Ulog 79 September 19 2019

When Babyboo and I started to work together, oh boy. All hell broke loose. The thing is if I were to list down and criticise her for all that she is doing, this whole place will fall apart.

So therefore, I have to change. She doesn’t have to do so. That’s because after 4 or 5 times doing that, I know that I am the one that needs to change the method to get through to her. She will always stay the same and I have to find some means to move to the other side of the wall when the door cannot work.

She is a smart girl. She watches TV and learns fast. She spots things that I cannot spot that fast. She speaks all the languages I speak. Malay, English, Cantonese and Mandarin. Yes, she may not be able to do math or write as well as I do. Her education is just diploma BUT. I have a BUT. Please wait for me so continue.

She speaks well. If you look at the the population in Malaysia, being multilingual is not as common as you may think it is. There are certain types of people. I call them the Chinese Ed, the English Ed, the Malay Ed and the Banana.

Chinese Ed

The typical Chinese ed is easy to spot. Speak to them in English, and their accent will be easy to spot. They won’t be fluent, their grammar will be all over the place, worst yet, they will think very hard and sometimes get very nervous if pushed to speak in English.

All my Chinese Ed friends do not speak good English. They may know how to read and write well. But when it comes to speaking, that is whole other ball game.

English Ed & Banana

The English Ed will not be able to write Chinese AT ALL. Speak to them in Cantonese or Mandarin and they’ll ask you to speak in Malay. That’s because all of us in Malaysia no matter Chinese or English or Malay Ed knows Malay.

Then there goes the Banana people. They will look Chinese but don’t know Chinese. Yellow on the outside. White on the inside.

If Chinese people speak Chinese at home and don’t go to a Chinese school, they’ll understand some basics of Chinese. But do not know any Chinese news or understand TVB or Chinese movies. They’ll read subtitles. But BaByBoo learned Chinese from TV whether Mandarin from
Taiwanese TV shows or Cantonese from TVB. Like I said. She is special.

Malay Ed

The Malay Ed is usually all Malay people. I had one Malay friend in Chinese primary school. He is the only Malay in the whole entire school. There are 1 or 2 Indians. But during my time in school that covers 6 years of people. He was the only Malay.

Malay people will speak Malay and that’s it. They may know English. But most of them have limited speaking ability. They don’t know Chinese either.

If you come across a Malay that speaks Chinese, that’s like 1 in a million.

Malays are asked to learn other languages. Even English. But few English teachers teach well and thus, we have a problem with English amongst the Malay Ed.

Word has it that in the past, if you fail to get all other jobs, you become a teacher. So guess what? The blind leading the blind.

Simple as that.

Of course there is also the Indian eds. But all speak good English and I have yet to understand them fully as I have not been in that world.

What am I?

Honestly I have no clue. I speak English like a Banana. But I speak Cantonese and Mandarin fluently. I can understand everything a normal Hokkien person would talk about in daily conversations. But I cannot understand news or some times the soaps are too complicated. Mandarin and Cantonese news is okay to understand. But when you give me a newspaper to read, I have to guess some of the meaning. The words are easy to identify with the computer. But when you ask me to write from scratch, I have a hard time when you ask me to spell it out. Writing with the computer is easy because I can recognise the character. But when you ask me to write a character just by telling me the word, I have a hard time writing it out. I can joke in all Malay, Chinese, and English. So that makes me a multilingual joker. I speak Malay well for basics. But I am baffled how I do that. I think that has to do with watching TV a lot in all languages when I was young. Mom always watches news. So I watch. Dad watches movies. So I watch. He watches sports. He watches news too. That’s the only common thing that mom and dad watches. News. They discuss about business and news. They turn on the English Radio 4 and I wake up to Patrick Teoh and Yasmin Yusoff talk even in my sleep when I was a kid.

So, what am I again?

I speak like all Chinese ed, English ed, Malay ed and Banana combined. Well rounded Malaysian. The golden fruit.

Thank you very much.

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