You speakee English, I speakee English

This morning on my way to my usual coffee shop for a drink, I cycled past a parked backhoe tractor. You know, the kind with two large back wheels and two small front wheels, a digger arm at the back and a large shovel in front. A middle aged Chinese man sat at the driver's seat. He had grubby hands, dark sunbeaten skin and dressed in seasoned labourer clothes. Getting ready to go to work I think. There he sat on his perch reading the Star newspaper.

If I may stereotype, he looks the kind who'd read Sin Chew or China Press but no, he was reading that paper, that standard fare so commonly associated with the English educated, middle class Chinese. That seeming contradiction was what caught my eye.

Anyhow I hollered "Good morning" as I cycled past and he lowered the paper a bit and hollered back "Good morning." Okay, so he wasn't just looking at pictures then. He actually speaks English. Wah lau eh!

I recall another scenario in the small town of Segamat where I went to this old Chinese coffee shop. One of the hawkers, a lady in her 50's was joking and bantering with a customer in English. And another time many, many years ago when I had the blessing to visit Surabaya and met a Chinese family who spoke to each other at home in perfect Bahasa Indonesia, with a smattering of Mandarin.

Nowadays what used to be normal seems rarer. Whenever I speak Cantonese, the people I speak to are increasingly taken aback to learn that I am not Chinese, as if something isn't right. Maybe the reaction is the same for the many Indians and Malays in Penang when they speak perfect Hokkien and vice versa. These are languages we pick up voluntarily, not imposed.

Malaysia is (or rather was) one of the few places where you don't raise an eyebrow when you hear people use 4 dialects in one transaction. We can start in BM, then English creeps in, and then we count the numbers in Cantonese or Mandarin and swear in Hokkien, while eating an Indian roti canai. I don't think you'll find anything like that in a mat salleh country.

That would describe us perfectly wouldn't it - a melting pot, a silk road-like spot on the map where traders from all regions once converged. We learned from each other, laughed and cried together, poked crude jokes at each other, and intermarried one another. And we spoke our own special house blend of Manglish that set us apart like no other. Well, except the Singaporeans who have Singlish. They all lah, always trying to beat us to it. :-)

And then something happened. We drifted apart and I still don't know what it is.

I miss the old days.