Bohemia Bunny

The Undercover Malaysians

August 3rd, 2008 by lynnylchan under Comments

They’re there, and you know they are. Sometimes you can spot them, but mostly you can’t. They’re indistinguishable from the average local Singaporean.

Yes, the Malaysian is a tricky creature indeed to spot. We look like you, talk like you (with certain exceptions that can be used to identify us), eat like you (except for my incessant bitching over how prawn mee, char kuey teow and laksa is very very different in KL) and we’re found in every level of society, from the humble hawker assistant to the loftiest of judiciary posts.

Don’t believe me? Go check the backgrounds of the previous Chief Justices of Singapore on Wikipedia. They were all born and raised in Malaysia. This tendency means that, ironically, my ex-boyfriend may have a higher chance of becoming Chief Justice than his Singaporean friends. I find this amusing.

Yes, the dudes at Cheese Prata, your kid’s tuition teacher, your company’s IT guy, and even your boss - you never know if any one of these might turn out to be Malaysian. We sure are good at hiding it.

We’re like Cylons. HAHAHAHA!

What’s it like being undercover, though? Well, it’s fun until we get spotted. Then it gets funner, as our friend/teacher/classmate’s eyes widen in surprise, and they say (in my case anyway): “But you don’t look Malaysian!”

Er, I didn’t know we had a “look”, but I’ve always been wonderfully stylish, which perhaps contravenes the common perception of Malaysians as backwater hicks with bad dressing.

On the other hand, my kids think I come from a rich family because “only rich Malaysians come to Singapore to study”. They’re not familiar with the ASEAN scholarship, apparently. While it’s true that one needs to be comfortably well-off to send one’s kid down south, it doesn’t require giant amounts of money. You think there are THAT MANY rich families living in Johor Bahru?

Of course, being a Malaysian overseas has its perils. Unlike being one abroad in the US or UK, where they’re generally genial towards you, Singaporeans seem to harbour a strange mixture of familiarity and disdain. On one hand, they will tell you what a great time they had eating and shopping in KL. On the other, they love pushing what they think are hot buttons: politics, race and education. I enjoy rubbing salt in their wounds on all three counts.

Singaporeans bitch about our country because they can’t bitch about theirs, and besides, when was the last time THEY got to vote?

For a supposedly ’second-class citizen’ in a ‘backwards’ country, I sure have done well. Or rather, my parents did well, which set me up in life to enjoy a multitude of privileges. For some of us very fortunate ones, the racial quotas are things that happen to other people. Moral of the story: Money reigns supreme.

I’m a product of the “lousy” Malaysian education system, where you can “allegedly” buy your grades. Now, I don’t know where you guys got your info, or if you’re just stereotyping, because some things remain free of bribery.  The system is built such that you’d probably need extremely powerful connections to get a (fake) good grade, because stapling money to your exam booklet isn’t going to work (so don’t try it, kids!). Don’t ask me how, because I earned mine the hard way.

Besides, “lousy” education or not, it was good enough for the Singapore government, plus I pwn my kids AND I learned my content in Malay, then relearned it in English. The poor dears just suffer from inferiority complex now that a Malaysian is lording it over them.

Muahahahaha.