Expecting Better: Thoughts on Language and Privilege in Malaysia

Recently, certain discussions of race and class in Malaysia have left me with the sense that we are all talking in platitudes and relying upon received ideas without considering the relevance of these ideas to our country and society. Such misgivings often descend upon me as soon as I detect binaries and absolutes: A is classist, therefore not-A is not; X is racist in all contexts. For example: expecting good English is classist; therefore forgiving bad English is not. Or: questioning the results of a racial quota system is racist in all contexts.

This current bout of unease began when I read Nathaniel Tan’s article, “Tommy Thomas, Anwar Ibrahim, and #BangsaMalaysia” in The Star earlier this month. While I was still trying to articulate what bothered me about Tan’s piece, Rina Harun’s speech for the UN’s Social Development Commission went viral. I noticed many younger, progressive Malaysians objecting to criticisms of Harun’s English, just as they objected only a few days later to certain reservations about the Ministry of Education’s DidikTV initiative that they perceived as “classist” and “elitist.” It seems to me that the thread that runs through all these points of view is a fundamental oversimplification of what classism, elitism, and racism are in the context of Malaysia’s history and present.

For Nathaniel Tan, Tommy Thomas’s “feelings of being victimised” have blinded Thomas to “his own similar faults.” He argues that the former AG’s narrative is rife with unspoken anti-Malay prejudice: what he describes as the “you know I know la,” nudge nudge, wink wink non-Malay perpetuation of the infamous “myth of the lazy native.” He cites as a primary example Thomas’s claim that the AGC employed no one else competent: the insinuation Tan reads into this is that the civil service is riddled with incompetence because of its hiring policies that strongly favour Bumiputeras.

Malaysia’s Bumiputera policies are often explained to outsiders as “affirmative action.” Naturally, if we accept this explanation at face value, the allegation that all beneficiaries of these policies are where they are merely because of their race — that they would never have been hired in a true “meritocracy,” in other words — takes on sinister overtones. To say to a Black or Latinx employee at a US organisation, oh, you must be a Diversity Hire: this is an obvious racial insult. But are Thomas’s statements about the AGC the equivalent of such a remark? First, let’s not forget that anyone accused of being “a diversity hire” in the US would belong to a small minority in a sea of white people. But so-called “affirmative action” in Malaysia favours the dominant majority. If ninety-nine percent of the people employed by a government body are Malay, how does anyone call out the inefficiencies of bureaucracy without making themselves vulnerable to accusations of prejudice? Also, in this context, if we insist upon reading calls for greater meritocracy as veiled prejudice, we are putting ethnic minorities in the position of never being able to demand fairer treatment.

We all know the justifications for the NEP and Bumiputera policies: that in Malaysia, as a result of colonialism, the Malay majority lagged behind ethnic minorities who had been favoured by the British. Wealth measurements at the time of independence seemed to bolster this theory and support the need for race-based affirmative action favouring that majority. But these measurements divided the population of the peninsula into three principle categories, Malay, Chinese, and Indian, all three of which were recent inventions. (That these categories erased many of the indigenous peoples of the peninsula is also crucial to note.) By this I don’t mean that the words “Malay,” “Chinese,” and “Indian” had only recently entered the English language; I mean that their use as racial identities with clear boundaries was a recent phenomenon. India, after all, had only existed for ten years when Malaysia became independent: even today, the idea that Punjabis, Sindhis, Malayalees, Telegus, Tamils, and more are all “Indian” glosses over the very real differences between those communities, let alone their different roles and statuses in British Malaya. Likewise, Malaysia’s racial classification system calls both the descendants of middle-class Sri Lankan Tamil civil servants and the descendants of Indian Tamil indentured labourers “Indian.” Had the measurements of wealth distribution at the time of independence taken actual ethnic divisions into account rather than recent and arbitrary national identities, what would the results have been? What percentage of the nation’s wealth was in the hands of Tamil estate workers, as opposed to “Indians”? The same point can be made about the various Chinese communities that were lumped together for these statistics on wealth and equity at the time of independence.

