Choose living, even if it is out of sheer spite

AUGUST 16 ― When I was the editor of a tech magazine, I had my own little bulletin board where I would pin reminders and little notes.

Right in the centre of it was a printed-out column by George Monbiot titled Choose Life.

I could say that it was a very condensed Bible of sorts, my North Star, reminding me to follow my own notions of what was right.

“You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?”

I sometimes feel like I'm living in a zombie wasteland.

How does it feel, really, to be surrounded by people saying things like “I want to vote for Perikatan because Pakatan Harapan holds too many concerts”?

Bloody depressing, that's what.

I've started to collect dolls (Barbies mostly) and when I was telling people in a local doll collector's forum that some items not sold in Malaysia could easily be gotten, for good prices, by going on China's Taobao they clamoured at me to buy things for them.

My answer: get someone else.

Their answers: they didn't know anyone. Because most of the people in my forum did not know, or did not have close enough relations with anyone who could navigate Taobao.

I wouldn't have been able to figure out Taobao if I didn't have friends who helpfully translated messages from sellers, or even added my orders to their own online shopping carts.

Browsing through my Facebook it's disheartening to know that for many of my friends I am that person who ensures their group photos aren't made up entirely of just one race.

“Hey, Erna's here, our table is now instantly muhibbah!” a friend joked once.

I don't find that funny anymore especially as Merdeka and Malaysia Day are both weeks away.

We vote in silos. We socialise in silos. We work, we go to school in silos.

I know that's not just the norm in Malaysia but in most other countries, because it's just so much easier to only socialise with the people who look like us and speak the languages we're most comfortable speaking.

A boy waves the Jalur Gemilang at a park in Cheras August 10, 2022. — Picture by Devan Manuel

Yet each year we talk about unity, we talk about tolerance, we talk about Malaysia berbilang bangsa (multiracial Malaysia) but in reality it feels like Malaysia's made up of just one race and the multiple other unwelcome guests.

I don't know how we can see change or fix things when the reality is that for some, the change they want to see is to have no other people around but theirs.

At this point I have reached the point of no longer wanting to care and just focusing on being happy with what I already have, and damn everything else.

I'm not going anywhere; this is still my country despite my being told that I am a traitor to a race I don't belong to, or not being seen because I'm of a people that only matter during elections.

So I have just one choice left to me now, which is to be determined to make the best of things, no matter how often I am reminded by some people that they think I deserve no rights, for being the wrong race and acknowledging the wrong deity.

I did not choose my birth or my birthplace, but I will choose to dig in my heels, and live my life as furiously, as determinedly, against the forces that would have me just give up or just jump into that ocean that separates me from the state where I was born.

This is my country, as much as it is for any one who calls themselves a citizen, or deserves to be one.

You make it so hard to love you and your people sometimes, Malaysia, but you're still home. Thus I will rage fully, for you, and sometimes against you until this stubborn heart of mine stops beating no matter how much it breaks for a country that doesn't love it back.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.