Seen in a positive light, Malaysia is really a blessed society because although it is made up of various ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic groups, we are yet united as a nation.

We are, to borrow a phrase from the Chinese New Year message from Keadilan's president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, "united in diversity".

To this writer, nothing is more heartfelt than the fact that his first CNY wish (via the short messaging service or SMS) came from a staunch PAS member whom I have known since the late1980s.

Of course, there were also similar SMS messages, e-mails and greeting cards from friends in Umno, PAS, MCA, DAP, Keadilan, Gerakan, PRM, NGOs, the Chinese media (my former colleagues) as well as from the diplomatic community in Kuala Lumpur and abroad.

That was not all for this writer. During the two-day stay with my family in Ipoh, I also shared the festive joy with Rajah, my English and Tamil educated Cantonese-speaking Indian Malaysian brother-in-law.

He married my youngest sister, who was educated in Chinese Catholic schools, while I was still studying in Monash University in Melbourne in the mid-80s.

A good news this year is that one of my nieces has been admitted into a prestigious undergraduate course with a South Australian university and she will be going to Adelaide next year to complete her studies. Our family connections with Down Under continue.

Also to celebrate was that an elder sister of this writer, a full-time worker of the Catholic Church, had returned from China safely after spending a few months there on an educational mission.

The war-torn years

Despite the different backgrounds, we shared one table to enjoy the once-a-year family reunion dinner with my mother. To her, multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural and even multilingual interaction is nothing new.

Batu Gajah, the town where she was born and raised during the immediate prewar years, has always been quite multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural and multilingual. According to her, the anti-occupation resistance groups in that area were also mixed in terms of ethnic and other backgrounds. So were the quislings.

The first day of every Chinese New Year has always been unforgettable for her because it was, in her memory, the day when Singapore fell and the Malayan Campaign ended in follies and disaster on Feb 15, 1942.

She used to tell and re-tell about those years in Batu Gajah where everybody had to help one another, irrespective of ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, to survive the occupation.

Sybil Karthigesu, that brave Malayan Eurasian female who secretly assisted the partisans in the clinic of her husband in Papan and who was later detained and severely tortured, remains her heroine.

This New Year Eve was also exciting for her because she was able to send her greetings to several distant relatives in southern China via the telephone. We still remember how our family, since the late 1960s and mid-1970s had regularly attempted to contact them through heavily censored letters to make sure they were physically safe during the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution'.

After spending the first two days in Ipoh, I had to spend another two days with my wife's family in Lurah Bilut, Pahang. It is located deep inside a Malay-predominated land scheme and next to a rare Chinese temple.

Although the Chinese and Indians are clearly minorities inside the Malay heartland, there has never been any inter-ethnic or inter-religious tension. On the contrary, in the marketplace and coffee shops, everybody just mixes around as friends and neighbours because everybody can speak a common language, namely Bahasa Malaysia.

As a matter of fact, some Malays and Indians there also speak Chinese dialects, like Hokkien. It was truly enjoyable to sit in the coffee shops at dawn, reading newspapers and having breakfast without the traffic noise or urge to log onto the Internet.

Internal, not external identities

The cooling and relaxing Lurah Bilut is indeed an antidote to the hectic Kuala Lumpur. Everyone there moved, spoke, drank and ate at a much slower and gentle rate.

However, Lurah Bilut is not a poor area. Many households belong to the middle-income group because, among other factors, many youths who work in Kuala Lumpur or overseas send a considerable amount of money home to their parents.

Like my mother, my father-in-law also witnessed the war and occupation in Malaya from late1941 to 1945. Knowing that I academically understand some aspects of the period, he likes to reminisce to me what he saw, heard or experienced during those years when he was a young boy working in Perak, always hoping that I would be able to match his fragmented memories with what I have read in more coherent and authoritative books. There was no exception this year.

Indeed, it seems that it is still difficult for that generation to forget about that war and the sufferings they endured although they may have by now forgiven the perpetrators.

Finally, the holidays ended yesterday evening in Subang Jaya with a renewed sense of the Malaysian nationhood and almost all its dimensions or constituent elements on the ground.

This writer and, I suppose, many other Malaysian Chinese are always proud of the twin facts that during the festivities, we do not need to wear classical Chinese attires to be more Chinese or attend open houses by political elites to be more Malaysian.

The majority of us are self-assured and self-confident of our identities as identities are always internal, not external to our hearts and minds.

The holidays are naturally always for families and loved ones.


JAMES WONG WING ON is chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia (SAM). Wong is a former member of Parliament for Kampar (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily (now Sin Chew Daily). He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew, he and a team of journalists won the top awards of Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) for 1998 and 1999.