Stop Defining and Redefining Malaysia

ARCHIVES 2011

By admin-s On Nov 9, 2011

We’ve come a long way in understanding each other. We’ve come beyond learning each other’s languages and customs, to accepting each other’s way of life, to be able to laugh at our peculiarities and even make movies and songs about it. Malaysia went quite well, without any real ‘definition’ till someone decided to make Malaysia ‘more Malaysia’.

By Emmanuel Joseph

Malaysia has been and continues to be, many things to many people. It has been and continues to be the meeting point of cultures so diverse, each with its own subcultures, vernacular, traditions and values, that the only real thing we can truly claim to have in common is the home we share-Malaysia, and our love for her.

Then, how do you define Malaysia? Terms like cultural melting pot, harmonious blend, microcosm of Asia, model moderate nation, progressive Muslim country are often used in describing Malaysia, thrown liberally in text books, magazines and travel documentaries. But what is Malaysia, really?

If you speak to a young twenty something Chinese educated, Taiwan graduated Malaysian who speaks Mandarin as his first language how was his weekend, he will tell you of his favourite ku luk yok haunt, how he and his buddies sang the latest SHE songs in Neway last weekend after a gambling spree in Genting where he won an Angry Bird doll as a consolation prize in a mini I Want to be Model contest.

If you ask an Indian lad the same question, he will tell you how he and his friends hung out at KLCC to watch Enthiran for the seventeeth time, had the best curry chicken at PJ State, a night out at Chakravati’s before attending his cousin’s wedding at 3.31am with his folks in a temple somewhere in Sungai Petani.

Ask the same question to a Malay girl the same thing, she would probably have been hung out with her friends at KLCC, where SLAM did a special reunion meet the fans session, then watched Bini-Biniku Gangster in the cinema next to where Enthiran was screening and headed to Neway to sing some Korean numbers, next to the room where the Chinese dude from earlier was trying his best to sound like Jay Chou, followed by dinner at Chinoz.

Ask a Malaysian businessman where to get your agreements notarized and he will point you to a commercial three story building, where on another floor above it, a Christian prayer group meets every Sunday and one floor below it, lonely salarymen come in to get their weekly ‘happy ending’ massages.The shop next door manages to squeeze in a barber, CD rentals and a small cofeeshop all in one, all patronized by different groups of Malaysians. At the end of the block you’ll see a surau, and under a tree outside the surau, a Chinese prayer tablet with Indian incense burning. Ask a different Malaysian, you get a different set of shops, hobbies, hangouts, activities. These shops, hobbies, hangouts and activities sometimes intersect and we often cheer at these points of meeting, shouting ‘1Malaysia!’ before going back to eating our mundane meals and back to loving or hating Ambiga Sreenivasan.

But therein lies the beauty of this country. For a country of 26 million, you can have so many ways to experience the same thing. You can wake up one morning and decide to have nasi lemak for breakfast, tose for lunch and koay teow for dinner all within walking distance of your house. You can have your car washed by an Indian car wash, polished in a Chinese wax service and serviced in a Malay abang’s workshop. We’ve come a long way in understanding each other. We’ve come beyond learning each other’s languages and customs, to accepting each other’s way of life, to be able to laugh at our peculiarities and even make movies and songs about it. Malaysia went quite well, without any real ‘definition’ till someone decided to make Malaysia ‘more Malaysia’.

When you try to define the quite undefinable- that’s where things go wrong. Especially when you do so vaguely, leaving much to the abstract imagination. Once upon a time, Malaysia was enamoured with the Boleh spirit. We built our own cars (some say ill advisedly), built the tallest towers in the world, tallest flagpole in the world, the longest roti canai, popiah, teh tarik (we were actually the only country in the running for the last three). Not content with breaking some previously un-thought of Guinness World Records, we went on to create our own book, the Malaysia Book of Records and went on to fill it with even more Boleh achievements. The Boleh spirit did wonders to the imagination and soon we had a new capital city, new duty free towns, new super corridors and even a Boleh Computer Operating System used widely by about 15 people.

But hey, Malaysia was defined, and that’s all that mattered right? Not quite. The next PM decided that the earlier definition was a bit too abstract, so he decided on Islamizing the whole thing and declared a little while after saying he was PM for every Malaysian, a civilizational form of Islam called Hadhari, which in one swoop, managed to imply both that earlier forms of Islam was not really civilized, and had every major local dictionary manufacturer rushing to get the proper academic definition of Hadhari, which is of course only obtainable in the Ivory Tower of Academia, the Jabatan Perdana Menteri.

Overnight, we had everything from Hadhari handphones to Hadhari watches to even a Hadhari car. To match this new definition, all government departments started Arabicizing their logos much to the annoyance of old people who had to turn their heads sideways to figure out first if it was Arabic (which mostly it wasn’t), then if it was English or BM,then finally, what the heck the words were actually saying. We had TV programs and radio programs explaining what Hadhari was, and PAS had a field day breaking it up to make their new war cry – ‘Islam Hadhari, ada had, ada hari..’

Just as we were all trying to find our way under the Hadhari sun, a new PM emerges and styled the new Malaysian definition- 1Malaysia. This one caught on even faster, as there was no need to Arabicize anything! You could have everything from 1Bank, 1Aircond, 1Chicken Rice Stall, 1Mamak Shop. Soon people started adding ‘1’ to everything it’s a m1racle Malays1a 1s st1ll called Malays1a. Oh wait..