KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 16 — The sea, you could say, kept my grandmothers from me.
My maternal grandmother walked into the sea and it would only give us back her body.
And the sea was too large an expanse for me to cross when my paternal grandmother left to join our ancestors, perhaps for some sightseeing where the spirits dwell on Kinabalu.
Not that I do not like the sea. The South China Sea is one of my favourite things in the world. It is the sight that greets me each time I return to Kota Kinabalu. The blue-green waters are what I dream about most, whenever I am homesick.
Yet the ocean that I love is both a symbolic and literal divide between West and East Malaysia, one that we have only partially addressed with the coming of cheap(er) flights.
AirAsia for a more unified Malaysia? If only we could fix all our problems with budget airlines.
To be a Sabahan residing in Kuala Lumpur is to always feel somewhat splintered; at home, yet not at home. Welcome, and yet unwelcome.
A child of Malaysia and yet not a truly equal citizen.
But you’re Bumiputera, Erna, what do you know?
That is what the Chinese and Indians tell me over here. Ah, but it seems there is such a thing as being a second-class Bumi.
Here, I am just a “lain-lain” or “other”.
I wish everyone could fly – not in planes, but to another plane where diversity is acknowledged and embraced. And maybe we’ll all learn to dance like carefree birds. Together.” – Erna
I wonder what my ancestors would have thought of that.
Would they have appreciated having to tick that forlorn little box right at the bottom of the list?
Race, another friend tells me, is an obsolete construct. We should leave it behind and embrace equality for all!
Ah, what naivete. And somehow, I can almost hear a grumpy ancestor wonder why I am not cutting my friend’s head off for the insult.
We don’t do that anymore, great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
Besides, I hardly think his head would match my living room’s furnishings.
The racial narrative in this country is so limiting. Even in our school textbooks, Sabahans and Sarawakians are portrayed as these “exotic natives.”
Pity, then, those who come from mixed backgrounds like my own. I feel no particular tie to just one of the many heritages that flow through my veins.
The people whose DNA came together to create mine were certainly very different, very varied and yet I consider them all equal. Why should I say I am X per cent Race A, Y per cent Race B?
Race is, after all, just an accident of birth.
I am Malaysian. We are all and should be equal, even if we are not the same.
Yet I think that is hard to grasp as a concept for many Malaysians who grew up speaking their mother tongue, around people who looked like them, thought like them, prayed like them. Without really needing to give a fig about the people who didn’t.
So maybe the children of mixed parentage have it a little better because they do not always have to grow up in a little box.
My mother looks Malay to most people and she speaks, and curses, very well in Bahasa. Her Bahasa poetry is beautiful and sad; a 100 years could pass and no sajak I could write will match one she can compose in 10 minutes.
But listen to her on the phone. It is my mother’s favourite invention as she has very many people to speak to. With her Datin friends over in West Malaysia, she effects a very KL-inflected Malay. “Ya” becomes “ye”, all the Sabah baku-ness dropping out of her speech.
And then my aunt calls, and my mother suddenly launches into a flurry of harsh-toned sounds I do not recognise. Except for the swearing bits. Lord knows I learned those parts young.
Her cooking tells another story. On rainy days, she would cook sweetcorn soup with egg drop. Open the fridge and there would be dried red dates, the type you find in Chinese soups.
I miss the taste of her sesame chicken, her plain boiled chicken soup and how she would always cook her vegetables soupy with corn starch and water.
When I moved to West Malaysia I had stomach aches each time I tried eating at a warung. I liked my vegetables but the warungs would prefer the cost-effective drowning of vegetables in oil.
So I ate at Chinese coffee shops or anywhere that sold dishes with clear soups that would make me think of home and Mother.
I spoke longingly of my mother’s cooking to someone one day and was asked, “Is your mother Chinese?” No, but her grandmother was.
The Malay-looking woman who cooked Chinese dishes and swore like a sailor. The beautiful mix of many things that is my mother, that is my home state.
My father, though, looks Chinese. Fair with the kind of bushy eyebrows you would see in a period Chinese drama.
It’s a good thing he isn’t Chinese, though, because he dislikes garlic something fierce. He does like his fish curries and tapai – not the kind you drink (he’s a teetotaller) – but the type you eat, fermented rice cakes.
Like his people, hill-dwelling folk who live in the shadow of Kinabalu, my father loves to sing. My father’s people are a happy folk, though most are poor. Singing is a nice, cheap pastime. Dad had to be reminded he wasn’t in Sabah when he started singing, loudly, to Prince’s Purple Rain the last time we were at Carrefour.
I love the way his people dance. They dance as though they’re preparing to fly, all in a ring, swinging their arms as though they are just warming up to take off. The sumazau, they say, was inspired by the birds, the arms stretched out to the sides, their feet half-on, half-off the ground.
There really isn’t just “one” Malaysia. There is a Malaysia, one coloured by so many things, influenced by so many peoples. I wish I could have people see the Malaysia I grew up with, the ease we lived together once upon a time.
I wish everyone could fly – not in planes, but to another plane where diversity is acknowledged and embraced. And maybe we’ll all learn to dance like carefree birds. Together.
Native Sabahan Erna is (not) Malay but loves Malay literature. Her hobbies: cats/gaming/blogging at ernamerin.com/Tweeting at @ErnaBKI.
