I've been busy with business lately. I rented a space during KAEDFest and sold my old novels and CDs. I asked Dina, a Sudanese studiomate to help me out and she opened her Henna booth. I, on the other hand used my only eligable talent of that time which was reading people's personality through their handwriting. I asked one of Dina's customers to write Saya naik feri pagi tadi, studied her handwriting and presented my findings. She was flabbergasted. A few minutes later, there was a huge crowd queuing and laughing at eachother's personality disoder. I didn't mind, since I was charging them 50 cents each and after 4 hours of 'predicting' people's private emotion, I made 60 ringgit. I wasn't predicting. Aiya. It's written psychology, something I'd learned and mastered years ago.
Some Maarof Club Members accused me for promoting a syirik practice. I accused them for being stupid.
Dina did beautiful henna designs and whenever she's bored, she'll pick a random topic to discuss. She saw me telling a friend of mine about one banned book I was selling, The Line of Beauty. "Afiq, why do you speak english to Nadira even though both of you knows how to speak malay?"
"Because she wants to. I don't mind" I answered.
"Well I won't speak english when I'm with Noor or any of my arabic speaking friends. Why would we want to speak english to eachother?"
"Some of us malays distinguish and elevate their status by speaking good english, so to tell people around them that they are considerably rich or their family is of good breed."
"I don't understand."
"Me neither, well, put it this way. I'm speaking to you in english because I can, because I was schooled in an english speaking school. Schools with english as their medium are usually private schools, which indirectly leads to another conclusion. Some are just comfortable speaking english. Whatever the reason, I would never speak english to random people. So berlagak.
"Berlagak?"
"Show off."
"Owh"
"It's just a language Dina. People who thinks English is something to be proud of are stupid. It's, it's unIslamic"
"Where is Afiq and what have you done to him?" Dina guffowed.
7 comments:
haha...being so narrow minded about something...typical malays...never give themself any chances to polish their ways of thinking or never wanted to think creatively...so there it goes...way to go malays!
sadly, I speak English to others mostly because my Malay sucks. And my Mandarin's even worse.
My parents made the conscious choice to speak English in front of us. In Subang it's normal for people to speak english, although in retrospect I realise a lot of people actually thought I 'berlagak' just because I was more comfortable speaking English.
We're a strange bunch, we Malays.
Language is language. I think it's pathetic when Malays get so jakun about other people 'speaking' just because it's a language that they can't speak well themselves. After all, as Muslims their lives are based on Arabic scriptures, a language more obscure and nowhere near as omnipresent as English in Malaysia.
The Chinese don't gripe about people speaking English. It's not a status thing, it's jealousy.
Malays are not superior. They're just Malay.
See.. i hate to be categorized as a MALAY. Aiya.
Can I be a Malaysian instead. Let's all call ourselves Malaysian. Indians comes from India lah. Chinese comes from China. Malaysians comes from Malaysia. Basic stuff.
the girl that you said was vain , her name is also Dina :)
the Maarof guy also gave me a flyer about coupling just because I was talking to a guy friend about our current project.
I gave back the flyer to him.
Hah!
Hey Afiq..like the post..But i would think that this world is borderles...yeah, call me an idealist..But language is to just another medium to get through the other person.
I wouldnt say anyone is trying to brag.The more laguages you know, the more you understand a certain culture and way of life...
I would look it in that perspective..I never had the perception that if one knew an extra language, one is better than the other.
Besides, we are all human beings. *wink*
Nice entries.
Sincerely,
Nuha
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