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By mikelsc  

I ate two half boiled eggs and had teh halia for breakfast. If was nice :) You can only find it in Malaysia.

Judging from the responses from my musings about history, I thought I will write this sequel mostly because of what other bloggers had written in response. I thank you all that took the time to drop me a line. It was most educational and fun.

I will begin by saying that a great majority of us, Malays included here, are a product of an immigrant. We ourselves are not immigrants. There is a world of difference between the two.

According to dictionary.com, an immigrant (penduduk), is "a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence." This would be true for our forefathers that came from far and wide to make what is now Malaysia their home. We, however, were born here and for some of us, many generations of our family were born here in this land we now call Malaysia.

Genetically we are different but yet, in the happier and less complicated days, people inter-marry and produce offsprings that have features of both ethnic backgrounds. The Baba/Nyonyas are a clear example. They even adopted children from other ethnic backgrounds. I am genetically predominantly chinese but I have an uncle who is genetically predorminantly Indian. Since my grandparents adopted him, he was given a chinese name. What more, he married a genetically Indian lady and all his children are pretty much genetically Indian, but they all have chinese names eventhough they are very Indian, look Indian and speak with an Indian accent. If you bump into anyone like that, he is probably my relative. As a kid, running around with the rest of the kids in the block, we learnt to speak each other's languages ... starting with the swear words first .. of course. It is not uncommon to hear chinese speaking all three languages, tamil being one of them. This can only happen if you are born in Malaysia.

Being born in Malaysia as oppose to being imported from another country means we dont really know the country of origin of our forefathers. Ask any Malaysian of Indian origin you meet on the road and say, "friend, what is it like in India eh?" and he would very likely reply somewhat like .. "dey! what India-lah. I come from Kuala Kangsar ah. Come there and see lah". As for myself, being the 3rd generation chinese born here, I don't even know where in China my forefathers come from. I had the opportunity to visit China when I was 30. I came back thinking ... was this where my forefathers came from? yaks!

Being born in Malaysia also means we love roti chanai, chapati, asam laksa, curry ayam, char koay teow, petai & onions and teh halia .. kau! (Some say, it taste better at 2am in the morning!) What diversity and fusion exist in our taste buds. This can only happen if you are born in Malaysia.

Our forefathers, rightly or wrongly, chose to import their cultures too. I guess you can't blame them. Being an immigrant, what do you expect. However, over the years, even that have been slowly but surely diluted. Somethings remain pretty the same, for example the language. But for me, even that is diluted. I remember telling a Hong Kongese friend in cantonese .. "Ngo oi hui pasak mai loh ti" (I want to go to the market to buy bread) .. and he looked at me, blinked a few times and said, "lei ngup mut" .. (you talking what?!). You see "pasak" is the malay word, pasar and "loh ti" .. believe it or not, is the indian word "roti", meaning bread. Obviously they dont understand. But after hanging around with a proud Malaysian, he was talking like that when we last said good bye.

However, with all this diversity .. our languages, culture, names and the way we look, we are not immigrants. We may be the product of an immigrant but we ourselves are not. And hey! Isn't it fun to have friends who are so different from ourselves but yet the same?

What I am saying also applies to our Malay friends. I have many who went swimming naked with me (when we were kids) who could swear in cantonese better than a chinese can. Even they would find their roots in Java and Thailand. Some are mixed in the pass, much like pak lah, but they are Malaysian none the less.

So really, Ahmad Ismail had got it all mixed up and in a sense he got it right. Some chinese walking around in Malaysia are Immigrants from China but so are some indians and some that somewhat look like Malays who are immigrants from another land.  He just forgot that the Malaysian Chinese, Malaysian Indians and the Malaysian Malays are not. Fairly, neither is he or pak lah or the host of politicians whose forefathers are from afar.

This being the case, lets just leave the use of "immigrant" to those who had applied to migrate to Malaysia in order to live here permanently. Even then, when they get their Malaysian citizenship, technically, they are no more an immigrant. For the rest of us who are born Malaysian, in Malaysia, we are truly Malaysian, technically or otherwise.

full stop!

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