M A C V A Y S I A

About a week after Alisdair was born, I went to the Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara (National Registration Department) to register his birth and get a birth certificate. It was quite easy, since the JPN is right next to the Darul Ehsan Medical Centre, and I was there that day anyway because of Alisdair’s jaundice. Overall, the whole registration process was quite simple. The person who served me was fairly friendly, spoke decent English (not a necessity but it did make things less complicated), and was willing to grant my request that my son’s name be registered as Alisdair Imran MacVay and not Alisdair Imran Bin Jordan or Alisdair MacVay Bin Jordan MacVay or something like that. After a short wait my son was registered and I had his birth certificate in my hand. Alisdair Imran MacVay, citizen of Malaysia.

Everything on the birth certificate is correct, which is a relief because I’ve heard stories. But one thing that is interesting—not necessarily wrong, just interesting—is the little box marked keturunan, which is Malay for ancestry. On the forms, there was a space to write in my ancestry and also Leen’s. Hers is easy: Melayu. Leen told me I should just enter mine as Caucasian, but I didn’t think that would be accurate. Perhaps keturunan and bangsa (which means race) are fairly interchangeable; in fact they would be in the Malaysian context since most Malaysians’ ancestry would be the same as their race: keturunan Melayu (Malay), keturunan Cina (Chinese), keturunan India (Indian), etc. But in English there is a definite distinction between the two terms. That distinction would technically affect not only what I entered into the box but Leen’s choice as well, since while her bangsa would most certainly be Malay, her ancestry would more accurately classified as Javanese. Still, because of the interchangeability of bangsa and keturunan in Malaysia, it seems natural enough for Leen to put Melayu into the box. What about me? Those people who still cling to arbitrary racial classifications might indeed classify me as Caucasian, but my ancestry could more accurately be classified as European.

Europeans? Us?

I’ve never even been to Europe, unless you count the couple of hours I spent in the transit area at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport last year. My parents were born in Canada, as were my grandparents and all but one of my great-grandparents. However, the further you look into my family tree, the more Europeans you will find. Most of my ancestors were Scottish, with a liberal mix of French, English, Irish, and even perhaps a little Welsh thrown in. So I guess European was the logical choice for my keturunan. Either that or Scottish, or maybe Scottish-Irish-English-French-Welsh. But that probably wouldn’t fit into the little box.

Also interesting is that the birth certificate lists only my ancestry and Leen’s. Alisdair’s ancestry is not indicated, probably due to the fact that in Malaysia people are automatically assumed to inherit the ancestry/religion/culture of their fathers. Therefore, it would appear that Alisdair is European too. Either that or lain-lain, which means other. Of course, official government classifications aside, I should point out that Alisdair is (at least according to some definitions) Malay, by virtue of the fact that his mother is Malay, he’ll speak Malay as a mother tongue, he’s Muslim, and he’ll follow Malay customs (well, maybe not every Malay custom, but then again there are plenty of people who are full-blooded Malays who don’t follow every Malay custom, and they’re still Malay, eh?). He’s also Canadian, eh? He’ll probably also often put eh at the end of his sentences, though it might end up sounding more like the ek that people from Muar put at the ends of theirs. Some people might say he’s 50% Malay and 50% Canadian, but I prefer to think that he’s 100% of each. OK, that shows I almost failed math in high school, but it’s also a strong statement of my belief that having parents from two different cultures doesn’t necessarily mean he will be following a diluted form of each culture.

Anyway, Alisdair can’t choose his ancestry but he can choose his culture to some extent. He can choose to follow one of his two inherited cultures more closely; he can find that he identifies more with one than with the other; he can favour one language over the other. It will ultimately be his choice. All we can do is guide him along the path we think he should follow. Then we’ll have to let go of the bicycle and see where he goes without the training wheels.

Who’s a Malay?

The problem is that while he can indeed choose his culture, in Malaysia culture is tightly intertwined with race, which here seems to be determined solely by one’s patrilineal ancestry (the ‘Malayness’ of a child with a Malay father and a non-Malay mother would never be questioned). I can speak Malay, I’m a Muslim, and I do follow some Malay customs, but the bottom line is that I’m not Malay and could never be, simply because my keturunan is not Melayu. But with regards to this I see a lot of inconsistency in Malaysia. Many Malays would not be considered Malay at all if their being called Malay depended on their ancestry alone. What really makes the whole issue confusing is that, even if one accepts the idea that race is anything more than an arbitrary social construct (which I don’t), it would be very difficult to identify physical traits that mark one as being Malay, because Malays have mixed with so many different groups over the years. Therefore, it seems necessary to abandon pseudo-scientific reliance solely on one’s genetics and focus on socio-cultural factors, such as language, religion, customs, etc.

It seems that’s how ‘Malayness’ was viewed in the past. At one time it appears non-Malays who lived in Malaysia and converted to Islam were said to not only masuk Islam (masuk means enter) but to masuk Melayu as well.

Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation about this topic with a Malay friend, who brought up an example from his own family which shows that keturunan and bangsa were at one time more loosely related than they are now. His grandmother was pure Chinese by ancestry and married a Mamak man (an Indian Muslim). Not a trace of Malay blood there, at least according to ’scientific’ racial classifications. And yet their children and grandchildren were—and are—considered Malay. My friend said their being a very prominent family (as in running a certain oil company) probably helped. Still, it does show that the whole bangsa/keturunan thing was once, as he said, more permeable. However, nowadays it seems the government takes a narrower racialist view of just who is and who isn’t Malay, a view that to me seems difficult to justify because of the history of the so-called Malay race.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Alisdair is considered European, Malay, or something else. If we decide to move to Canada (which we may eventually end up doing), then it won’t matter what racial category the Malaysian government puts my child into. I suppose it won’t matter if we stay in Malaysia either, although when I see how complex and frustrating racial politics can be here, I might have to rethink that. Sigh. Maybe we should just move to Europe. The irony is that we ‘official’ Europeans probably wouldn’t get in.