As it turns out, 2009 showed me how I could celebrate my first day of Ramadhan (the Muslim’s fasting month) in ways I could never have imagined. As I sat in the restaurant, as the waitress came and put in front of us a big seafood platter, as we began to eat and talked about our stories – I uttered to myself a prayer of gratitude.
From an outsider’s point of view, I’m certain all they can see is one old man sharing stories with three young people – a young woman in tudung who everyone seems to mistake for an Indonesian (or Iranian at times, for reasons only known to the guesser), another young woman who no one can seem to correctly guess where she’s coming from, and the old man’s son, a young man who looks every part an Asian, but who is as Australian as the next man cheering at Australian rugby matches.
However, what is unknown to them is the most precious thing for me. In the Land Down Under and miles away from my own home, I feel like I am a step closer to finding the missing piece of life’s puzzle which perplexed me in my younger years; I did not understand why I never had a friend who was not Malay, and what the real rationale for religious school was when I couldn’t see how kindness transcends religion, culture, and ethnicity and how a society’s greatness comes from its ability to see similarities beyond differences.
Naturally, I cannot speak for the mass of Malaysian youth who have a myriad of different experiences growing up in different environments and cultures. But if I could tell them one thing, I’d tell the stories of the old man I met last night – about how he grew up running around in Klang with his Malay and Chinese and Indian friends, how he went to the birthday party of his Malay friends and came back with a handful of pineapples tied to his bike, and how only one of his friends has a radio in the house and his friends had to come over to listen and memorize the songs for the rest of the week.
“Ask your father,” the old man kept repeating. “He would know what I’m talking about.”
What breaks his heart, however, was watching our generation grow up in the isolation and confines of our religion, culture, and ethnicity – when we never bothered to see beyond what was given to us and make the best out of it.
How many of us ever think to ourselves when we see what’s going on in the television, “what is right and what is wrong with the world and why it happened?” How many of us ever think to ourselves when we wake up in the morning, “today I want to break boundaries!” How many of us ever walk past a stranger on the street, who is as different to us as we are to him or her, and say to ourselves, “how about today I look at the world with my own eyes, and put away these rose-tinted glasses society has given me in the past 20 years?”
When my friend and I parted with the old man and his son, clad in their green and yellow Australian rugby jerseys and scarves, I felt as if one knot in my life has been undone and ready to be braided again on a new canvas. It was a meeting between generations, between cultures and nationalities, and despite coming together as citizens of different countries, I felt as if we all came from the same place with the same hope in our hearts – to see Malaysia as one again as it had been once before.
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