A letter to PM YAB Dato Seri Abdullah Badawi

Dear YAB,

Re: Making the right choices

I have lived outside of Malaysia for almost 20 years now but still have a deep and strong love for my country. Late last year, I became very disillusioned because of the news I was reading about how corrupt, unsafe and disunited my country had become. As I said, I have a deep and strong love for my country and although I could easily have decided to leave it all behind and cement my economic move to another country with that country’s citizenship, I chose another path.

I chose to find out for myself if the country I was born and lived 21 years in had really changed that much. I had grown up surrounded by friends of all races. We never paid much attention to our differences, mind. Instead, we reveled in what we shared in common.

We flew kites we’d built, shot at targets - live or inanimate - with catapaults we’d made: mine was a steel-framed lorry-inner-tubed wonder that could punch holes in an evaporated milk can from 20 yards. We caught fish in the longkangs, cycled, fell off our bikes, slapped on some TCP and Handyplasts and cycled again. We went for walks in the jungle behind our house where we fished in the stream, climbed the trees and once - and I am sorry now that I did this for nothing more than teenage machismo - even chopped down a tree with my father’s parang.

At school, I passed my SRP and SPM Bahasa Malaysia (I was one of the 3 top SPM Bahasa Malaysia students in my school) papers because my Malay friends let me practice daily with them. I was a member of the Hindu Society - well OK, a fringe member as I was really just hanging out with my Indian friends. I still have a soft spot for Shaw’s Pygmalion simply because I was Henry Higgins in our little excerpt from the play which we put up as our class effort in our annual English Drama Competition. Oh, we won the finals you know.

When I worked in advertising in Malaysia, my mentor was Zul, our studio manager who took this young designer who couldn’t keep his mouth shut under his wing. I learnt much from him and sometimes when I teach at a local design college here, I find myself repeating some of Zul’s stories.

So you see, when I grew up, right up until the time I started work, Malaysia was an amalgam of the new and the old, all races and cultures, rural and urban folk. Malaysia then wasn’t any ONE of those things - she was ALL of them.

So, in 2007, when the news seem to be filled with so much doom and gloom, so much about the racial and religious divides, so much about vested interests and corruption and abuse, I could have turned my back but I chose not to.

Instead I turned wheels. Bicycle wheels, to be precise. I rode from the southernmost tip of Johor to near the northernmost point of Perlis. I rode through kampungs and villages. I met a lady with astounding business acumen who ran a small food shop on the edge of padi fields. A young man who owned a bicycle shop and was committed to making it work. A bankrupt who was making good once again with a modest motorcycle repair shop. Security guards coming off a shift who bought me my dinner of Nasi Lemak and Teh-O and sat down and listened to my travel tales. A retired teacher who ran a medicine shop, who shared my name and when we realised that, took my arm, looked me in the eye and said ‘You’re meant to do this ride’. A Tenaga employee nearing retirement who hosts travelers from all over the world and who brings them to see the sights and sounds of rural Malaysia. An ex-footballer who now helps at his father’s gerai under some trees - and who told me how he walked away from sports corruption. And, would you believe it, I met a DAP and an UMNO member enjoying breakfast like they had done for years, just because they were friends?

Over the course of 5 weeks and 1200 cycled kilometres, I met normal, everyday, typical Malaysians. They were not Chinese, or Malay, or Indian Malaysians. They were simply Malaysians.

And more importantly, I was simply a Malaysian to them too.

Now it is a year on from my ride. The ride I returned from and declared ‘Malaysia as we knew it, is still there’. My euphoria may be diminished but my conviction remains.

You see, although I recognise that Malaysia has changed in many ways in the last two decades - new highways, tall iconic skyscrapers, grand cities, mega development projects and so on - in many other ways, I sense that Malaysia has not changed at all.

The Barisan government may claim credit for much of the infrastructural development, but it surely cannot ignore the fact that alongside the shiny and the new and the mega, there is also rising crime, corruption, abuse of power, disenfranchisement of indigenuous peoples, rising poverty, greater disparity in the extremes of many demographic criteria and so on. If the government was not directly responsible for these, then it is culpable for not having dealt with them.

As I mentioned earlier, for some time, I’d begun to think there was no turning back time and the wheels of progress - if indeed we can call it that. For someone who has always been passionately Malaysian even while living away from home, hearing or reading of things like threats to bathe a keris in the blood of the Chinese, or more recently, being referred to as squatters, brought a sense of dread - that the Malaysia we had all grown up in was now on an irreversible path of segregation, polarisation and self-destruction.

What I eventually found out though is that things like national pride, friendship and loyalty don’t change overnight. Despite all the doom and gloom I had been hearing and reading, the reality as I discovered is that the spirit of Muhibbah remains, perhaps not so much in the towns, in the mainstream media, in government even. But it remains in the heart and soul of most everyday Malaysians.

And that is why I write to you, Prime Minister.

The last couple of decades have been like Malaysia’s national puberty. We’ve grown prosperous - more quickly than many others, we’ve flexed our muscles on the world stage, achieved many firsts and experienced ups and downs.

And now, we’re finally reaching maturity and adulthood in our 6th decade. And like any human adult, we’re more independent - both in thought and in action. We saw that for the first time on March 8th and again on August 26th. And now we’re seeing it again - in our blogs, on our streets, in political discourse, and alas, in Kamunting as well.

For far too long we’ve been fed a diet of fear - fear that some of us - the ‘pendatang’ - will take what is the right of the others who have been here longer; that if those who have been here longer don’t protect ourselves, those who came and made their home here later will turn out to be no better than the former colonial masters, bent on plunder and subjugation. We’ve been taught to look at each other and to categorise and distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Well, we’ve grown tired of what’s been put on our plates and we’re making choices for ourselves.

We know what’s best for us now, or at least we know what is better. We’ve chosen to remember those values we had at the very birth of our nation - those same values that still remain in everyday Malaysians. We’ve chosen to reject the policies and politics of division and corruption. We’ve chosen to take our chance with a new government because we recognise that the very things we have been told to fear are indeed right there in the hearts of those who have been telling us to fear.

And we’re choosing now no longer to fear. Not the things we have been told to, nor the ones who have been telling us.

So YAB, may I be so bold as to suggest this be a time for some reflection? This letter is all about choices that have been made. And in some way, all these choices lead back to you, and the choices you now have to make too.

On the one hand, some choices will lead to more of the same. The same fear-mongering, the same corruption, the same social problems. In making these choice consider that the young adult will ultimately find his own way to where he needs to go, despite the best efforts of those who would deny him his dreams.

On the other hand, there is another set of choices which would bring about a return - a return to values, ideals and standards that we believed in at our birth. A return to the dreams and aspirations our nation was founded on. A return to the example we were setting for the rest of the world.

The everyday Malaysian has made his choice - now what will yours be?

An everyday Malaysian at heart, I remain
Yours patriotically,