"Kamu orang dari mana datang?" asked a middle-aged Chinese aunty we met while shopping the other day. When we told her where we come from, she replied with a nice-mannered way of she "could tell by our looks." What came out next was either hillarious or offensive, depending on the decoder of the message. "Ramai orang Sabah and Sarawak datang Malaysia kerja." We laughed...
Ya we found it funny, until it finally came to my mind how offensive that was, I screamed, "What??!!!" at her and swore my way out of the shop. Ha ha. Kidding.
It's funny (or maybe sad) how some people still think that Sabah and Sarawak are separate entities and it makes me wonder why. Part of it could probably be the blame of the Borneans themselves (some of us can be quite defensive or take pride in telling how we're not from 'here'). It's an attitude that really needs to be altered. But on the other hand, it couldn't be our fault that we're classified as 'the others' by the government, right? While all the other races are given their respective proper race classifications, we're enlisted as 'Lain-lain' (okay, okay, I know I've been going on and on about this, but hear me out). I understand that there are just too many ethnicities to list out in forms and such - hundreds. But we would appreciate it if we could tick 'Bumiputra' when filling out forms. This, and a number of other things as well, could have been the cause of Borneans sometimes being too defensive about our ethnicity. I reiterate, we should have only one race classification; Malaysia. It would be nice to stop hearing people say "Chinese," "Indian," "Malay," "Kadazan," "Iban," when they're asked "Orang apa?", or better still, not to hear people - Malaysians in particular - asking the question at all.
And speaking of that, I remember Klahid Ibrahim's proposal on making Sept 16 a nationwide public holiday. Back in KK we're used to having that priviledge. Sept 16 is always a holiday for us and we would celebrate it by attending the parade at Padang Merdeka downtown (di KK ah, bukan di KL), very much like celebrating the usual Merdeka Day. It's kind of weird not having that 'here' (again, it feels like referring to a foreign place).
It's not that I'm making up excuses for more of public holidays, but shouldn't we acknowledge the day Malaysia was formed? Doesn't it mean as much to welcome new members, which completes an entity, as it is to form one? Just a thought. (NOTE: I'm not complaining. It's just something that I thought of and want to share *smiles*).
I'm sure there are a lot of things that can be done to counter this problem, this whole racial polarization (and I don't think ISA is part of it). Just sitting on it and prohibitting people from talking about it are definitely not solutions. I've always believed that education can do so much to a person. And I mean, informative education instead of persuasive ones. One of the reasons why I became so aware and critical of issues like these was BTN, and very chauvinistic talks we were made compulsory to attend during my three-years of uni life. For a start, why don't we drop that from the course, kan? That would be nice. And probably things won't get as tight as they are today if things like BTN, TITAS and CTU don't exist. Why do they anyway? Oh well. I don't get to call the shots.
More later. Ciao.
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