Sunday, April 06, 2014

The One Malaysia Family

 Penang Island is a melting pot of migrant workers where historically the Chinese and the Hindus came over form China and India to work for the British on estate and plantations all over the country these can be said were the first generation families along with migrants from nearby Indonesian and Thailand who mostly arrived to become farmers and gatherers in the more remote parts of the Malay Peninsular. They came via Georgetown most of the em especially the Chinese and the Indians courtesy of the East India Company which had great interest in the resources of the neighboring states of Kedah and Perak s well other than the Penang Island itself. George was the hub of the political as well as the economic administration of the British Colonial Rule in  the country. The Malays back then were primarily farmers and fishermen and were tied to their rulers in the form of a Sultanate. 

My grand father was from Ceylon or today known as Sri Lanka and he married my grand mother who he met in Deli, near Medan Sumatra. What he was doing in the neck of those woods back in the very early nineteen hundred is another mystery, but suffice to say he was an artist. My mother was born in Medan Sumatra and met my father  a gold smith from Ceylon or Sri Lanka when the family escaped from Sukarno's wrath during his pogrom of Sultanates and Malay Rulers, to Georgetown, Penang. Why they had to escape? That is another mystery and takes some telling; however briefly my grand mother was related to the Sultan in Deli or Medan or so they say, but that is what rumor has it.

So I am a child as so my siblings born out of a mix marriage between hereditary cultures and faith of different countries and  my DNA should trace it all the way to two separate gene pool. Wow! Look at this family, the father a Chinese and the mother an Indian and the child they call a Chindian looks every bit a typical Malay child. I hope someday he will grow up to claim his right as the true Malaysian by birth and many many more like him will help to erase the racial demarcation between our different races in this country.

I hope many, many more like him will be born to rip apart the bonds of racial prejudice and religious extremism in this country. I hope that many, many more like him will grow up and claim they of one race and one only, Malaysians. 

I hope he will grow up to experience a country from Racial bigotry and religious persecution .

So I stood with this special child in my hands wishing and hoping that one day the children like thes will help to bind and heal all the broken dreams and the shattered hopes of their forefathers to build this country. For they are the future of this nation..

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