Ordinary people are by nature not racial.

Did you read my posting where I told you about a place called Caunter Hall in Penang which has benn renamed Jalan P. Ramlee. Yes, I was a village boy, brought up in a small village surrounded by coconut trees, sugar cane plantations, pineapple lots and attap houses. (Attap is a roofing material made from the leaves of a kind of palm tree.) In the area were Malay, Chinese and Indian communities. As children, whenever we played, the idea of race did not enter our minds then. We only differentiated people by their jobs, their kindness and their attitudes.

I had to go to school by bus which took me and my elder brother to Hutchings School (the building housing the Penang State museum now) which was quite a distance away. There were times when we missed the bus and had to walk many kilometers to school. For me, despite such sometimes tiring walks, school was the most enjoyable part of my childhood. It was the place I learned a lot, made lots of friends, played with them and despite their skin colour, never thought of them as people of another race. We had our misunderstandings, our quarrels, our fights and our reunion as friends without any care for the race factor. This continued with our advance into secondary education when I was chosen to go to the Penang Free School. I remembered a Malay friend who was so close with us to the extent of even gradually being able to converse in a Chinese dialect. That was easy as ordinary children do not think of themselves in terms of race.

It was only after 1969 when the National Economic Policy (NEP) was implemented that Malaysian teenagers found that not every Malaysian teenager is treated equal by the Malaysian government. The traumatic moment of truth dawned upon the teenagers of minority races when they were not given opportunities to study in universities despite their excellent results while other teenagers of a certain race with lower results are offered those places. The race factor had raised its ugly head since then.

The injustice of such a policy was even realised by my Malay friends. One particular Malay teacher told me not to worry about having children as such a policy will not be around for many years. He thought that my wife’s inability to conceive then was due to my not wishing to have children to face such a moment of truth brought by the NEP. His compassion for the children of other races touched me even to this day.
In those days, I told politicians in the ruling parties that the poor can be assisted without bringing in the race factor. If the government sincerely wish to assist the poor of any race, which ought to be done, and certainly without opposition from any quarter, then assist all poor Malaysians. After all, if a certain race has the most poor, then the people of that race will be helped the most. However, it turned out to be helping the rich of that race to become richer through the excuse of uplifting the poor. The poor poor were left to remain poor, tossing merely crumbs to them just to keep them quiet. Well, go to the rural areas and see the poverty there. Their homes stand as proof of what had taken place.
It’s the politicians whom I am weary of. When it comes to ordinary people, we mix fairly easily in walks up the hill in Bukit Semarak. We take part in activities in Rukun Tetangga and residential associations, exchanging views and news without anxiety or fear of the other race plotting to steal away our wealth or blaming our individual poor economic situation on someone else.

When I was teaching in Kodiang, Kedah, I had some of the best times of my life in the company of ordinary village folks. Each weekend, I would drop into Pak Mat’s house to go trap birds in the nearby forest near Changloon. Sometimes, we would search for good ‘merboks’ in another village and Yusoff would help me to bargain for a fair price. Yusoff had a monkey to help him pluck coconuts. Once, an enraged monkey almost tore off his scrotum. He had to kill it as it was no longer safe to take around. A group of us gathered some money to buy him another monkey. Thus, we spent time with our hobbies, had outings together and helped each other out without the race factor interfering with our friendship.

However, the race factor is always read of in our news media each day as power hungry politicians use it to gain political mileage. And, apparently, this will continue for some time yet as even these politicians understand that it is not our nature to think of another person’s race as an important element in our lives. So, unless they persevere, they will lose their much needed following and support.
Well, that is life. It is never plain sailing. Fortunately God is still watching over us and as long as the politicians belong to a religion they dare not be too ungodly in their ways. There is still hope.