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GROWING up in 1990s Malaysia, our worlds were small, but our imaginations were vast. Unfortunately, much of that imagination belonged to someone else.
Every Saturday morning, we sat transfixed in front of bulky television sets, rushing through a plate of nasi lemak before Captain Planet saved the Earth, or practising martial arts kicks in the living room while chanting along to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
Friday nights meant family trips to the neighbourhood video rental shop. We carried home scratched VHS tapes that transported us into an America where Bruce Willis could leap through exploding buildings, save Christmas in Die Hard and casually dispatch villains with a perfectly timed "yippee-ki-yay".
To our young minds, America wasn't simply another country. It was where life seemed bigger, richer, cooler and infinitely more exciting than our own quiet, humid Malaysian neighbourhoods.
Without realising it, we were being taught a story.
Long before South Korea mastered the Hallyu wave, the United States had already perfected soft power. Hollywood didn't just export films. It exported aspiration. Television didn't merely entertain. It quietly sold the idea that America represented the highest version of modern civilisation.
For Malaysians of my generation, that story arrived at precisely the same time another one was unfolding at home.
We grew up hearing about Vision 2020. We spoke endlessly about becoming a "developed nation", about catching up with the West, about crossing an invisible finish line into the coveted club of "first-world countries". Implicit in that ambition was another assumption: that countries like America had already arrived.
Three decades later, the internet has rewritten the script.
Instead of carefully choreographed Hollywood tracking shots, we now watch ordinary Americans document everyday life through TikTok, YouTube and social media. We see sprawling unhoused communities in major cities.
We read stories of families overwhelmed by medical debt. We watch political polarisation unfold in real time. The glamour hasn't disappeared, but it now shares the screen with realities that blockbuster films never showed us.
As the United States celebrates its 250th Independence Day this Fourth of July, perhaps the most fascinating transformation is not America itself, but how the rest of the world now sees it.
The numbers tell a more complicated story than Hollywood ever did.
According to the US Census Bureau, tens of millions of Americans continue to live below the poverty line. Millions remain without health insurance despite living in the world's largest economy. These are not isolated anecdotes amplified by social media. They are enduring structural challenges acknowledged by American institutions themselves.
None of this diminishes America's extraordinary achievements. It remains the world's largest economy, a global leader in innovation and home to many of the world's greatest universities and companies.
But it does force us to ask a question many Malaysians of my generation have never stopped asking.
What does "first world" actually mean?
For decades, we used the phrase as though it were synonymous with prosperity, dignity and quality of life. We casually labelled ourselves "third world", often with embarrassment, as though it reflected some fundamental national inadequacy.
Yet the phrase was never intended to measure wealth or human development. It emerged during the Cold War to describe geopolitical alignment. Over time, it became something else entirely: a shorthand for who had supposedly "made it" and who had not.
Perhaps it is time to retire that thinking.
Malaysia is far from perfect. We continue to wrestle with corruption, uneven public services, wage stagnation and political instability. We have no shortage of problems to solve.
But we also possess strengths that many of us have spent decades overlooking.
For RM1, Malaysians can receive treatment at a government clinic. Our public healthcare system, despite its pressures, remains one of the country's greatest achievements. Our education system is heavily subsidised. Our passport consistently ranks among the world's strongest, opening doors to destinations that many people can only dream of visiting.
Perhaps national success should not be measured solely by GDP, skyscrapers or military power.
Perhaps it should also be measured by whether a child can see a doctor regardless of their parents' income. Whether an illness destroys a family's finances. Whether opportunity exists beyond those born into privilege.
For years, we asked when Malaysia would become "first world".
Maybe we were asking the wrong question.
Maybe the better question is what kind of country we actually want to become.
The next time I hold my maroon Malaysian passport, I will remember the child who once stared at the television wishing she had been born somewhere else.
She wasn't wrong for dreaming.
She simply believed that somewhere else had already figured everything out.
Happy Fourth of July.
