A broken promise

Many years ago I made a promise to myself that I shall ignore these silly goings on in my homeland known as politics.

A few days ago, I broke that promise. I think that incident with the cab driver the other day tripped it.

It was a day out in town. From the bus terminal I took a cab to see my travel agent who was arranging my flight to Beijing. That done, I took another cab back to the terminal. The cabbie, a Malay gentleman, must've assumed I was Chinese from the way he spoke to me.

Along the way my travel agent rang me up for a confirmation. We spoke in Cantonese.

After the call I rang up my mum, speaking in Malay. After I hung up, the driver peeked at me from the rear view mirror and asked me in a rather concerned tone, "You Cina ke Melayu?"

Being the courteous person that I try to be, I obliged him with an answer. From that point on, the journey proceeded in awkward silence. His previous friendly demeanour had somehow vanished. The rolled up copy of Utusan in the driver's pocket instinctively told me to be careful with my answer.

Maybe it was nothing at all. Maybe it was just my memories from my old kampung playing tricks.

I've had similar questions posed to me in my younger days, not because they didn't know who I was but as a jibe, a kick in the behavioural circuits, a message that as a member of a race 'under seige' I shouldn't mingle too intimately with that other race. I was expected to behave a certain way and from the reactions of people, I felt that speaking another language was like some kind of treachery. I have been called a pengkhianat bangsa (a turncoat to my race) once before in my teens. My offence? Accepting an invitation to stay the night in a Chinese friend's house.

Luckily nothing untoward happened to me in my village or in the cab but the feeling of deja vu overwhelmed me for a few seconds. I reached my destination, he took the fare without so much as a thank you and drove off.

Hmm... do I really care about what's happening? I've rattled off a few rants in Facebook so maybe I do.

Actually I used to avoid the topic like the plague when I lived in Singapore. Maybe deep down I knew change won't happen in my lifetime. Indulging in any discussion about it would do nothing but ruin a perfectly good day so I did what other 'positive thinking' Malaysian PRs did - built walls around myself and locked it all out.

Unfortunately when you're back in the bubbling stew there's only so far you can run before reality jumps and bites you on the nose. You don't look for it. It looks for you. But I have a choice. I can pretend it doesn't exist or I can acknowledge its presence and find a way to make peace with it.

I choose the latter but I am unsure how.