Are we seeing a failed M’sia?
I was born in a British military hospital in Singapore and grew up in a Malay kampong in Johor Bahru. I’ve moved from one realm of cultural experience to another, living in one enclave to the next in the process of being schooled and becoming an educator.
I’ve finally ended up in a truly multi-cultural town a half-an-hour’s drive from New York City where I have lived for several years, waiting for opportunities to come home to Malaysia and be directly involved in Malaysian education, social, and cultural development. No place like home.
Sometimes I wonder if all this make me a cultural construction of multi-ethnicity or a if I am still a Malay. Is the question of being Malay merely academic by now?
I think I am still that. I still speak Malay fluently and write in Jawi quite beautifully, although my almost half of my life has been ‘schooled’ by American education, constantly exploring the ideas of America the pastoral – the hard core Jeffersonian ideal drawn from Humanism and the Enlightenment Period.
At times too I would still plow through representative texts of ancient Malay philosophy and to situate the core ideas within newer perspectives I constantly acquire, so that as the poet WS Rendra would say, we will always “reconsider traditions”.
Here in the US, I teach a course called ‘Cross-Cultural Perspectives’, trying to engage my students in the works of Edward Said, Clifford Geertz, Renato Rosaldo, and the like.