Certainly there were “Chinese” and “Indians” who had been favoured by the colonial administration, but there were also Malays who had been favoured by that same administration: after all, the British built MCKK, branding it “the Eton of the East,” with a view to creating a class of Malay elites, the same elite class to whom the country was bequeathed at independence. If there was an elite Chinese class and an elite Indian class, there was also an elite Malay class, consisting not only of the royals but also of many of the men we remember as founding fathers. No one denies that wealth was unequally distributed in all three racial groups at the time of independence; yet this brutal inequality within each imagined community was not taken into account in formulating economic policies that favoured one race over the others. To suggest that every non-Malay who critiques those policies is a racist or an elitist therefore requires a particular kind of magical thinking, a rewriting of our actual history, because, leaving aside Tommy Thomas, many of are descended from the very people who were left behind by those policies.

Every discussion of racism in any society should begin with an acknowledgement of the balance of power, and this is where Tan fails most glaringly: he seems to think that the “racism” of ethnic minorities against the dominant majority is equivalent to the racism of the system against those minorities. That Malaysians of all races harbour noxious prejudice is an indisputable fact: only look at the way we turn immediately to racial slurs to call out politians or express our disagreements. Prejudice is rampant, yes, close under the surface of the #BangsaMalaysia facade. But the institutionalised racism of the Bumputera policies simply does not wield the same power as the “you know I know la” prejudice Tan bemoans, even if Thomas were demonstrably guilty of that prejudice. I do realise that one cannot simply superimpose the racial dynamics of white-majority societies onto Malaysia; unlike white privilege in, say, the US, Bumiputera privilege is limited and context-dependent. I have written elsewhere about the shifting balance of racial power in Malaysia: how the state’s race ladder favours Malays while the ladder of the private economy favours the ethnic Chinese. But even taking into account the power of systemic racism in the private sector, which sets itself in opposition to the government’s institutionalised racism and successfully undermines its reach, we must see that casual individual prejudice can never be the equivalent of any system: whatever Tommy Thomas does or does not think about Malays, and notwithstanding his financial, class, and educational privilege, his alleged prejudice is no match for the machinery of an ethnonationalist state. How far would Tan be willing to go with this argument, anyway? If an estate Tamil living below the poverty line were to use racial slurs against a Malay, would those slurs carry the same weight as the system that keeps the Tamil on the estate and denies his children opportunities?

Which brings us to the question of Rina Harun, DidikTV, and the English language in Malaysia. At first glance, the charge of neocolonialism or neo-imperialism would seem to apply to those who criticise the standard of English of non-native speakers. After all, a white American or British person who mocks the English of an immigrant to the US or UK is clearly imposing their cultural chauvinism upon people who, in many cases, are not only multilingual but highly accomplished in their home countries. More than any other European language, English reeks of imperialism, because of both its past and its reach: the sheer number of nations and cultures upon which it was imposed. And insisting upon “good” English in many countries does automatically favour those who have class or financial privilege: those who have been educated at elite schools in India, for example, will speak the Queen’s English, while the Indian middle classes in the heartland states speak it much more haltingly. Once, after a visit to a doctor during a brief stay in Thailand, a relative of mine complained, “Even the doctors here can’t speak English! What kind of education have they had?” I had to point out the gaping holes in this argument: first, that English language skills tell us nothing about how a person’s intelligence or communication skills in other languages, and that this is no less true of Thai speakers than it is of speakers of glamorous European languages like French or German; secondly, that foreign language skills are not a prerequisite for a successful career in medicine. So I’m well aware that focussing on a person’s level of English can be both misplaced and elitist. But is this true in the case of Malaysians who are criticising Rina Harun and the DidikTV teachers?

