisible people holding our world together.
It was an ordinary afternoon at a mamak in Kuala Lumpur. The kind of place where the ceiling fans turn just fast enough to make you forget the heat, where the teh tarik arrives before you’ve finished your sentence, and where the whole city seems to pass through sooner or later.
My colleague and I were waiting for our food. When his order arrived, something wasn’t right — the wrong dish, a missing item, a small thing, the kind of thing that happens in a busy restaurant a hundred times a day. But rather than letting it go, he turned on the server. The words came sharp and fast.
I leaned across the table and, in French so only he could hear, I asked him to stop.
He looked at me.
“That man,” I said quietly, “is not the cook. He is not the owner. His job is to carry the plate from the kitchen to your table. That is all he controls today.”
I paused, then said what I actually wanted him to hear.
“And more than that — he crossed oceans and borders to be here. He works twelve hours a day. He gets one day off a month. One. And every dirham, every ringgit he earns, he sends back to people who are waiting for him. People who are counting on him. He is here because something — or someone — was worth leaving everything behind for.”
My colleague sat back. After a moment, he nodded slowly.
“You’re right,” he said. “I shouldn’t have reacted that way.”
The food arrived. We ate in relative quiet. But something had shifted — at least for me. And I think, for him too.
A few months later, I was on the train.
A foreign worker stepped aboard at one of the stops — the kind of tired that only comes from the kind of work most of us will never do. The kind where your body keeps going because stopping isn’t an option. He scanned the carriage, found an empty seat, and folded himself into it with quiet relief.
A few stations later, some women entered the carriage. There were empty seats in the next coach. Plenty of them. But a local man walked up to the worker and told him to give up his seat.
And then — as though the humiliation needed a finishing touch — he added:
“This is Malaysia.”
I watched it happen and felt something break open in my chest.
Not just sadness. Something closer to grief. Because I knew something about that man in the seat — or at least, I knew his story, even if I didn’t know his name.
The Life You Don’t See
Here is what most people on that train didn’t know. Here is what most people never stop to consider.
That man — the one now standing in the aisle, head down, making himself small — has a phone in his pocket. And on that phone, there are photographs. A wife, maybe. Children with wide, bright eyes. Parents with tired hands and proud smiles. A home that is modest but full.
Whenever these workers get a free moment, they disappear into a corner and they call. And when the screen lights up with the faces of their family, something extraordinary happens. The exhaustion doesn’t vanish, but something else comes through — joy, recognition, belonging. The people on the other side of that call don’t see a foreign worker. They don’t see a man who just gave up his seat or served a plate of food that wasn’t exactly right.
They see everything.
They see the father who left so his children could go to school. They see the son whose monthly transfer means his elderly parents don’t have to choose between medicine and food. They see the husband whose absence is painful precisely because his presence means so much. They see someone building a future — not for himself, not even for his children, but for grandchildren who have not yet been born.
He might mean nothing to you. But he means the world to someone else.
What They Give Up So You Can Have This
Think about the last time you walked through a train station and didn’t notice the floor. That cleanliness didn’t happen by itself. Think about the last building you entered — the lobby, the lifts, the glass towers of the skyline. Think about the roads, the tunnels, the infrastructure of daily convenience that most of us move through without a second thought.
These men and women built it. They are still building it. They clean it, maintain it, keep it running. They sacrifice proximity to the people they love most in the world, and they allow their dignity to be stepped on — sometimes in moments just as cutting as what I witnessed on that train — because the dream they are working toward is worth the indignity.
Not every dream is about luxury. For most of them, the dream is simpler and more profound: a roof that doesn’t leak, a child who can read, a parent who can afford to be sick without it becoming a catastrophe. They are here for that. They are enduring this for that.
A Hierarchy Built on Sand
There is a particular kind of contempt that some people carry toward foreign workers — a contempt dressed up as pride, as belonging, as the right of having been born in a particular place. The changing of seats. The averting of eyes. The small daily performances of superiority.
But here is the uncomfortable truth that performance depends on: the very things that make you feel entitled to look down at someone else were, in large part, built by the people you are looking down at.
Your spotless commute. Your gleaming office building. The city that rises every year, faster and taller. The food on the table in the restaurant where you sit in judgment of a server who carried it to you.
None of it appeared on its own.
And Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — Safety, Love and Belonging, Esteem, Self-Actualization — does not have a footnote that says “except for migrant workers.” These are not the aspirations of the privileged. They are the aspirations of the human. Every single person crossing borders in search of a better life is pursuing the same things you would pursue if you were in their position.
They Are Not Perfect. Neither Are You.
I want to say something plainly, because it matters: I am not asking you to romanticize. Foreign workers, like all people, are complicated. Some will disappoint you. Some have made mistakes. They are not a symbol or a cause. They are people — flawed, tired, hopeful, achingly human people.
But here is the standard I am asking you to hold: the same one you hold for yourself. The grace you extend to your own imperfections. The patience you ask others to show you on your worst days. The basic dignity you consider non-negotiable when it comes to how you are treated.
That. Just that.
Not pity. Not charity. Not the condescending warmth of someone who feels good about being kind to “those people.” Just the ordinary, unremarkable respect that one human being owes another — for the simple reason that they are human.
The Next Time You See Him
The next time you are in a restaurant and the order isn’t exactly right, remember: the man standing at your table carries a world inside him that you cannot see.
The next time someone sits next to you on a train, tired and quiet and trying not to take up too much space, remember: somewhere, someone is counting the days until he comes home.
The next time you move through the city — the clean city, the lit city, the city that works — remember who kept it running while you were sleeping.
You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to do anything dramatic. You only have to remember one thing:
He means the world to someone. And that someone, right now, is hoping that you treat him like it.
— Written in a mamak in Kuala Lumpur, with gratitude for the people who keep the lights on.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over her