I refer to Josh Hong's latest column entitled 'Little dragons girls' and my post-Merdeka Day reverie.

How true about the Malaysian attitude towards mainland Chinese. If you want to know who is the most racist of them all, you just need to go to either New Zealand or Australia to live among the new migrants from all over.

You will notice how painfully the Chinese Malaysian insist that they are not Chinese and that they are Malaysians. Under ethnicity in any government or whatever form to be filled, they insist that Chinese - or for that matter the Indians too - does not adequately identify them.

If there is no column for 'Malaysian' or 'Singaporean', they insist and that's why now you find a new identification under ethnicity in those countries' official forms that says, 'Southeast Asian'.

Now, do you know what that race is? What language that race speaks? Any cultural practice or dressing or food that identifies this ethnic sector?

But funny as it might sound, I'd rather be identified as Southeast Asian than Indian Malaysian or Chinese Malaysian when there are a lot of those from the two respective mainland around.