I’m a pure Malay.
Merdeka Day always gets me thinking about the Malaysia I actually grew up in, not the one people argue about online.
Here are my closest childhood friends:
Rosazali Bin Ghani.
Tek Chong Meng.
Low Teik Wan.
Ng Soon Kiang.
Teh Tin Lim.
Cham Choon Fatt.
Chow Yun-Fat (errr…maybe no).
Yes, only one close Malay friend.
We never touched Ketuanan Melayu or non-bumi inequality.
Why?
Because they did not exist.
Not in our world, anyway. We were too busy borrowing bicycles and arguing about football to care what race anybody was.
Nobody handed out a script telling us we were supposed to see each other differently, so we didn’t.
Chong Meng’s dad was a fishmonger, he drove a Mazda 626.
Teik Wan’s dad was a Tokei balak (forestry business owner).
Different backgrounds, different dinner tables. But at our level, none of it mattered. A friend was a friend.
But Soon Kiang never saw a silver spoon. His dad repaired bicycles. His family was so poor that the State sponsored his studies from year one to University Sains Malaysia.
Even I, with a family head bringing home RM200 per month didn’t have such a privilege.
Because a bicycle repairer would then be lucky to bring home RM100 per month.
Think about that for a second. A Chinese boy, fully sponsored by the state, all the way through university. Not because of his race. Because his family genuinely needed it.
That doesn’t fit neatly into anybody’s narrative, does it?
On paper you can lay out a lot of things.
In reality things can be different.
The policies people fight about on X, the statistics people quote to prove a point; none of that was the Malaysia I lived in as a kid.
My Malaysia was a fishmonger’s son with a Mazda, a bicycle repairer’s son with a scholarship, and a Malay boy in the middle of it all, not once thinking to keep count.
Malaysia is for everybody for real.
If no one plays victim, things can move forward, right here in Malaysia.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, 🇲🇾MALAYSIA‼️🇲🇾
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