An outsider among the British: part two | Nicola Dinan

All views expressed are that of the writer.

It is 2016, and I am in Central Market, Kuala Lumpur, with a friend from university who has relocated for work. He has the 3Bs of social currency for Southeast Asian travel: British passport, blonde hair, blue eyes. He peels the batik shirts from the clothes rails, layering them onto his forearm. The woman behind the till, in her fifties and Chinese Malaysian, hands him his receipt and thanks him for his purchase – he has spent over a thousand Malaysian ringgit (around £186) – but before we leave the shop, she thanks him for something else.

“Thank you for the education“ she says, and on seeing his bewildered face, perhaps also mine, clarifies, “the British education system. In Malaysia”.

I have thought about this interaction many times in the years since, both strange and familiar. Growing up, there had been a certain cultural deference to the British, even in the post-colonial era. The deferral is written on my tongue: I don’t speak a lick of my mother’s first language, Hokkien, despite living in Kuala Lumpur from the ages of six to 18. My parents only spoke to me in English – the language of my father’s home, the UK. One language was seen as useful, the other was not. Ironically, after being one of the privileged few to attend and graduate from a British university, I’d been trained in a new understanding: of the ills of colonialism, the way it hamstrung economies subject to it, and the legacy of corruption it sowed long after the British left.

My own mother, Chinese Malaysian, was very much like the woman at the till, thankful to the British education system. Born in Malaya, she was only a toddler when it gained independence from the British, and she continued to go to a school with a British curriculum until she would leave. She was only 15 when the race riots broke out in 1969. The violence began after the general election that same year, in which the majority-Chinese Democratic Action Party and Parti Gerakan dented the ruling, multi-ethnic Alliance Party’s majority. The Chinese opposition had run on a platform opposing the ideology of Ketuanan Melayu (meaning Malay supremacy), namely challenging Article 153 of Malaysia’s constitution, which codifies the special status of Malay people over non-Malay citizens, including Chinese and Indian Malaysians. As explained by academics like James Chin, these political gains, together with pre-existing economic disparity (the Chinese elite held most of the country’s corporate wealth) culminated in riots that killed hundreds of people, the majority of whom were Chinese.

My mother lived in Taiping, a majority-Chinese area, and therefore did not experience the worst of the violence. However, she would come to know its aftermath well. In the following years, the Malaysian government implemented the New Economic Policy, an expansive affirmative action programme for the Malay majority, enforcing quotas for Malay participation across the country’s institutions. It seemed that under Malay supremacy, a Chinese girl from a poor family might fare better abroad, especially if, like my mother, she was privileged enough to speak English. She was 19 when her father presented a one-way ticket to London to her. From there, she moved to another colony, Hong Kong, before returning to Malaysia at the turn of the century.

If the UK was a land of opportunity, access made possible by the English language and assimilation of British culture, then it’s easy to see how some cultural deference may arise, particularly against Malaysia’s longstanding racial tensions. But it is also paradoxical, given that enmities in Malaysia are, as scholars like Charles Hirschman have argued, connected to colonial rule.

During the 19th century, the British colonial administration imported large amounts of wage-labour from China and India to work in tin mines across Malaysia’s western states. Divide and rule policies segregated the local Malay population from the workers, who suffered high-mortality rates and political exclusion. The racist characterisations of both Malays and Chinese Malaysians by colonial officials – the former as lazy and the latter as greedy – persist today.

Political frustrations shaped my childhood, despite my mother’s identification as relatively apolitical. It seemed that my education in Malaysia – a British one – was more than anything else a means to leave it. Malaysians have long attended universities in the United Kingdom in droves. Malaysia is also one of the largest host countries for UK transnational education in the world, with universities like Nottingham and Reading having set up Malaysian outposts. The colonial ties persist through education, though it seems that British institutions still hold the reins.

It was only after leaving Malaysia that I developed a sharper understanding of colonialism’s legacy and the complex ways colonial history is embedded in personhood: From how or what we speak, to where we choose to live, to how we are othered. Moving to the UK also shattered, to some degree, ideals I’d held with respect to my father’s home country. This might be of little surprise, given that I arrived in 2012, when Conservative austerity was in full swing. People complained of a fading United Kingdom, which usually meant a decline in public services, stagnant salaries and an intractable productivity problem. Racial and religious intolerance became increasingly normalised in political conversation, particularly around and in the years following the Brexit referendum.

Now, having lived here for 13 years – the land of opportunity – the seat of the British Empire doesn’t feel like the be-all-end-all. Though I’m not sure I’ll ever return to Malaysia - my roots in London now just as deep as they’d been in Kuala Lumpur - I allow myself the occasional fantasy of what my life could be back home. It’s certainly more than warm weather, mamak stalls and familiarity, but a whole new world of opportunity, too, one which I’d perhaps been unwilling to see.