Rahmat Bahagia, Tuhan kurniakan,
Raja kita, selamat bertakhta.
Rahmat Bahagia, Tuhan kurniakan,
Raja kita, selamat bertakhta.
It's been almost 14 years since I've sang the national anthem. 14. Guess that's what happens when you're shipped off to an international school system, a little piece of the'motherland' in Malaysia. All I remember about it though is the fact that half the school would get the lyrics wrong (kurnia......SANNNNNNN), and the other half would get it correct because we just spent the last music class being corrected on it. One half would try to outdo the other in emphasizing the fact it was KAN...so the poor song would obviously be butchered in the process of all this.
Anyway, why am I talking about this? Well with the whole brain-drain-national-loyalty-we-want-to-be-developed-GTP-ETP-MRT-WTV-government-scholarships-chaos-bag-snatching-shopping-crazy-elections-exchange-rate-increasing-subsidy-cutting-political-sex-tape mess that defines our country, I guess it's normal for us to pick up the papers and be totally jaded by what is going on, I mean really now? Sex tapes? I thought you said Anwar was gay?! They couldn't even get the storyline consistent. Ostriches.
But seriously, sometimes I'm torn, I'm Malaysian but my Malay sucks, my chinese isn't the best in the world and the history I know is probably more about Hitler than anything else. But obviously I'm still Malaysian. The older I've gotten the more the elder generation of the family complains about how unfair the policies that govern us are, about how they have had to work extra hard to make a difference in their own lives, about how privileges are enshrined in the system to favour someone because of their name, their skin colour and their believes. Sometimes I can't help but want to tell them that they shouldn't have elected who they did at that time and kept him in power for years then. Blame no one but your own generation for creating and sustaining the mess that we're attempting to sort out now. When the tide goes back it really reveals the shit that is left behind.
I am starting to see some of their points though. 7% discount on houses? wtf? And I guess the more I attempted to be representative of Malaysia in Michigan, the more I realized that I wasn't really. I exist in the semi 3rd culture kid stage by sheer virtue of having been around them for about a decade, and I'm grateful for it because it showed me so much of the world. Italian cows and Bruneian chickens and all.
Working on this project for international schools makes me realize how much colonialism kinda still remains, but this time in a friendlier way I guess, it's all bout the $$$ and as long as people perceive more value attached to a certain system, so will demand and WTP rise with it. A Singaporean friend said to me that she saw the difference when you brought a white guy into a restaurant with you vs. an asian guy, the service was so abjectly biased. SPG? lol. Then again Singapore is just oozing materialism, I'm starting to feel it even more, probably also because I've started earning my own money, sweetness.
Anyway, looking at KL through the eyes of a tourist/stranger is so much more fun sometimes. Let's me forget for an instance the troubles that brew just slightly below the surface and see it as a beautiful city with contradictions and chaos. Does it really take someone else coming from outside experiences to tell us how beautiful our country really is? Or is it just the biased-ness of an expat who is not vested emotionally in this country and has their house/car/maid/schooling paid for by whatever MNC they have been lucky to work for? Obviously that skews things slightly.
No comments:
Post a Comment