The Chinaman's REAL dilemma

KTemoc Konsiders

RPK has published a letter in his Malaysia-Today titled The Chinaman's burden, which came up with lovely neat motherhood statements on what DAP as a political party should do in the light of virtually continuous anti-Chinese diatribes coming from UMNO sources, even down to childish nonsense that romanization of Bahasa Melayu was done as a favour for the 'ungrateful' Chinese but an accusation which failed to mention the much earlier death of Jawi-script Malay newspapers.

Be that as it has been from a former judge who has lost his moral direction, we know that there'll be further 'incoming' for the Chinese - 'incoming' being an American military word for enemy artillery barrage which for the Chinese Malaysians would be UMNO sources and their politicized anti-Chinese rants.

Let me tell you what has been and is the real Chinaman's dilemma. But to do so, I need to step back a few decades in time, at least briefly.

Because Chinese like Jews all over the world have had pogroms against them from time to time, they (the Chinese, not the Jews) prefer to lie low amidst the political landscape of wherever they sought domicile.

This political evasiveness or if you prefer, political abstention manifested in the notorious all-day-all-night long mahjung games on Malaysian election days wakakaka, is quite the opposite of what Indians do.

My Unc who studied in UK for many years told me at one time, around the 70's, there was strong anti Indian feelings among Britons just as there was recently in Melbourne, Australia, but relatively nothing much against the Chinese, both in Britain during the 70's and Melbourne, Australia at the time of the anti-Indian outbreaks.

Maybe it's because Indians have been and are very politically conscious and active (could this be linked to the domination of Indians in the field of law?) that they brought themselves to public prominence which gained for them the full attention and force of local bigotry?

Incidentally, pogrom is a word of Yiddish-Russian origin, testifying to the regular and frequent persecution of the Jews in Europe (particularly in Russia, Poland, Germany, etc) that such a word worked itself into the English vocabulary.

Similarly, the overseas Chinese, also a race frequently bashed around by the majority ethnic groups in various countries, have such a tragic word to describe the regular anti-Chinese pogroms. That word is p’ai-hua meaning ‘The Driven Out’.

Oh, now that we have mentioned p'ai hua, someone who was once in UMNO, wakakaka, was very vocal in telling his Heartland crowd that the Chinese should balik Tiong Sun (China).

Okay ... back on track, Chinese Malaysians had been lying (politically) low for decades because of two factors: firstly, as mentioned they didn't want to bring the attention of the mainly Malay local authorities to themselves, and secondly, I believe there could be an atavistic belief among at least the older Chinese Malaysians that Malaya-Malaysia was/is not their land, a subconscious impression enforced through regular drilling into their barb-wire haired head by UMNO that they were/arependatangs (despite sacrifices of Chinese soldiers and policemen), so why would/should they bother to participate in local politics. Aha, the allure of mahjung becomes more pronounced, wakakaka.

Politically, they quietly worked out a voting strategy of sending federal opposition parties like the Socialist Front and (from 1969 onwards) DAP and its late 60's to early 70's allies (PPP, Gerakan) to federal parliament to 'make mucho noise' for Chinese interests while voting Perikatan-BN into the state Assemblies to ensure continued federal-founded developments for their state.

The strategy had been employed for years except in the 1969 general elections but ceased since 2008.

Prior to 2008, when push comes to shove, they preferred a BN-UMNO government, hence 1999 and 2004 saw Chinese tsunamisfor (not against) BN-UMNO.

I have to say that someone saved by these Chinamen in 1999 has been terribly ungrateful, while having the brazen thick-skinned face to condemn the Chinese today. It's the same volte-face treachery practised against the Malay rulers, who were slapped in their royal face in 1991 but Godzilla-ishly ampu today by the same group of treacherous traitors.

Anyway, I believe two principal reasons convince the Chinese Malaysians today to cease the strategy of 'making noise in the East while behaving with decorum in the West'.

The first came about during AAB's term as PM, when ironically due to his quite relaxed attitude towards the online media, the Chinese public saw on TV and read on both hardcopy and online media the vile vicious vitriolic ultra racisms exhibited during the UMNO Party General Assembly as several wannnabe leaders showed off their credentials as defenders of bangsa, agama dan raja,and bloody f**k negara. They frightened the Chinese.

Yes, most Chinese were shocked at the unbelievable words and antics of those wannabe ethnic heroes. It was no longer the UMNO they had been comfortable with, an UMNO which though was the dominant political force and favoured UMNO Malays excessively but was also an UMNO which was reasonable, rational and reachable (accessible).

The second factor was the generational change among the Chinese, where the younger Chinese, born as 3rd, 4th or even 5th and 6th generation Malaysians have different values to their elders. They believe in and would vocally assert their Malaysian rights, and sometimes in their western cultured democratic practices appear as biadap to conservative and elderly Malays who haven't been exposed to the more robust style of democracy seen in Western countries like UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Thus the dilemma, the real dilemma of the older Chinamen was whether to join the younger Chinese in being more vocal in their opposition to BN and its nefarious practices, or to lie low as before while continuing with their 'making noise in the East while behaving with decorum in the West'.

What tilted them over had been their belief that the UMNO (and thus MCA, Gerakan etc) today is not the UMNO they had been comfortable with in the past. They fear that by remaining politically equivocal or worse, silent, they will suffer far more from increasing racist marginalization than by being vocal and bringing themselves to UMNO's nasty attention.

And then of course the very epitome of all this new UMNO viciousness was tragically encapsulated in the untimely unwarranted (and arrogantly) unexplained death of Teoh Beng Hock, a man who was killed on the eve of his wedding day.