What is Chinese in me?

 

I am prompted to do a stock-take of my ethnicity because of DAP's Sungai Pelek assemblyperson Ronnie Liu’s term, “Chinese-ness.”

He used it in reference to his party, saying "The party need not dilute its Chinese-ness just because of the criticism from our political enemies. We have to safeguard the culture of the party.”

That drew charges from party colleagues of him being a toxic chauvinist, which in turn led Liu (above) to trot out the usual “misinterpretation” motivated by prejudice retort. This was followed by so-called party grassroots standing straight and tall holding signs that note that the DAP is for everyone. An ideological and personal squall, not gripping drama, it will pass.

But really, Liu, to throw into the mix of your ideal society and party more Malay-ness and Indian-ness, Iban-ness and Kadazan-ness, it’s too many “nesses” for me to take in.

I think I have enough of a problem with qualifying for sufficient “Chinese-ness.”

Right from the start, I was at a disadvantage. Dad was Hokkien. Mum spoke Hakka at home, and she was home-tutored in Mandarin. Cantonese was their shared dialect, so this Hokkien boy grew up speaking Cantonese, my Hokkien restricted to about two dozen words or so, a few of them not to be said in the presence of adults.

In the 50s, the academic bar to pass for better employment prospects was the Form Five Senior Cambridge, so I was enrolled in an English-medium primary school close to my home.

As my first grounding in the English language, when I was about five, dad also paid 30 cents a week to the Indian newsagent who delivered the daily copy of The Straits Times, for weekly copies of Beano and Dandy. Every Friday morning, I was up in the dark before dawn, dashing downstairs to look for the comics folded within the newspapers… occasionally distraught when the weekly shipment from England had been held up.

My first “story-book” was a collection of Aesop’s Fables, that imprinted on this impressionable mind the terms “dog in the manger,” and “sour grapes,” etc.

That led to Enid Blyton, Arthur Conan Doyle, my uncle’s complete collection of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan, Dumas, my father’s Agatha Christies.

My secondary school was named after a fusty, musty English queen, and the regimen was an English public school with a large strapping of Gordonstoun-like tough physical challenges. Excel or be caned. Excel and be caned anyway, call it character-building.

At the University of Malaya, I majored in English Literature, but was not allowed to take Chinese Studies as a minor. Why? Because I would have an unfair advantage over the non-Chinese in the courses. What advantage? I am illiterate in Chinese. Denied an opportunity to add to my “Chinese-ness,” because the borang said I was Cina, and that’s all they needed to know.

So, on physical facts of “Chinese-ness”, I am shamefully lacking.

My ancestry is as Chinese as it can get. Both my grandfathers were immigrant labourers from China at the beginning of the 20th century. Grandpa, on my maternal side, struck it rich in the tin lodes and veins in Kepong and Kampar, and sent for a child bride from China, my grandma.

He died young, an aunt suggesting that a contributing factor could have been governing his family of five wives and 18 concubines, 21 sons and 23 daughters.

If grandpa was an over-achiever in the virility stakes, I am underwhelming. Marrying late, my wife and I decided I was too old to learn how to change diapers.

But back to my grandpa. For those who are paranoid that they are not standing up in the world anymore, my mum told me that every night, in Ipoh or in Kuala Lumpur, before he left for his carousing at the opera and houses of repute, mahjong game, his dinner would include a pot of shark’s-fin from a restaurant delivered in a trishaw.

Yes, I can finally claim some “Chinese-ness” in my fondness for food. (I had a food and drink column “Fats” in The New Straits Times in the 80s.) It’s a truism – Chinese will eat anything that flies, swims, and prowls. Many species are threatened with extinction from the voracious appetites of over a billion Chinese who find life profuse with edible things.

Poach the dwindling numbers of awesome, sexually reticent rhinos for their horns because in simplistic minds the up-thrust horn means they can karaoke Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long.” This culinary crime is committed for what is overgrown rhino nostril hair glued together by snot.

The most ludicrous example of Chinese appetite adventure is some Chinese forefather, in a lost time, venturing into a pitch-black cavern, feet squelching and sinking into aeons of pungent guano and bird droppings, with swarming cockroaches and beetles, and possibly, a few poisonous reptiles underfoot, feeding on fledglings falling out of nests from the dark heights, rigging together several long bamboos, shinnying up it, avoiding a feathery winged rush of disturbed bats and birds escaping the intrusion, waving a flaming torch onto the walls of the cavern, seeing small plaques of coagulated phlegmy bird spit, splattered with organic cultures, matted with fluff and twigs, and say, “I think that will make a sweet dessert boiled with rock sugar, and it can be sold for a lot of money as a tonic for good health.”

I am stopping this stock-take of my “Chinese-ness.” Depressing. I am not much of a Chinese. I will have to settle for being more of a Malaysian.  - Mkini    

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THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.