No Four Seasons in Malaysia

There will not be summer if there are no four seasons..

From a tropical country to a city where the four seasons alternate, the most direct sense of the body easily leads to a dialogue with the locals, “Malaysia is like summer in all seasons!”. To be honest, before that I didn’t know what summer is, I would only know the unpoetic hot and cold. Leaving one’s original city is not about physically distancing oneself, on the contrary, it gives oneself a fresh perspective to view their original city from afar.

Before that, I didn’t know how many Chinese people there were. I would only classify races by language. If it weren’t for the repeated question of “So Malaysians can speak Chinese?”, I would not have a deep understanding of Chinese as a language medium for cultural heritage. From folk customs to the education system, different races seek common ground in this racial melting pot. The real difference here is the “same bed but different dreams” of the Chinese and the Malaysian Chinese; the real similarity is the same opinion of the Malaysian Chinese and Malaysians of other races. This feeling hit the hardest when a Beijing local welcomed me back to China with a Beijing accent. I got inexplicably angry and realized that I have always related myself more to my national identity than my cultural identity. I am a Chinese, but I am a Malaysian Chinese, or rather, a Malaysian.

I was treated like “foreigners” in the beginning and encouraged to speak Chinese, but slowly, after staying for a long time, I was accepted as a “half Chinese”. My Chinese language is often amused and corrected for being inaccurate. In Malaysia, we are accustomed to relying on the integration of three languages ​​to complete the expression of a sentence. This is derived from the “agak-agak” spirit of Malaysians. It is good to know what you mean, and you don’t need to waste your energy on communication to form dialogues, or to express opinions strongly. After the colonial struggle, we are more inclined to treat the group of people around us as a community. Unlike China’s political views, we are more emotionally dependent. We are more afraid of being abandoned than the community’s disharmony. We observe the overall situation before making a decision. This may be Malaysians’ advantage, but also may be a disadvantage.

We can speak English to Americans in the first second, and speak Chinese to Chinese in the next second, or occasionally sneak in a few Cantonese and Hokkien words to amaze Hong Kong and Taiwanese friends. Sometimes, we even deliberately hide the Malaysian accent to use the Taiwanese and the mainland Chinese accent. After all, we are used to switching languages ​​in Malaysia. In dealing with people, we reflect our amiability and language advantages. However, in contrast to other people’s pride in their own mother tongue under the influence of nationalism, we show that we have no personal opinions in terms of international differences. We smiled, not having a characteristic is also a characteristic, and I am still proud of it.

I came to the city of Beijing with prejudice against China. The uncivilized Chinese tyrants in media reports are not fictional, but do you think it is just that? If you experience what I have experienced – walking through the street where the uncles spit, inhaling the haze outside the 3M mask, eating cold noodles on the roadside stalls expelled by the city management, scooping the suspected-to-be-gutter-oil spicy hot pot, witnessing the ant tribe in the big cities, living in the cubicle sold by bad housing agents, missing the subway filled with indifferent crowd – every moment of your fury will seep into your heart, you will find that corruption and beauty exist side by side, they will not cancel each other, but they are very real.

No matter how good you are, there are people who are better than you; no matter how bad you are, there are people who are worse than you. Order a takeaway and open a can of Qingdao beer, the city of Beijing reminds you that you only need to learn to live your own life well.