Living in Canada for the past 21 years I thought I understood poverty. The poverty I thought I knew was that people who are unemployed can access employment insurance or social assistance while those who are homeless have at least the choice of using shelters provided by the government — however unattractive that may seem.

Never could I have imagined that poverty in this day and age means that pre-teen boys still work in fields instead of going to school, or that girls young enough to still skip-to-my-lou would be serving my every breakfast, lunch and dinner during a trip with my parents back to my native Malaysia, my first since immigrating with my family in 1984.

In Sandakan on the eastern coast of Malaysia I saw poverty I thought existed only in Dickens novels, not in a country known for the Petronas Towers and the tourist paradise of Penang. While walking along a shoreline dotted with stilted houses built on water I saw a boy about eight-years-old rummaging barefoot among refuse collecting scrap metal in a can almost as tall as he was. The boy was filthy, as the mud he walked upon was lapped by water that also served as a lavatory for those houses just metres away.

Another time I saw three boys ranging from five to ten-years-old walking along the side of a busy street. It was 8:30 a.m. on a school day but only one had a bag, and that was an empty plastic one held by the tallest. A couple of hours later when I returned I saw that the bag was being used to collect coal scrounged from a 10-acre field that had been bulldozed in preparation for a residential development.

My parents said these were Filipinos who enter the country illegally in search of jobs but who end up finding their own work. They do not have status and thus are not bound by education laws — in fact, without status, they are not allowed to attend school. This is unlike the Malays, who make up the majority of the population, and Chinese, who have access to education and all services provided by the government.

So the Filipinos — and other illegal immigrants, including Indonesians — fend for themselves in whatever way they can. These boys did the Dickensian thing and did what everyone else could afford to avoid doing. The girls work as housemaids or in open-air restaurants, often for less than $100(Cdn) a month. It was such that I got used to 10-year-old girls taking my order for a meal and soda that never cost more than $1.50(Cdn). But this is supposed to end. As of March 1, the Malaysian government ended amnesty to these illegal immigrants and began rounding them up for deportation.

I am not sure what surprised me more — that children still live like this or that this is where my roots lie. My parents grew up in Malaysia after their respective Hakka descendents emigrated from southern China and settled there in the early 1900s. But while they both worked hard to attain relative success my parents wanted a better life for their children, so they immigrated to Canada in the hopes of a brighter future.

What they left behind was a country where necessities taken for granted by Canadians are unreliable luxuries. In Malaysia, I experienced two blackouts in as many weeks — one for a few minutes and the other for almost two hours — and these were just the ones I knew about as I was outside for about three-quarters of the day.

In addition, the water supply cut out one night at a cousin’s place where I was visiting. Both are apparently common problems in a country that counts oil and ecotourism as major industries, leaving an economic cleavage that has yet to be reconciled.

The fruits of these economic harvests are reaped in West Malaysia, where westerners flock to beaches and resorts highlighted in tourism leaflets. And unlike Toronto’s City Hall, where the poor can be swept off its property onto neighbouring streets, the Malaysian government has a handy body of water called the South China Sea to isolate the rich sandy beaches on the west from the destitute conditions of the east.

When I returned to Canada my first pleasure was drinking a clean glass of tap water, something I did not indulge in during my trip. I returned to clean washrooms, clean air, and a clean social infrastructure where kids strap on backpacks and accompany parents on their way to school. But for all of this I may as well still be living in the 19th century in a Dickensian world of young coal gatherers and scrap metal collectors, for I’ve realized that this is a world that still has children who work for food in filth to support themselves and their families.

If only this were just a story.