Author's note: 

Malay words used have not been translated as it reflects the cultural heritage the author has been born in.

Ruminations on Race

You always know you are different when someone points it out.

“Eh, you Malay or Chinese?” a new friend in class would ask me.

When I was a schoolboy, my skin colour and appearance did not always seem to fit into any category. I was neither here nor there. Not dark enough to be “true Indian” and not fair enough to be “pure Chinese.” My spoken Malay was also not good enough to pass off as a native speaker either.

Like those boxes we ticked off in forms, some annoying mono-racial kid would always insist I had to be Malay, Chinese, Indian or, if not, then “Lain-Lain”—The Others.

I often chose to be The Others, but had to relent when the class teacher would insist I tick Indian even though I protested that my father was Ceylonese. Apparently, Ceylon—or Sri Lanka—was not even a recognized country in her mind’s geography.

It also seemed to be an unspoken rule that if you didn’t tick one of the boxes, it meant that you didn’t belong.

“What mix are you?” would always be the follow-up question. It was always a question asked as simply as that. As if I were merely a fruit rojak (salad mix) or “chap chye,” which I knew to be a stir-fried mixed vegetable dish that my mother cooked. Of course, there were also others: the derogatory celup (a rethreaded tyre), chap chung (mixed type), kopi susu (milked coffee), nasi campur (mixed rice), and so forth.

I would usually heave a sigh before providing the stock explanation I had for them:

“I am Ceylonese from my father’s side and part Chinese from my mother’s side. However, my mother was adopted by an Indian family when she was very young and speaks mostly Tamil. She also wears a pottu and a saree.”

When she dressed less traditionally, my mother’s identity was always a source of befuddlement wherever we went together: the wet market, the hospital, a government office, or school.

My mother was less than five feet tall, but she was a tiny woman who could strike up a conversation in fluent Tamil with the nearest “Indian-looking” person whenever she wanted to. I always saw the look of surprise, followed by a pause, before delight took over their faces when they connected with my mother and started to jabber away in their “mother tongue” together. I wasn’t fluent enough to understand it all, but I always knew that this was my mum’s superpower.

One time she was admitted to a hospital for an overnight stay, but when we came to visit her the next day, my mother was not in her bed. Instead, she had traipsed around the entire ward and learned every patient by their first name, including their illnesses and how long they had already been there for. 

My father, on the other hand, was brought up in a family that emphasised English (as far as I know). He had chosen to reduce his multi-syllabic surname—my grandfather’s Kanagasabai (a name I found difficult to pronounce even into my teens)—to just a single letter: K. He gave each of his six children his middle name Matthews as a surname instead. With all of us having an anglicized Christian name, my father was able to complete the transformation. 

None of my siblings or I would be associated with the motherland ever again, at least not from just the sound of our names because we all have proper “English” names.

In the early 1950s, my father was a government servant and only a young parent of two daughters. But it was around that time when he finally got the chance to visit his adopted country. He was sent to Britain on a Malayan Governor’s Scholarship. It was there, I believe, that he became the anglophile he so aspired to be.

When I was growing up, he always proclaimed he spoke the “Queen’s English” and would always have a proper toast and a half-boiled egg in the morning. From watching him, I learnt to eat with cutlery, just like a proper Englishman would.

When dad went on and on about his days in England sometimes, it was my mother who would put him in his place: “Karuppu suthu velaikaran,” she would say bluntly. Loosely translated, it meant: “Black-assed white man.”

As the youngest of his six children, I never saw my dad as black or white in any way. But being the youngest and an avid reader, he was always my go-to person when I didn’t know how to spell or pronounce difficult English words like “awry” (uh-rye, not awe-rie), “often” (of-tunh, not of-en), and “privacy” (priv-uh-see not prai-vuh-see).

One of my father’s favourite often-repeated words was “incorrigible,” which he used when deriding a certain prime minister on TV or when labeling a visitor who once drank too much before begrudgingly leaving the party. “Incorrigible!” my father would say.

I always thought that it was meant as an insult, but now I think of the word with fondness. I see now how it could be applied to my dad, and even to my mum. They were both gregarious, sociable, stubborn, and set in their own ways: my mother with her comical stories, and my father with his bawdy drinking songs. We were never short of laughter at family gatherings.

Nowadays, in my fifties, I have come to embrace the fact that I am an amalgam of them both. Not a form with box after box of one-type races to be ticked out. (Or to be ticked-off about.) I don’t need to explain who I am to anyone. I don’t need to prove it to anyone. 

I’m still asked the inevitable question today: “Eh, what race are you Uncle?” But these days, I don’t even bother with the usual stock reply. I just let their thoughts run rampant for themselves. 

Call me whatever race you want.

Or just call me incorrigible.

Julian Matthews is a mixed-race minority poet and writer from Malaysia, published in The American Journal of Poetry, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Live Encounters, and New Verse News, among 60 other journals and anthologies. He stumbled upon a creative writing workshop by accident. That happy accident has turned into a rabid compulsion. He is still extricating himself from the crash. If you wish to support his recovery, please send him Wordle answers at https://linktr.ee/julianmatthews.