Those who know me personally can relate to my blog title of “Chinaman stuck in an Indian body…”. In fact, a friend of mine who keeps on reminding me of this fact, came up with the title.

For those of you who have yet to have the pleasure of meeting me, let me briefly explain it to you:

I am a racial rojak of sorts. My dad’s an Indian and I know some Indians out there will be curious to know what “type”. He is a Malayali -pronounced like Maleeyaalee. My mom more keng… she’s a combo of Eurasian + Peranakan(Baba Nyonya). That makes me 1/2 Indian + 1/4 Eurasian + 1/4 Peranakan. Actually, I could break down my mom’s heritage into European + Asian…bla bla bla.

Back to the point, I have lots of friends and they’re all from different races but somehow the majority are Chinese. I dunno why, but it just happened. So I kinda ended up talking like them, not that it’s a bad thing *phew. You will notice that I often end a sentence with mar, hor, le, bor, liao, la and lo. For Malaysians, they will understand what I mean but let me elaborate further on the usage according to my understanding:

Like that mar… <– To express simplicity

Yea, hor… <– To express understanding

Why le? or Easy le… <– To emphasize subtly

Sure bor? <– To express disbelieve

Finish liao… <– To express completion

What la you~! <– To express exasperation

Like that lo… <– To express hopelessness

I’m not only known to have the “Chinaman” within because of language, but also because I love pork~! I can’t live without it…I practically eat every part of it. I’ve known pure Chinese people who don’t even eat pork the way I do. When I say I like pork, I mean I REALLY like pork. I love bak kua, bak hu, lup cheong, bak kut teh(with all the internal organs), pai kut, bacon, ham, pork sausages, siew bak, char siew and the list could go on and on…

I am also known to think like a Chinese. I am rather kiam siap and relatively hamsap. Sometimes I’m a bit kiasu. I am always tam chiak with pork and tam sim with other things. Money is very valuable to me but I always go by yi fen qian, yi fen hua huo… When I see something bad happening, I sometimes have the mo ngan tai attitude.

If you’ve read this far, you would have noticed that I’m simply hantam-ing different dialects and throwing in some Mandarin as well, though I’m pretty sure I’ve spelt a couple of words wrongly. It’s not really to show off (even though I did get a B+ for Mandarin Level 1 in university) but just to show how Chinese-fied I am.

To top it all off, I married a Chinese, a beautiful Chinese school teacher who teaches Mandarin as a major. I don’t think I can be any more Chinese than I already am, except if I bleach my skin like Michael Jackson.