For what its worth, Malaysia.

I am a Malaysian.

I grew up in a small yet booming town where oil was found and everyone had hopped on the bandwagon.

I did kindergarten and I grew up speaking my mother tongue and learning three different languages.

After a brief stint overseas as a kid, I came back and studied in Primary 4. I had to learn everything all over again. BM, verbal Chinese, dialects.

I spent 8 glorious years in Malaysia. We stayed in the one city and I developed my friendships there and I called that place home. Always.

My friends were of different skin tones, different religions, different cultures but that did not matter. Perhaps, that was what kids were like. We never cared about anything more than what was the next fun thing to do together. We learnt of different cultures and never that one was better or worse than the other. We lived within hearing range of the call to prayer and the ringing of church bells and the sounding of temple drums but never, ever, were we taught that it was bad or it was okay to put down other people or their religions.

As we progressed through secondary school, the splitting of the friendships became more obvious. I wondered why but I never really thought too seriously about it.

And then I left Malaysia to study overseas.

I came back twice in two consecutive years and I have not been back since.

And how it has changed.

From the tens of thousands strong protest to the murder of a Mongolian woman to the beheading of animals to the lifting of cultural weapons and swearing to drenching them in blood to a new government unable to carry through with its promises to paparazzi photos of MPs designed to shame and blame, this place has changed.

The place I called home has changed.

We pride ourselves as a multi-cultural nation. We pride ourselves on perpaduan rakyat (Unity of the people), we pride ourselves on respect and courtesy and we even teach it in our education systems, for goodness’s sakes! Yet, where are we now?

What happened to the respect that we drill into our children? What happened to the moral values that every child had to memorise to pass their Pendidikan Moral paper? What happened to unity? What happened to Seia, sekata, sehati, sejiwa? Are all those patriotic songs that get churned out like Communist propaganda just for show? Do we promise that all is equal, but some are more equal than others? Where have we failed that prejudice, blame, fear, disrespect, and utter contempt for others have become commonplace behaviour? When has respect become sought at the end of the baton rather than in the spoken, well-thought, respectable word?

Keranamu, kami bebas merdeka. Really?

Where is the freedom? Where is the independence? We were so proud to call you home, yet year by year, more and more of us flee. Not because we want to but because we can.

We teach our children the idealogy of fairness, respect, love, peace, harmony and unity, and yet, look at the rest of us adults. We preach fear, blame, prejudice, disrespect, hate, chaos, and contempt. What do you think the children will pick up more of?

A song once said that children are our future. If this is the future that our children will inherit, we as a nation are royally screwed.

We have learnt nothing. Absolutely nothing. After all those years of independence, we still struggle with racism, religious discrimination, dissent.

Our ideals of unity, one race, 1Malaysia is a lie.

Sure, we like the idea of a peaceful Malaysia. Call it the Malaysian Dream, if you will.

A few out of many have stood up for it. We want to be able to say that we fought for our country. We fought for the peace and the stability and the harmony that is depicted in so many Pendidikan Moral books. Samy and Ahmad plays with Chong Beng in the park. Salmah and Devi and Soo Ling work together to tidy up the yard. But if things carry on the way they do, soon, Samy and Ahmad and Chong Beng will be trying to outrank/outperform/crush the other in the business, economic, and personal world. Salmah and Devi and Soo Ling will sit around gossiping behind each others’ backs.

Perhaps, we can learn from the simplicity of children. There, skin colour doesn’t matter. If you don’t eat pork or beef, it doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter that you had to wear a scarf to cover your head. It didn’t matter that you celebrated one thing and I, another. It didn’t matter that we spoke different languages or we dressed differently or that I had small eyes and you had dark skin or that I worshipped one God and you worshipped three or ten.

We need to see beyond that. We need to blur the lines of distinction. Because no matter what skin colour we are, we all bleed the same red blood. Crack open our skulls and you will always find a brain. Rip our chests open and you’ll find a pulsating, beating heart. Underneath everything that we say make and conforms us to become who we are, we are still human.

And no matter how different we are, we still have that one thing in common.

I hope we see. I hope we open our eyes to the foolishness of what we have become. I hope that we can one day, live again in peace and harmony, rather than cower in fear behind the lies that we read and hear and see on a daily basis. That one day, I can look out the window and I will see Samy, Ahmad, and Chong Beng playing in the park together again.

Happy 52nd Birthday, Malaysia. I hope as you grow older, you grow wiser. We are your people, your voices. And may we one day wake up to realise that indeed, we are 1Malaysia, one people, united. In peace. Prosperous. Respectful.

Like the Malaysia that we’ve always studied about rather than the Malaysia we live in.