I still remember vividly the day I went to juniors' house to pick up a delivery while they were having dinner. It was a bit awkward for me, I felt like I was interrupting them. But I was invited anyway to have dinner together with them. To my surprise, they had their dinner in potluck form of course, and all the food was put together in a large plate and everybody ate from the plate, in traditional style of course, with hands.
What a great way to connect with each other, among friends and roommates! Plus they are doing these every evening for dinner. It is not the same feeling as a normal potluck, where everybody eats on their own plate. It is not the same feeling as having a steamboat where everybody takes food from the same place but still personal plates. Most of my juniors are Malays, so I would assume that this is a normal practice for Malays. But that is really an eye-opening for me.
Yet again, it shows how little I know about Malays, while together we come from the same country. It shows also how much we can learn from each other. It is probably an obsolete idea to call myself a Chinese and them Malays or calling whoever in Malaysia by their ethnicity, as we should call ourselves Malaysian as a whole. But I am going to use those terms anyway, to facilitate my description in the following passage.
To avoid any further misunderstanding, I feel like we all need to start talking about some taboos. Not pouring all out at once, but bit by bit, slowly and considerably. As a Chinese myself, and surrounded by majority Chinese for almost all my childhood and adolescence, my relatives, my primary and secondary school friends and me used to talk some not-so-serious shit about Malays. Like, we used to criticize Malays, saying that they are so 'cheap' as it was always Malays who would go picnic in the park on weekend. Sometimes, not in the park but also near rest and service areas beside highways, wherever there was a piece of meadow. There was this joke among my friends, which basically saying, grow a meadow and the Malays will come and picnic. Well the joke is now on me, because living in France now and the french likes exactly just that, going for a picnic in a park whenever the weather is warm.
The other shit I always heard is that the government was trying to 'invade' Chinese-majority areas, by building Sekolah Kebangsaan, building mosques, building new cheap flats, etc., to encourage more Malays to move in. Well if it is true, the main advantage of all this for me, is that I can easily get Malay cuisine from gerai-gerai (hawker stalls). I really enjoy savory food, especially spicy food, and Malay cuisine can normally provide me just that. If there is one complaint about Malay food is that it is lacked of vegetables, and I might get constipation if I constantly eat them. I notice this when I went for some training camps and drilling competitions, and also National Service, where Malay cuisine was served exclusively. And I assure you that constipation was my major concern every time I went for these occasions. I got to say, as well as they can cook meat, Malays are not very good at cooking vegetables, at least from what I see so far.
In my younger years, my father always told me that, a nation with one and one only ethnic (or one majority ethnic, like almost 90% majority) is not a good thing either. He always gave me example like Taiwan, saying that their parliament always fighting (I mean hand fight with fists and chairs). He used to watch Taiwanese news report very frequently. I guess that's why he got this bad impression about the politics of the country. Meanwhile he also gave me other examples like Singapore or China. He always said that we Chinese were a bit selfish. We were like always money first and we were hard to control. Only a totalitarian government or a derivative like Singapore and China can rule a country with almost exclusively Chinese. Well, this is an interesting point of view and worth ponder upon sometimes. Brought up under this influence of thinking from my father, it is good for me in the sense that it allowed me to think differently.
Regardless its accuracy, what my father said means at least one thing - those countries he mentioned are not better than my own, our own Malaysia. Every ethnic has its own unique historical background and thus defining our special situation. The thing is, it all depends on whether are we able to identify the good traits of each of us and make good use of them. Easy to say but hard enough to execute. What makes it harder is that, there are still people who don't understand the truth and they just don't want to change.
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