No more bah-kut-teh by order of Shuzheng!

Recently blogger Shuzheng wrote a letter to Malaysiakini titled 'Malaysian First' requires doing a Ridhuan Tee.

Obviously he is against Lim Kit Siang’s Malaysian First, going to the extent of accusing Lim of denying his ancestral roots.

He erroneously assumed the consequence of Lim’s proposal would be along his very narrow-minded logic, arguing the DAP leader’s espoused ideology of Malaysian First requires (his words) “... foremost, the subjugation of an existing culture, an individual identity, after which to be replaced by an indescribable unknown quantity, a closet of rejects all dissimilar in size, fitting nobody, and must be sliced up for stitching into a one-size-fits-all.”

Balderdash, and that's an Anglophilic word, old chap.

To him, Malaysian First is a “… 'beyond race' politics … conducted purely by the Chinese groups, DAP most fervently. It is so far the highest political expression to a cultural phenomenon, a whole 'pendatang' group ejecting its ancestry to take up – converting, actually – for another identity label ...”.

He likened Lim Kit Siang’s effort as similar to the ethnic-religious identity taken up by Dr Ridhuan Tee Abdullah but a whole lot less successful.

It’s hardly surprising and of course unfortunate that Shuzheng didn’t stop at his admittance of Lim’s Malaysian First as ‘beyond race politics’ but went on to make a preposterous assumption, driven by his insecure fears that Malaysian First-ers will have to abandon their Chinese ancestral heritage.

Now, where is the evidence or indication to support such a nonsensical claim?

In fact I now quote Lim Kit Siang’s media statement on 05 July 2010 (available on his blog) where he responded to a second challenge by DPM Muhyiddin to state whether he is a Chinese or Malaysian first, as follows:

I had already stated in Parliament that I am a Malaysian first and Chinese second. I am proud of my ethnicity but I have always believed that all Malaysians must rise above their ethnic, cultural, religious and geographic differences to seek a common bond with the Malaysian identity transcending all ethnic, cultural, religious and geographic identities.

That’s a political vision statement of the highest merit, akin to the “I have a dream” made by Martin Luther King Jr on 28 August 1963 during an era of seemingly impossible struggle for racial equality, and for an end to ethnic discrimination in the USA.

Lim’s openly asserted “…I am proud of my ethnicity …” shows either Shuzheng’s lazy scholarship or his malicious fabrication in accusing Lim of emasculating his Chinese identity and denying his ancestral roots.

Apart from the shameful lie about Lim Kit Siang, Shuzheng’s Taliban-ish obsession with force-feeding northern Chinese culture down the throats of Chinese Malaysians extends to the extreme, even to sneering at non-Mandarin dialects.

For example, in his blog he insisted that Teoh Beng Hock should be accurately addressed as Zhao Mingfu because Chinese names should only be, or would only be accurate in hanyu pinyin and not in what he described as mangled colonial Chinese Manglish. Maybe someone ought to inform Mr and Mrs Teoh, poor Beng Hock’s parents, of their effrontery in naming their son in Hokkien without consulting Shuzheng.

He reiterated his anti-southern dialect frenzy when he bemoaned that the surname Ean Hong in Ean Yong Hian Wah is nothing more than a form of heteronym bastardized by the colonial administration, when the correct pronunciation and spelling should be Ouyang, naturally in his prestige dialect of Mandarin and its written form, hanyu pinyin.

With such a lunatic puritanical cultural ideology I wonder whether Shuzheng employs chopsticks as his only cutlery during meals, while refraining from using non-squat WC?

Obviously Shuzheng would prefer that each ethnic group in Malaysia live in their fenced up socio-ethnic ghettoes, where Chinese Malaysians would dress up like Bruce Lee as seen in his film ‘The Big Boss’, speak only Mandarin and their names sino-nized and Mandarin-ized (or f* else - no more Teresa, Hannah, Helen, Susan or Lucia) and spelt, only where Romanization is required, in hanyu pinyin, use inked brush to write or its electronic form (inked brush wakakaka) to send emails, and …

… where the only religions permitted would be those indigenous to China, namely Taoism and Confucianism, while the foreign Christianity, Buddhism and Islam as well as southern Chinese cuisine such as Teochew char koay teow, Hokkien bah-kut-teh, Hainan chicken rice and kopi-aw-peng, and Canto sar hor fun would be forbidden, let alone Malaysian food such as nasi lemak and roti canai.