ARE THE CHINESE USING REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY TO PORTRAY THEMSELVES AS THE VANQUISHED AND THE MALNOURISHED IN MALAYSIA?

…WHEREAS THE MELAYU ARE IN WORST SHAPE WITH MANY WHO ARE LIVING IN ABJECT POVERTY AND NO BASIC AMENITIES.

By Mansor Puteh

Let’s call the bluff once and for all; that the Chinese community leaders and other national political aspirants have been misleading everybody in the country all this while.

There’s no need for the Melayu to accept their charade and expose their bluff as it has become boring.

That the claim they have been making to charge that their community as the vanquished and the most malnourished is nothing but a lie.

It is true that there are many Chinese who lead miserable lives. But they are to be blamed for their miseries.

Ask those Chinese who are in the top wealthiest persons in Malaysia. Don’t ask those who are at the lowest rungs and in the poverty bracket amongst them, since they are there because they trusted their vernacular education too much that has forced them to stay there all their lives.

Yet, their community and political leaders do not want to highlight this fact and be proud of them. They only want to highlight the Chinese who are poor but not telling everybody why they are in such a bad shape. It’s because of their poor education and vernacular school background.

Even with their newfound wealth, they do not find it interesting enough to return to China as what many of their ancestors had pledged when they wanted to come to Malaya or Tanah Melayu, to find their riches and take them back to China later.

They prefer to remain in Malaysia where they believe they can retain their position as amongst the wealthiest persons in the country and getting all the help and support from the Melayu.

In China, they will feel lost. There is religious stifle. They cannot do much even after the opening up of that country more than twenty years ago.

Some do return to China though, but because they have to run away from the law, with the Indians in Malaysia fleeing to India to escape persecution for the crimes they had committed here.

However, there are still a sizeable Chinese who are not so well off; they survive doing petty trading.

And they are mostly those who have vernacular Mandarin school background. They do not have much of a future in the first place.

They do not blame their poor education studying in the vernacular schools but everybody else including the government whom they perceive as the Melayu government who had not cared enough for their well-being.

Unbeknownst to them, there are many more Melayu who are in much worse shape than they are who live in the rural areas where the basic amenities are not offered even after more than fifty-three years of Merdeka. They are still living in abject poverty.

And the Chinese who fail still insist on sending their children to such schools knowing how they will also become like them who can’t speak much Melayu and almost no English.

Yet, those Chinese who are successful are demanding that English be taught in the schools more extensively with some clamoring for the return of such schools so that more Chinese will send their children there to study.

But, don’t they realize that the return of such English schools or schools with English as the medium of instructions will cause the end of their vernacular schools, and such schools will also have Melayu majority?

There’s no doubt that if the Melayu are to be ‘forced’ to speak and write more in English, studying in such schools, they can easily outsmart those of the other races.

Those who write and speak in English better than the other races are the Melayu. This is a fact.

Even now those Chinese and also Indians including the Tamils who studied in the national schools are better off. They are able to related and react to the situation and be successful in life. They do not have any complaint compared to those Chinese.

They believed their schools and community could provide for them.

But alas, it was merely to force them to believe in the vernacular schools more. And it is also for those community leaders to get support from them so that their guilds and other associations and political party could function and continue to exist.

The truth of the matter is that the vernacular schools are the root cause of most of the problems faced by the group of Chinese who fail in life.

There are some who are successful. But they are those who went on beyond the limitations of their school. They entered the national schooling system and studied in the local universities using Melayu as the medium of instruction.

There are a smaller group of Chinese who could pursue their education abroad.

And they are the ones who are doing all the shrieking and shouting on behalf of the Chinese who fail, to show that they are successful despite them having had vernacular school education just like them.

But what they all neglect to say or admit is that they were able to continue with their studies in the national schools, for without which they will be stuck in the rut with them working in the ‘pasar malam’ and also engage in illegal trading of all sorts.

The Chinese elders and community as well as political leaders have been making the Melayu like fools for taking in their demands, at the expense of looking at the interests of their own community and that of the Indians and the others, all of whom have been neglected.

They have failed to develop their potentials and their communities suffer, just because the Melayu leaders were forced to accept all the lies that the Chinese community leaders have been telling them.

Their vernacular newspapers and those who write in English also do the same to show that their community are the ones who suffer the most. The Melayu had done things to stop it from progressing.

They have never acknowledged that the most wealthiest Malaysians are Chinese. There are so few Melayu and fewer still, Indians in this group.

But the Chinese community and political as well as intellectual leaders and their other spokesmen always want to avoid admitting this. They want to show those Chinese who fail in life without admitting that it was because of their poor education having just a few years of education in their vernacular school.

They also do not dare say the Chinese in other developed countries are worse off then them. And how those in Singapura can’t even write or speak loudly on any issue.

Here in Malaysia, they can even provoke the Melayu Sultans and other institutions of the Melayu and of Islam.

They insist on having the right of way on almost anything simply because they control the media.

The Melayu leaders are not smart enough not to know how to wrest control of the media so that their views on the poor state of the Melayu especially those in the rural areas can be highlighted.