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In Malaysia, the question is finally asked: Are you Chinese? By Shuzheng
It has been said that Thomas Mann, the German novelist (Felix Krull, Death in Venice) arriving in New York from escaping Nazism, was asked the question about his cultural heritage since he had fled his homeland. His reply: “Wherever I am, I’m German (culture).” While being subjected to ridicule, “Cina bodoh” (stupid Chinese), Tan Boon Wah, the Kajang municipal councillor, was asked by an MACC interrogator if he was from China. But Tan’s disclosure leaves out a critical piece of another information: What was his answer? Almost routinely, it appears, MACC interrogators asked the same sort of question or related questions. To Dariff Din, an assistant to the Selangor state legislator Lau Weng San, the interrogator asked him if he was Malay or Chinese. Both men were not the subjects of an ongoing MACC investigations, supposedly for corruption; rather, they were called in to offer evidences. So was Teoh Beng Hock, accurately Zhao Mingfu (赵明福). What might the MACC officers have asked him? More pertinently, what had they said to him? Or, how had they insulted him? The picture drawn by Tan and Dariff is uniformly clear: the MACC do not expend niceties on citizenship assistance in an investigation or to prefer questions pertinent to the same. Instead, they were more interested and eager to insult, to ridicule and to harangue the Chinese (or Chinese-looking) politicians that challenge the Umno government. This is not new; in Parliament, the Chinese is told to leave the country. A Chinese, especially if political, in front of immigration, police, the road transport office, or the anti-corruption agency, MACC, is always a liability. More than anybody else, the former premier Mahathir Mohamad must bear responsibility for this racism, promoted in his pseudo social commentary, The Malay Dilemma where he virtually invented Malay grievances and directed them to the Chinese as the primary cause. This is racism par excellence because it mirrors the way Nazism pinned the problems of the entire German nation on the Jews.
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