To answer this question, we must consider our own history with the English language. The truth is that those mocking the poor English of these speakers do not, by and large, have a longer relationship with the language than they do. This alone puts such criticism in a different category from the “speak English!” racism of white Americans confronted with immigrants speaking an Asian or Middle Eastern languages: the language is not more our heritage than Rina Harun’s or that of the teachers on DidikTV. Just as Rina Harun’s ancestors probably did not speak English two generations ago, most of our ancestors did not. They spoke Tamil or Malayalam or Punjabi, Cantonese or Hokkien or Hakka, and if, today, some of us speak English at the native level, it’s not because we were educated at the Doon School or the Lawrence School while our peers were making do at government schools; in fact, elite boarding schools in Malaysia either accept no non-Malays whatsoever or a very small percentage of them. We’re the ones who were denied educational opportunities on the basis of race; how is it elitist of us to expect better of those who were given those opportunities? Rina Harun not only attended an elite government boarding school that strongly favours Malay applicants, but also went on to a MARA Institute and then university in the US, which I would assume was paid for by the Malaysian government. She and I are of the same generation: as she was walking through all these doors thrown wide open for her, those same doors were being slammed in my face. I don’t know, and don’t need to know, what her SPM results were; I do know that wherever I looked after I received my (very good) results, the racial quota system applied: local universities, scholarships to the US, even scholarships to France, although I, unlike any other student the Malaysian government sent to France that year (all of whom were Malay), already spoke the language. Rina Harun now has enough financial privilege to settle a RM1.3 million debt in 15 months; whatever the mysterious sources of her income are, most people criticising her English have not had similar good fortune.

My family’s history on the Malay peninsula is not unusual. My great grandmother, who spoke no English, raised five children alone on the money she earned by selling thosai. She sent her children to government schools, but had to pull the oldest — my grandfather — out when he was twelve so that he could help to support his siblings. He entered the British postal service as a clerk, and there, working his way up the ranks (in which he had both Malay and non-Malay colleagues), he improved the English he had picked up at school. The woman he married, my grandmother, had only been formally educated up to the age of nine. To the end of her days, she spoke almost no English, so that my brothers, who spoke little Tamil — this, the speed at which we lost our “native” language, is perhaps the only thing that sets my family apart from the norm — had to communicate with her in Malay. (We are unusual but not unique: I do know of other non-Malay families where Malay became the common language.)

Take a moment to consider this: within two generations, my family’s linguistic choices became English — the colonial language — or Malay, which, no matter how strongly we might champion the notion of a #BangsaMalaysia, is still a language that was imposed upon ethnic minorities in the process of building the nation. What makes English different from Malay, from the point of view of ethnic and linguistic minorities in Malaysia? Neither is the language of our ancestors; some have gone so far as to argue that both are colonising languages. While I would distinguish between the colonising force of the British empire and the nation-building of the post-independence Malaysian state, I have often thought that the closest thing urban Malaysians have to a shared national language is Malaysian English, which belongs — or does not belong — equally to all of us: it is neutral. What does it mean to demand greater loyalty to the Malay language than the English language from non-Malays? Neither one of these languages is our “mother tongue”; both are choices. Some proponents of decolonisation like to point to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s decision to abandon English in favour of Gikuyu in his fiction, but by this logic — which I would argue itself depends upon a simplistic, if not regressive, definition of identity — the equivalent of Gikuyu for non-Malay Malaysians would be their ancestral tongue(s): Tamil, Malayalam, Cantonese, Hokkien, and so forth. Just as mixed race Malaysians have multiple ancestral languages, all of us belong to layered histories, and colonisation is one of those layers. The English language, for better or for worse, runs in our veins now, unless we favour purely biological definitions of identity: why not claim ownership of the language? How can the language belong, in 2021, solely to the English race? The English of G.V. Desani and Salman Rushdie, of Earl Lovelace and Sam Selvon, is not the English of Queen Elizabeth, and thank goodness for that: as Rushdie himself once said, we have done with the English language with that English once did with Indian cotton. We’ve taken the raw material and spun it into something of our own, a product that is wholly ours, and that, in Malaysia, belongs to us just as much as the Malay language does.

