When we came back to Shah Alam yesterday, a friend of ours alerted us to some posters that were put up at the faculty, detailing new dress codes. He seemed quite happy about it, which made us curious. And so we checked it out. Whoa! Guys are allowed to wear round-necked t-shirts to class on Tuesdays to Fridays, Girls are allowed to put on anything as long as there are sleeves on it (they can even wear shorts to play certain appropriate sports which weren't stated in the poster). I did think at the time that it seemed too good to be true and that the regulations weren't detailed enough, but whatever works, huh?
So today, I put on a t-shirt but I decided to wear a jacket with it because I wasn't that confident in the "new" ruling. My husband, though, was all too willing to comply with the ruling and donned a round-necked T. Imagine our surprise when a female guard stopped him and demanded that he changed. Apparently, someone or other had declared a cancellation on the new dress codes. The notice was put up outside the guard house (come on la. Passing by a guard house, most people want to get away from the prying eyes of the guards as soon as they can, even if they've done nothing wrong. For some reason, even being decked out in Baju Kurung makes me feel like I might be doing something wrong when I'm walking past the guard house. NOBODY stops and reads those notices, okay?) and nowhere else. So my husband had to go back to the car to get his jacket. Unsatisfied with what happened, he went back to the place where the new regulation posters were put up and lo and behold! They were still there, with no indication of the new notice ANYWHERE.
So siapa yang salah? Weren't the office notified by the higher-ups? Couldn't the guards at least notify the office? I have no clue, but that's Idiotic story #1
Idiotic story #2
During class today, some of our classmates excused themselves. When they came back, they were holding a bunch of car stickers which were given to them by the office. It was the whole Bumiputera/Malay issue coming up again *sigh*. I refused to take one, and so did most of my friends. According to one of them, if she takes one, she'd stick it on her bathroom window so that when she's constipated, she can look at the sticker and get so angry that she'd "teran". LOL. She's part Chinese, btw.
Y'know, looking back, I suppose I'm lucky in a way. My parents were never racist. They never taught me the "kita orang Melayu. Orang Melayu bagus. Diorang orang Cina. Orang Cina makan babi dan jahat" and so on and so forth. I grew up with chinese friends and we accepted each other for who we were without any discriminations. I went to a kindergarten where I was the only Malay girl and all the kids accepted me readily. Throughout promary and secondary schools, my bestest friends, the ones who were most loyal to me were chinese and indians, while most of my malay friends played hot and cold with me. I remember going to their houses for lunch or dinner and their moms would make sure the dish I was eating was cooked in a different pot because they knew what muslims could and could not eat. That's my idea of being a Malaysian.
Going into matriculation, I was lucky because the two classes I got into were those who accepted everybody, Muslim or not, Malay or not. So while other people were discriminating agaisnt the Non-Bumis, most of the people in my two classes walked hand-in-hand with them.
So I consider myself lucky that I was never hit by the racist bug and my first glimpse of it comes now that I'm old and mature enough to know what's right and what's wrong.
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