Foreigner in a foreign land

Every time I come home to Malaysia for a visit, my mother asks me variants of the same question: "When are you coming back for good?"

And I always answer with the same, "I don't know."

I really don't. I always tell people that the reason why I've not come back to stay is due to the insane heat in Malaysia which I have complained and barely tolerated in my 20 years growing up in Malaysia before I went to England for further education. But what really drives a girl away from all her friends and her family and all that is familiar to her to a place of unknown?

Most of you know what drove me there. What you don't know is what kept me there. Other than Boy, that is.

It is the political climate and the underlying racial tension all around us. It is things like this: www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/malaysia/44775-btn-taught-me-the-chinese-are-the-jews-of-asia

I, for one, do not believe racism is inherent in us. Racism is learnt. We acquire this from others, our peers and family and sometimes, the people we respect or are told to respect. I went to a Presbyterian kindergarten even though I wasn't Christian and then I went to a Malay primary school and were one of the five (and later, six) Chinese girls in our class. All through that, I did not think there were any difference between me and my Christian friends, or me and my Malay friends. Perhaps I was naive, but as far as I could remember, we were kids, we played and laughed and learnt together. Some of us were very close despite belonging to different religions, different cultural backgrounds, etc.

I first learnt about racism and the effects of it when I was eleven. I cried in my mother's lap and asked why did it have to be so. She said that is life. For a long time, I refused to believe that life has to be that way, but she was right. Life continued on, and racism became more apparent in secondary school when we were joined by students from the Chinese primary school and the chasm widened. The Chinese and the Malays hung out with "their own kind". The Chinese students who studied in the Malay primary school had to make a choice.

I distanced myself from people, not willing to participate in this game.

Do you think it is sad that I feel more accepted in a foreign country like England than I do in Malaysia, the country where I was born and bred? I am treated as a second-class citizen in my home country. I am penalised for my origins, my skin tone, my race, all which I cannot help or change.

I am treated as an equal in a foreign land regardless of what colour I am and which god I worship.

Why, then, would I - or anyone else - want to come back? Even if I were treated like a second-class citizen in a foreign land, I'd rather that than to be treated that way by my motherland. You know why? I can rationalise easier on why a foreign country may alienate me, but I can never rationalise why my own country would do so to me. It's like being abused by your own parents, who are supposed to love you most. You can understand why a stranger may hit you for something that is not your fault, but you can never understand why your own mother would do so.

But I have never ever thought of myself as anything other than Malaysian. Even now, when I am in England, people curiously ask me if I am Chinese. They wonder if I had been born or brought up in England.

I smile and I tell them that I am Malaysian.

But I don't know if I ever will come back for good.