Exactly how this linguistic transformation unfolded in my family, I would be unable to say. What I know is that my grandparents’ five surviving children all began their education at missionary schools. At just such a missionary school, my youngest uncle played field hockey with Raja Azlan Shah, who would soon go on to MCKK, which my uncle could not have attended no matter how well he performed academically. (Yet we’re supposed to believe that elitism is the province of non-Malays, even as, today, wealthy Malay families can and do also choose to enroll their children in private and international schools.) But my grandparents’ two oldest children spoke primarily Tamil with their own children; the third child had no children of his own; the two youngest children, for reasons no one can specify, were speaking only English with their offspring by the 1960s.

In writing this essay, I thought about and talked to other Malaysians I know who speak English as a first language. Is class privilege a consistent, or even common, factor in our families? To begin to answer this question, we have to ask what class privilege is in Malaysia. There is no non-Malay nobility; the Western concept of “old money” is hardly applicable in our country, for even the oldest money is only a few generations old. Those of us who speak English at the “native” level include people whose parents were sweepers, housecleaners, and dhobis; people whose parents ran food stalls and canteens; people whose parents were illiterate. Our extended families are full of people who still, in 2021, speak little to no English. Among us are also many who spoke decent English in secondary school but improved our English after leaving Malaysia: I once knew a Malaysian Chinese woman who, by washing other people’s clothes for thirty-five years, saved up enough money to send her two children to university in Australia, where they remained after graduation. Now, thirty years later, they and their own children speak English at the “native” level. To say that those with such family histories are not speaking from privilege is not the equivalent of a white person arguing that they have no privilege if their ancestors were working class; unlike white people, we do not globally benefit from the colour of skin regardless of our family history and present circumstances. English proficiency is, quite simply, an unreliable marker of class in Malaysia, because class itself is complicated: within the same family, and sometimes even within the same generations of a family, you will find lawyers and manual labourers, hawkers and bankers.

Many of our parents explicitly identified the English language as a path to opportunities that our government would deny us. The washerwoman saving up her money to send her children to Australia: you can bet that she told them they would have to excel at English. My own mother told us: you’ll have to be ten times better to get half as far. She didn’t just mean ten times better at the English language; she meant ten times better at everything. English was only part of the picture for those of us who were constantly reminded that government support was not in our future. To some extent, this explains the great disparity between Rina Harun’s English and the English of people like me: we always knew we had to master her native language and English, while she, perhaps, remained complacent in the knowledge that her native language was the language of the state, and that her government would open doors for her. But here’s the thing about forcing yourself to be ten times better: you cannot easily switch that off. You cannot require us to be ten times better to make it half as far, and then tell us not to notice others’ inadequacies when they mangle their sentences and blithely teach children that only married people can reproduce. We expect better because — at the risk of sounding arrogant — we can do better. Not because we grew up with elite privilege, but because we were told we had no choice but to be better. And so, when we (and this “we” includes Tommy Thomas and everyone deploring low professional, linguistic, and academic standards) call out mediocrity, you can accuse us of many things: bitterness, perhaps, or resentment, or even jealousy, which is an emotion we don’t talk about enough. But neocolonialism, closet imperialism, elitism? No. (Nor, by the way, does this charge apply to every instance of a foreign government calling out our problematic record on human rights and press freedom: the British High Commission objecting to the Malaysiakini verdict is not neocolonialism. Governments can and should hold each other to global standards on such matters.) In one of my favourite essays of all time, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” Zadie Smith writes:

The terms we choose — or the terms we are offered — behave as

containers for our ideas, necessarily shaping and determining the

form of what it is we think, or think we think. [….] Aren’t we a

little too passive in the face of inherited concepts? We allow them

to think for us, and to stand as place markers when we can’t be

bothered to think.

Smith is specifically talking about the notion of “cultural appropriation,” but this idea of terminology — whether academic jargon or the beloved buzzwords of both ends of the political spectrum — restricting our thought processes applies more broadly. So let’s stop borrowing impressive-sounding labels and applying them to Malaysia just because they might fit what’s happening in other countries. In addressing the problems of our country, let’s insist upon rigour and original thought.