Don’t box me in.

Taken with my Canon EOS KISS.

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As the English/Malay speaking half of World Vision Malaysia’s Youth Ambassadors (hah! I sound so self-important) I had to today emcee a colouring contest at the Putra World Trade Centre in conjunction with the My Family Showcase. All registration fees went to World Vision Malaysia (yay! Methinks about RM4,000-RM5,000 was collected) and kids between the ages of 5-12 stood to win cash prizes.

Now, hardly exerting stuff, but it was quite challenging, and hilarious how miscommunication was so rife and there wasn’t enough space for all the kids to colour together; the younger ones remained inside the hall while the older kids had to colour outside (poor things).

Now, why this is blogworthy: it was scary.

Like, seriously—the air of competition, the hardcore coming-early-to-book-a-spot, the doting parents who watched their kids like hawks…now, I’ve entered a few colouring contests in my time (haven’t we all? It’s like some Malaysian child’s rite of passage)—never won, obviously, because when I was a kid my 5 second attention span was much worse and I never got the hang of the shading thing—but I don’t remember those colouring contests being less of a contest than it was a battle!

Ok picture this yeah—clearly some of the kids go for art classes (in addition to the music/piano class, the taekwondo class, swimming class, maths class, English class, spinning class cooking class upper-middle class…yeah I’m kidding about the last three, but you catch my drift); these kids were the ones with the hardcore parents.

The parents that buy them full on mini-tables and chairs and lugged it to PWTC just for this. The parents that forced me to return submitted artwork “because the full two hours are not up yet; Ah Boy, colour some more until time is up, I don’t care if you are tired or not”. The parents that crushed littler kids in the melee that happened during prize-giving up on stage.

Gaah! The kids are almost as scary….especially among the older ones, many of them actually brought pieces of cloth to cover their half-completed artwork to prevent other children from seeing what they’ve done! They’re sitting there on their cushions/mini-chairs, barefoot, little scraps of crayon-stained cloth around them, dusting and scraping away at their artwork, giving their opponents sneaky looks and glaring quite dangerously at me when I make announcements, like they’re thinking “stuff yer gob, ye crazy woman, let me colour in peace! Yer disrupting my artistic train of thought as to whether I should colour the man’s hair cornflower yellow or sunshine yellow.”

Speaking of which, is something else I noticed—call me over-analytical but my Arts training has done me well. I noticed that almost all the kids, colouring artwork that featured families and kids (and a cat, for the older group of children), coloured the skin of the characters in the pictures light. As opposed to dark. Yes, even the children who were Malay or Indian (dan lain-lain).

I just found this so problematic and sad. Things are such that these little ones think that fair is beautiful and dark is not? Sigh.

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I also found myself asked twice over these last two days, once by a salesgirl at a cosmetics counter, and another time by a DJ at PWTC (I digress here, but why do DJs always put on this fake ‘ohmygod I’m so cool listen to my sexy raspy deep’ voice when they’re at the mic, but when they’re not on it they can talk like a ‘normal’ person again? Gaah.): “So what are you? Malay? Chinese? Mix?”

Everytime I am asked this lately, my answer is always the same. “I am Malaysian”.

This always throws people. “Yeah, ok, but what are you? You speak Malay so well” to which I usually reply, “but that’s inconsequential. I’m Malaysian and I don’t think I should be defined by my ethnicity or my language.”

I always make them uneasy with this…haha.

The DJ-type person also interrogated me on why I couldn’t speak Chinese, because I told him that Jia Xiang (the other WVM Youth Ambassador) was doing the Mandarin version while I spoke in English/Malay. (Gaah. Because!) I was a little offended by this, even though it happens to me so often you wouldn’t believe it, and I told him so. Because I choose not to, and why does it matter, especially to him anyway? Does it make me less of a good person because I can’t speak what society deems my mother tongue?

It’s a personal choice and I don’t think I need to justify myself to anyone.

Call me a shit-stirrer but I think it’s high time we embraced this on a personal level to not be defined in terms of these things. The more we harp on issues of ethnic pride and the whole my-language-is-better-than-yours and all-English-speaking-people-have-forgotten-their-roots issue the more we are perpetuating this vicious cycle.

There’s only one race, and that’s the human race, and we’re all citizens of this same country. So why the labels? Why the need to put everything in boxes? Why can’t we be free to be you and me?