JULY 16 — I have been searching for Malaysia. It has been going on for some time.

Where could it be? I cannot be definite. But I can tell where I’ve been.

In a missionary school in the middle of a Chinese squatter settlement with a Catholic Church. 

Catechism was slowly being phased out when I entered Primary One. The crucifixes were gone. 

Advertisement

Today, it’s a regular school — whatever that means — and to emphasise the uproot, the school building and field traded places. A literal transformation. 

The adjacent police station was upgraded into the district HQ, but the church stays nestled but slowly cornered by a mall development which prefers to call itself a city. OK, if that helps with foot traffic. 

Two MRT stations mark either end of the area. Is Malaysia about change, ever changing shifts to suit modern times?

Advertisement

Or waiting in the school bus, as the single kid from the Chinese-type school boards our bus for the often-Odyssey-like journey through the Cheras crawl. 

His badge, I can’t decipher, it’s in Chinese characters. I used to think, how sad for him to not go to a Malaysian school. 

But what is a Malaysian school? If most in a school are Malaysians, how can it not be a Malaysian school? 

And now in the present, I work in a Cheras-as-they-come office building. More often than not, when any pair share the small lift with me, they speak in a Chinese dialect. Does the lift remain Malaysian then, or is it invaded?

I went to neither a full-boarding nor a residential area school. So not as much the Lord of the Flies siege or the proverbial friend across the field with a VHS player. 

We felt like a strange piece stuck among city traders, workers and dwellers. A headmaster decades before had to form student gangs to fight off the local gangs attempting to infiltrate.

All it had, the school I mean, was traditions. And at a strange time, with a country unsure of which part of history to embrace and a prime minister in denial of his own past. 

So, I let the city teach me or was it a choice? I wasn’t fee-paying so I wandered it to pick the lessons which lay in the buildings, the people and the buzz. Hoping the pieces added up to the whole. 

But is a country a collection of its highest structures and colonial relics? It is and it is not.

Bangi campus was not fenced up then, but I did not roam much beyond it. There was plenty of staid buildings within it and a flat campus life for all of us undergraduates to regret.

But the people, fascinatingly, they came from everywhere. All kinds of Malaysian curiosities showed up at a time two hands could count the total number of universities in the land. 

So, by dint of their selection, whether from Besut or Miri, they too were estranged from their own people. But no revolution was forthcoming.

The rage I felt, not that I processed it as such then, was how the system was keener to contain us than liberate us. Obedience rather than intellectual fervour ensured progress. I believe the country is paying the price today.

Refuge was taken by most, to what was necessary and familiar. The Kelantanese boys sticking a “Republik Kelantan” poster on their exclusive four-man unit as PAS lately regained the state. 

The Indian lads playing in one of the many pitches, not surprised to see me with the Melayu on another despite more than a few bad tackles aimed at me. 

The Penangites with their Hokkien streak, wondering why I am in their kin’s dorm when even other Chinese aren’t welcome. 

The Borneo Christians tired of being asked why they don’t fast sing ferociously their carols training for the Xmas Eve performance.

Was it wrong to hold on to what you learnt in your corner of Malaysia? Is to be safe by being with what is common wrong in Malaysia?

There were oases in that desert bereft of multiculturalism. The late-night chess matches at the hostel café, always a place in my heart for the free warm water to wash down my defeats. 

Not unlike Moses trudging about for 40 years in the wilderness, I found debate halfway through my undergraduate programme. A small secret society of young people across the country trying to grow quicker than their country would let them.

Which led me away to mountainside towns, small docks facing large oceans and an island with only mules for transport. Everywhere I go, I sit and consider Malaysia.

I came back home and moved from one thing to another, seeing if that brings me closer to my country. 

Maybe today the distant personal past rather than the recent one forms better with time to crystallise those experiences.

The cynics might ask, why look for Malaysia when you are already in it? Why keep asking when one can keep living, in it? 

While many might disagree, at a time when righteousness and virtual signalling behind the Malaysian flag is so chic, a country is but a continuous conversation.

It must find means to include all its inhabitants into that conversation. So yes, the divisions of city and rural affect it. So too the language or languages of the people. 

Or if our issues have diverged so much due to region or religion that our common values are at risk. Or that if we have been so invested in our differences that we have outsourced our outrage to agents keen to maximise our distance to keep themselves at the top.

How to promote this conversation? By encouraging its people to look for the country. 

It makes them connect to the country with its warts and all. And if they did, they are likely to compare their search with others'. Not to agree, but to know. To know our neighbours.

Still, this business of seeking, may be a senseless pursuit. But it’s that love letter you can’t help but write, even in the knowledge no one reads it. Or more cruelly, your lover doesn’t.

But maybe by writing about it, you calm your own heart even if despair may follow. Or not.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist