My Primary Schools

Kepercayaan kepada tuhan,
Kesetiaan kepada raja dan negara,
Keluhuran perlembagaan,
Kedaulatan undang-undang,
Kesopanan dan kesusilaan.

At the back of my primary school exercise books, there written five lines like the above. That was the result of the riot in nineteen sixty nine. I was reminded not to mention the case in front of anyone since young. So we learnt in Alam dan Manusia on Rukun Negara. As a student, I memorized the lines intactly and shouted out every line when we were asked to say them out. So you see I began my early education in a very typical malay school full of malays and with only about four to five chinese in a student year. There is a rule in school where nobody is allowed to speak in their mother tongue language except malay language. If anyone were caught to speak in mandarin or hindi or others, the person has to pay a fine of ten cents. The can that teacher kept was meant to collect the cents from non-malay students and to my great controlled in using mandarin, I spoke malay to even my chinese friends. I can remember their faces vividly: Evelyn Wong Tze Li, Tang Yien Siang, Teo Yee Yong and Alan; whom were in the same class as me # Merah class which was specially only to store us, two or three indians and a punjabi, the non-malay with the rest filled up by malay kids. I remember there was this Cikgu Ghazali whom I hate even until now. Remember the "derma PIBG" that school collects every month? At that time, my dad was the sole-bread winner of the family and he was just a machine operator in a factory with five daughters and a wife to support. So my mom said lets give the donation only RM1 per month, since it was meant to be donation and we can't afford to give more than that. Total we gave RM12 per year. Everybody knows that malay medium schools are fully sponsored by the goverment and don't actually need any donation to help the school operation. This cikgu which I referred here still as cikgu because I respect his profession. When I presented to him the card in the class, which was supposed to record down how much we donated and with my mom signature on it, he said very loudly in class with a disgusting voice why that I only gave him RM12? He mentioned that the other chinese are so rich and willing to donate so much money to chinese schools and why not me? I was a very very very very very timid girl in my early days. I quietly listened to his lecture and then crawled slowly back to my seat and with tears rolling down my cheeks. You know why I hate them now. That was just the starting and there were much more to come, where the other kids will call us as babi because we makan babi and their mother said to them not to mix with babi. My school is located very near to a local university therefore many of my classmates parents were either lecturers or professors. So when teacher wanted to collect information on the occupation of the student's father, easily he just need to ask, "bapa/mak siapa pensyarah?" and he can start counting, followed by "bapa/mak siapa profesor madya?". The remaining one he will ask manually one by one. Their donations were like Rm100 or more. There it went... how I got the insults from.

Luckily my dad able to fish another better job in my later days and we shifted to another town and to new school. YES YES YES. No more those racist remarks. And that time of my age I was a happy kid, it was a convent school. St. Anne's Convent. Then the most happy days was singing school anthem in dual languages :D. But we still have to stand still listen to "baca doa" every morning. Doesn't matter to me as long as I was respected. Everybody shall be respected no matter what they pray for.

There was news saying that goverment wanted to tear down anything that look christianity in the school and demolish the cross sign lately. Then for the sake of the election, they purposely make the statement that the school can now keep those crosses and statues. Good job laaaaaaa. Even the extention of PengerusiMajlisPilihanraya from sixty five to sixty six is ridiculous. Who doesn't know they want to use Rashid for another year just to secure another term of ruling.

Sigh. Better stop before stepping into political stuff. My mom will scold.