Satun. Langkawi. George Town. Then a flight to Kuching.

But it all seems a bit irrelevant at the moment.

The weekend has been dominated by the terrible events in New Zealand on Friday.

We get asked a lot where we're from. It's part of the polite chitchat Southeast Asians do with strangers. We always say "New Zealand". (Admittedly, this is a bit of shorthand in our case. The longer version comes if/when we get to know the person better.)

Normally, the reaction is "oh, such a beautiful country" or "such a peaceful country" or "such a clean country". New Zealand has a vast amount of reputational capital in pretty much every place we've travelled. Basically, if people have heard of it, they have a good opinion of it.

Now, when we say we're from New Zealand, we have to talk about a terrorist massacre.

We've had four of those conversations this weekend.

What can you say? Apart from that you're grief-stricken by this vicious tearing apart of lives and families, repulsed by the ugliness of the terrorist's ideology, and awed by the stories of heroism that are emerging?

Words. Just words. So very, very inadequate.

Two personal things stand out for me. The first is the realization that I'm definitely still a Kiwi... It's more than 10 years since I've lived there. I've had my beefs with the place. But when New Zealand is under attack, I feel viscerally involved.


The other is the sense that I -- we all -- need to do more...

Australian commentator Waleed Aly's moving message resonated with me, as with so many.

Such incidents never come out of nowhere.

And I've done too little to defend decency.

Yes, I've pushed back against the casual Islamophobia I've encountered in circles where such expressions would once have been unthinkable. And as an academic I've continually resisted "essentialism" in all its guises (the idea that "they" are "this" -- both categories always highly over-simplified and generalized, obfuscating rather than enlightening). With my students, I've done my little bit to expose the undercurrent of racism that swirls beneath a lot of international relations power struggles.

But I've often been too polite, I think -- too slow to push back really forcefully; overly respectful of others' right to have an opinion, even if gross.

Things must change. I must change.

In the meantime, kia kaha, Aotearoa.