I HAVE not been able to forget Sharyn Shufiyan’s last column (Why I have not emigrated, Tapestry, Star2, April 27). It was how I used to feel too: guilty about the benefits I received just by being a Malay Muslim – so much so that I turned down three government scholarships, managing to win a private company scholarship back when it was rare.
I had parents who believed in exposing us to different cultures; and when I became a parent in my 20s, in the 1990s, I would show China on a world map to my young kids and explain that the Chinese live there but that the uncle next door is Malaysian. I used to not fill up the “race” columns in forms and was proud when my teenage son followed suit at school. But things have changed since then, and to me, the biggest change happened in 2008 and onwards. Suddenly, race became a dominant topic. Suddenly, I found that I was judged based on my race. However much I wanted to not talk about it or defend the Malays, I was expected to.
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