Tribal Talk

I came down to Melbourne from Malaysia a little less than two years ago, and I was a little tense, considering that until then, I never really stayed away from home for extended periods of time. And I was also a little lonely since I was the only one from my class back in college to actually choose the university that I'm going to right now. I got by pretty alright, when I look back on things, though sometimes I wished I could have been more permitted to enjoy the atmosphere of a foreign land. Sometimes that was brought about by the continuous horde of paperwork on my shoulders, and sometimes out of the hesitation of the heart, but nothing more so than the lack of friends.

Where back in Malaysia I would enjoy the camaraderie of my comrades, going out on almost a daily basis to seek the nearest drinking hole and just fraternize. Of course, it was never limited to mamak stalls, as we also included Ramly burger stands, Chinese restaurants and the like. Food was cheap, and the chatting topics aplenty. Here in Melbourne, I didn't gain companionship until a while later, as is with most other places that one would come into for the first time.

Now, at the time, I deemed to make myself seem like a friendly person, and I would bring up small talk with the random fellow on the street, if the occasion called for it, of course. And one particular incident I remember for today was when I walked into an Indian grocery store to grab some curry powder. One Indian man (northern Indian, I presume, by the color of his skin) was behind the counter, and when I went up to pay him, I asked him an innocent question.

"How long you been here?"

He looked at me on a slightly peculiar angle, as if he tried to fathom what it was that I was trying to ask of him. He answered: "Fifteen years."

Fifteen years, a long time, I replied or something of the sort, paid the man and walked out of the store.

On another occasion, I was in Brodie's car and we were talking about some random stuff until I brought up the subject of the poor Vietnamese bugger that was going to be executed in Singapore under drug charges.

Brodie looked at me and told me that the fellow was an Australian, and not a Vietnamese, as he had been raised in an Aussie background for like, all of his life. He was not a Vietnamese, but an Australian. If you want to be really pedantic about it, you could have called him an Australian by Vietnamese descent, and that the only thing connecting him with that bit of land in Indochina was his name, his blood perhaps, and nothing more.

Now this got me thinking a bit. In Malaysia, the Malays, Chinese, Indians and whoever don't really refer to themselves as Malaysians, but rather by their race, which was what got Brodie talking when he learned of how things were in the fatherland (my fatherland, heheh). I don't suppose I could have blamed him for thinking that way, seeing as that despite having gained our independence from the British colonials for 49 years (43 for Sabah and Sarawak), we still maintain this racial profiling that has been a product of the ancient ways of settling who gets to do what.

If you don't know what I'm talking about here, I'll intro you a bit. Back when European colonists decided to come on over to Asia -slaughtering a few natives in the process, as they always do- and take control of things, there was a bit of a industry going on in Malaya, so the British saw that, and took good advantage of it.

In order to support this industry, they brought over Indians and Chinese from you-know-where to work in the mines, plantations and whatnot, and for a time, everything was peachy. Until the Second World War came about, Japanese came over, killed a few Chinese and made things difficult for everyone. Then the Emergency came around by the local commies, and after less than two decades of fighting, we gained our independence.

At the time, the leaders of the country noted that there was quite a substantial amount of Chinese and Indian immigrants that had now called Malaysia home. These people had grown used to the Malayan way, and to simply send them back home to their ancestral countries would have been a bit of a disaster, so everyone who was there at the time became citizens of the new country.

If you've ever taken a school exam in Malaysia, you'd have seen that there was a field that you needed to fill in, and that was called Race. And in various parts of our society, especially when it comes to government administration, the public are referred to each other not as Malaysians, but rather by our races, so instead of calling ourselves Malaysians, we'd call ourselves Chinese-Malaysians, Indian-Malaysians and so on, though the Malays would just be called the Malays because to call them Malay-Malaysians would be a little bit much.

Me being here, I have come to know anyone who is more or less local here as an Aussie, even if they're not visibly Caucasian. If they can be seen as Aussies, then why not we, Malaysians in our own country not look at ourselves and say we are Malaysians, instead of Chinese, Indians or whatever? Can we truly call ourselves Chinese, being so far removed from mainland China? Or be called Indians, and then be expected to say which village you were from (which is what my Indian-Malaysian friends say about the true Indians).

This is not to say that we should lie about what or who we are, because if I was of Chinese descent, I would still maintain a bit of the heritage of my forefathers, and also keep a little bit of the money-minded idiosyncrasy. But when I'm asked to what I am, should I not answer that I'm a Malaysian? Or when I see someone on TV, I would not look at the person by the color of his skin and just keep on watching simply because the racial profiling did not enter my mind?

So when I see another Malaysian on the streets of Melbourne, I would simply call that person a Malaysian, and not a Malay or a Chinese or an Indian, because that is what we are, and have every right to be.