Can't believe how rusty I am when it comes to writing shit; they were right when they warned you about instant messaging too much. My English is all over the place right now, all my participle and perfect tenses are jumbled up, my grammar is messed up and my vocabulary was the same as when I left high school if not worse. I personally don't mind as I am not exactly a paid journalist or a poet, far from it, I am a mechanical engineer and engineers live in a world where English purists will get lost in. I mean, where else will you find a sentence that follows the form "if......else...."?! (only c programmers know what I am talking about, and even then, it's still a very lame joke, thank you very much)
I do wonder, however, what a qualified English teacher would think when they see how children these days are using three full stops instead of one... Oh, there I go again. We all remember the basic rules of writing that gets drilled into our head in high school but all those went down the pipes after a couple of years without a proper English Language module. You can almost feel the deterioration. Some examples will definitely be "cant" instead of "can't", "your" for both its literal meaning and "you're", i instead of I, and of course the classic "its" and "it's". There is bound to be more but I honestly don't know what is right or wrong anymore.
While I am on the subject of the usage of the English Language, the 2nd most widely spoken language in the world (the first being bullshit), the one thing I've noticed since I got here is that there really are a lot of myths about the English people that we tend to conjure up back home. For one, and let's get this out of the way first, their command of the English Language is not all it's hyped up to be. I know some people might go, duh, but let's face it, that's what we tend to believe in Malaysia; that all English people are masters at the English Language. We have this section called "boob watch" in the MoE section in the Star, where they highlight obvious English mistakes in signs and pamphlets and whatever that goes into print. Quite honestly, I've seen a couple of gems here that would make the list in The Star as well. I really don't remember but I'll remember to snap some photos when I see it the next time.
Oh, and I notice how they sometimes love to use "literally" in their sentences when the predicate doesn't carry any figurative meaning at all! It's almost as if they are using it just for the sake of elongating their sentences. They'd go "I literally finished everything, I was so hungry!" and "She literally phoned him up and asked him if he was cheating". Huh? Wha..?
And expanding on the myths topic, another famous one is that Malaysia has first world infrastructre but third world service and we should look up to Westerners and set our bar that high up as well when it comes to customer satisfaction. To a certain degree, I agree, but only if customer satisfaction means having a 30-day return policy because other than that, their customer service is not all it's cracked up to be and dare I say it, even worse than what we have in Malaysia. Try calling any customer service department and you'll get attendants that really don't give a shit about what you're talking about, putting you on hold for ages and giving you half-hearted responses. I mean, they tell you what you want to know but they won't go the extra length. E.g. if the shirt is out of stock, it's out of stock. Unlike Malaysia, they will not check with the other outlets if there are anymore available.
No, I am not stereotyping all of them and of course there are places and people who give you sterling customer service but yeah, the next time you see a letter to The Star telling you about how great our foreign counterparts are, just think of a used-to-death proverb. A clue, it involves the words "grass" and "greener". Oh, not the bus and rail services in Notts though, those are perfectly fine. Long live Rainbow and National Express.
Moving on, one thing I've realized since I got here is how much Malaysians categorize each other based on race. We have gotten so used to calling each other "Chinese", "Indian" and "Malay" when what we really are are "Malaysians". It took me quite a while to reply "No" to "Are you a Chinese?". Get what I am trying to say? It is fun though to tell people that Malaysia is a country filled with half-bloods. We're neither here nor there. We celebrate almost everything on the calendar. We have authentic Chinese, Malay and Indian food. We can speak English, Malay and multiple Chinese dialects but are most of the time, proficient in neither. Which leads me to the ultimate question, what is Malaysia's identity? How do we explain what Malaysia is or isn't? We're not a pure Islamic nation, neither are we an oriental-type Asian country, sorry Indian friends, I don't know how to describe India and Bangladesh and the like.
To be fair, I can so easily tell the answer to a foreigner if only I knew how to say "rojak" in English.
It's also funny when everytime they see an Asian male, and by Asian, I mean oriental Asian (Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese), they automatically assume you're a martial arts expert! I kid you not! It does get annoying when they try to make Bruce Lee noises, ask you to teach them moves and do the crane position they saw in the Karate Kid but still, it's funny as heck to see them make a fool of themselves. Oh, and did you know that every yellow-skinned person with small eyes is automatically a Chinese and speak really bad English? Because I get a lot of "wow, you speak pretty good English, I didn't expect that". Seriously mate, what were you expecting, "chings" and "chongs" in my everyday speech?!
Having said that, I am a sensible person though and to be fair to them, if we were to see a Caucasian, based on appearance alone, we'll never be able to tell their nationalities anyway so we can't really expect them to do the same for us. But still, for the record, and I am getting really sick of saying this, not all Chinese fry really good rice and jump 20 feet in the air!
You look like this.
Don't mistake this as a "white-hating" post though because I do not hate the locals here. Far from it, if there are anything average Malaysians can learn from them is their friendliness. Some of us in the UK may beg to differ, but I found the Brits in general to be really warm and friendly, right down to the cashiers, the block cleaners and the kitchen porters at the dining hall, whereas you would be lucky to squeeze a smile out of the Giant Hypermarket cashier you frequent every fortnightly.
By the way, the English accents does my head in at times though. It was hell for me during my first week. I could barely register what my blockmates were telling me. Give me American accents any day, baby! It's a lot better now though, and yes, I do tend to drift into a fake accent when I talk to them but only because Manglish is un-understandable to non-Malaysians. I don't act all cheem and posh in front of my Malaysian friends, okay?
Sigh, when I look at the calendar, it feels like it has only been a while but in reality, I have barely 3-4 more months here in the UK. Such a pity indeed. Everytime I think of the Malaysia Campus in Semenyih and compare it to the Nottingham Campus, I die a little inside. If only I could somehow bring the best of Malaysia over here, low tuition fees, food, my car, my baby(muaks).... You might not notice this, but I said bring the best of Malaysia over instead of the best of UK home, because, quite frankly, it's easier as there's not a lot of good in Malaysia in the first place!
"Be more patriotric, you ungrateful bastard!" Well, what do you want me to say anyway? Oh, I love scorching weather, internal politics drama, racial bias, rising toll prices and low wages?! As the Brits would say, you're having a laugh!
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