Annoying stupidity on the National Day
A teacher asked my
close friend, also a teacher, where her loyalty lies; with China or with
Portugal. My friend is a Melakan Portuguese descent and married to a Chinese.
She has however, to my knowledge;
- Never been to Portugal
- Never been to China
- Cannot speak mainland Chinese Mandarin
A few things that I
would like to get straight;
- The last person I know was actually born in Mainland China was my friend's Grandfather who passed away two decades ago.
- I don't know any fellow Malaysians who were born in Portugal. I do know a couple of Portuguese folks but they are Portuguese, not Malaysians.
- Most, if not all of my fellow Malaysian friends who are not Malays, were actually born in this country. To be fair, there are a few of my friends who were not born here. They were born in Cairo, Egypt; somewhere in England that is not London, somewhere in Australia, somewhere in Japan that is not Tokyo, somewhere is California, USA; somewhere in Canada which is just north of the USA. They all however have Malaysian citizenship, live in Malaysia, and work or have businesses here.
- The las time we watched football together a few of my Chinese Malaysian friends were shouting so hard that they lost their voices the next day. One chap, got so frustrated that our team lost that he went to drown his sorrow in beer right after the match.
I would not be
annoyed if some uneducated laymen asked this loyalty question but for a teacher
to do so is unforgivable. A teacher is an agent of society and government whose
function is to educate the next generation on, amongst other things, what it means
to be a Malaysian and how to be a Malaysian. Making such asinine assumptions
without any grounds for justification is simply moronic.
Malaysians f all
races must know that being citizenship is not a zero sum game. In fact, it is a
positive sum game: if we are a success today, it is because of our collective
effort. Certainly, there are areas where we question the disparity in participation,
such as membership of the armed forces but that does not take away from the
totality of everyoe's contribution.
After more than half
a century of being a nation, I think it is time for some of us to get their
collective heads out of their heads out of their anuses and stop their unwavering commitment to omphaloskepsis.
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