“WO de ming si jiao Fakhrul,” said the little lad, looking almost fearful. That means “My name is Fakhrul”. With him were a handful of Malay boys and girls, aged from about six to 12.
They were learning Mandarin as their teacher stood there, beaming. Her name? Vanisha Sivalingam.
This is the real Malaysia – a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual nation, despite what some “trapped-in-a-time capsule” politicians may say. It’s a nation where a 26-year-old Indian woman teaches the Chinese language to a class of largely Malay children, all of whom are from the B40 group.
She was doing it for free, using her own money to print out worksheets for the children, and she was also doing a good job of it.
It was only their second session in class, and already Fakhrul, who is eight, and his classmates could string together a couple of sentences and even read words like cup, dress and ice cube in Mandarin. Their diction, says Vanisha, is impeccable.
What is even more unbelievable is that this was in Taman Medan, Petaling Jaya, almost exactly at the spot where, some 22 years ago, racial riots broke out between Malays and Indians.
The place is far more tranquil now, and the squalid longhouses and squatter homes are gone. Instead, spanking new four-storey buildings with hotels and high-rise condominiums have taken over.
Among the hotels, nasi kandar shops, car washes, laundromats and the ubiquitous 24-hour retail shop – all trappings of modern urban life in the Klang Valley – is Tara Foundation’s gurukulam (tuition centre), dedicated to uplifting the lives of the poor, especially the Indians and Malays.
The foundation runs other classes too – Maths, Science, Bahasa Melayu, English and basic computer courses – but it was the Mandarin classes that caught my eye. The mastery of languages is going to be very important for the growth of the country.
In fact, it could be our best shot at succeeding in a very competitive world.
It has also become very important in this country to speak each other’s language. We really need to communicate, especially at a time when the country seems headed towards a big rift. We are divided by race, religion and even language. The rhetoric of hate is everywhere.
Many are questioning the vernacular education in this country, not realising that it is actually a treasure trove, a gold mine from which nuggets can be found to take the nation forward, even as China and India grow as superpowers.
Instead, these people want to limit the languages we can learn in the name of protecting the national language.
Some continue to claim that it is against the Federal Constitution to have vernacular schools in the national education system, although the High Courts have twice ruled in their favour.
A recent report even claimed that non-Malays are not keen on learning Bahasa Malaysia. That could not be farther from the truth.
Just look at how well the non-Malays do in the Bahasa Melayu paper in the SPM examinations. And I have just watched a video where very young Chinese school students put up a boria show in Penang, drawing exclamations of wonder.
Boria, once the forte of legends in Penang, is becoming a lost art, but to have Chinese schools revive it? Awesome! Their Bahasa is immaculate, too.
Like those kids, we must all master Bahasa Malaysia. It’s the glue that holds the country together. But we also need to get out of our little silos and seek knowledge from a wider range of sources. We don’t need frogs, be they political or those trapped in a well.
Ironically, any rejection of languages other than Bahasa Malaysia leaves the majority Malay community most disadvantaged here. The non-Malays, including those in Sabah and Sarawak, have Bahasa Malaysia and their mother tongues.
They also embrace English, thus making most of them at least trilingual – and more valuable in the real world.
The Malays, on the other hand, have only their language, and the push to downgrade English has led to many of them being monolingual, unable to communicate with the world.
Remember that Malaysia was once a magnet for investors because of its well-educated and English-literate populace.
With nomination day for the six state elections today, it is my hope that whoever wins, the country’s current system – where the learning of all languages is allowed – is maintained.
We already have rows over race and religion; we do not need language supremacists as well. They will only take us down a dangerous slope.
Former Umno strongman Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah has said that many civil servants don’t even know how to write a simple letter in English. It’s not surprising, considering that we had a government that wanted to make it an offence for civil servants to use anything but Bahasa Malaysia.
Thank God for the Sarawak leaders who have refused to toe that line and remain adamant that English, as one of the region’s two official languages, is here to stay.
I am encouraged, though, by the recent words of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.
“In this age, mastery of languages is important. The old mindset of some Malaysians would be against efforts to promote other languages in secondary schools.
“They tend to ignore the fact that the mastery of a third or fourth language is important,” he said, even suggesting that rules be relaxed so Tamil can be taught in more public schools.
Of course, he was speaking at the 11th World Tamil conference and may have just been pandering to the audience.
However, one thing is certain: the mastery of languages is important, and those language supremacists who want only their language to rise at the expense of others must not be allowed to get the upper hand.
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