On being called an ‘ungrateful Malay’

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Jan 30, 2013

Imagine if the Armed Forces, the police, the teachers and the trash collectors kept coming around our houses telling us to be “grateful” that they were honouring their duties.

This country would be nothing without the “pendatang.” Dr Mahathir also forgets that many so-called Malays have ancestors who were also in their days “pendatang.” The Bugis. The Minang. The Javanese.

Erna Mahyuni, The Malaysian Insider

A “cybertrooper” sent me an email response to last week’s column.

To assuage your curiosity, I’ll let you read it: (swear words censored so I won’t get more emails about offended sensitivities)

F*** U ERNA

UR A PIECE OF S****

UR REMARK ON PENDATANG ISSUE IS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE UR A RUNNING DOG BARUA CHINESE UR AN UNGRATEFUL B******** MALAY QUESTIONING UR OWN RACE

UR ABLE TO WRITE N SPEAK ENGLUSH COZ OF GOVT POLICY TO HELP U A B**** MALAY TO GO TO UNI.. UR SUCH A PIG RUNNING BY THOSE SEPET

I SAY IT AGAIN UR A B******* A B**** UNGRATEFUL MALAY

YET I BET U TOOK 5PCT DISCOUNT FOR BUMI HOME BUYERS… SHAME ON U SHAME ON U

First thing: The Bumi discount is 7 per cent.

Second thing: The discount is useless to me anyway as house prices are so ridiculous these days that even my more-than-10-years of EPF can’t cover a downpayment. Unless you’re the CEO or editor-in-chief of a mainstream paper, journalists aren’t rich, sweetheart.

Third thing: I’m not Malay nor do I have “Malay” blood anywhere in my ancestry. My birth certificate shows my father is Dusun; my mother is Bajau. Incidentally, one of my great-grandmothers is Chinese, as are quite a number of my relatives, and the other great-grandmother is Pakistani Indian.

Which still makes me 100 per cent Malaysian.

Fourth thing: In this day and age, why do I even have to make a big deal about/be forced to share details of my ancestry? Maybe I’ll just do a Barack Obama and print my birth certificate online so the cybertroopers will quit harassing me on Twitter, my blog and their blogs.

(And for the record, there are non-Malay cybertroopers as well who happen to be working for ministries/agencies I won’t name here. 1 Malaysia, even for cybertroopers.)

A friend of mine summarised the basic rhetoric of most cybertooper “logic”: “The implication is that Malays are not capable of achieving anything on their own, and must be buoyed by a system that supports them. And, my god, how this system sustains itself!”

If you read Bernama on a daily basis like I have to, the government feels duty-bound to near-constantly remind us to be “grateful.”

So I should be grateful the government is doing the job it was elected to do?

Imagine if the Armed Forces, the police, the teachers and the trash collectors kept coming around our houses telling us to be “grateful” that they were honouring their duties.

That we owe them our security, our education, our litter-free lawns.

Wait, doesn’t that make them a lot like Ah Long moneylenders?