"Amoi, kamu rindu KL ke?"

"Hi kelas, minta maaf kerana Cikgu tidak boleh hadir hari ini. Tapi saya harap kamu semua menikmati masa yang kami telah berada di kelas…"

(Hi class, I apologise for not being present today. But I hope all of you have enjoyed the time we had together…)

This was the beginning of a speech I was writing to my class I taught at SMK Bario. And I was stuck there, unable to continue my draft.

The speech was meant for the last day we were to teach in the school and I wanted to motivate and encourage my students to work hard for their next exam. It’s not that I had nothing to say, in fact I had plenty to say, but I didn’t know how to say it in Bahasa Malaysia (BM). I found myself having to translate what I wanted to say from English to BM and elicited help from my friends when I couldn’t remember a particular word in BM. I realized some of them struggled to recall as well.

Such was the difficulty I encountered throughout my stay in Bario. The primary language of communication was BM and my capacity of speaking that language was embarrassingly limited to Bahasa pasar. I can’t seem to recall all the 1000 word karangan (essays) I wrote and countless peribahasa I memorised.

I remember one occasion when Aunty Dayang (the lady I was assigned to) had to bring a bunch of army men to put out a bush fire and they were all really curious who I was, why I was following Aunty Dayang and why a peninsular kid like me was doing in Bario. They started firing questions at me in BM and I struggled to understand them and my response to them was slow and short to say the least. I was interested in their army life too, but was too shy to expose my lousy BM speaking to ask too much. Much of the time I kept quiet and that kind of made them assume I missed home when the truth was far from it. So they kept asking me, "Amoi, kamu rindu KL ke?" I just smiled and said "tak." Never have I felt more like a foreigner in my own country. How do I tell these guys my embarrassing lack of proficiency in the national language?

Why don’t I ask in English, you say? Because I stubbornly wanted to prove that I am a trilingual Malaysian. I didn’t want to be excluded from the conversation or to make things awkward by making them speak English just to me. At the end of the day, they are a great bunch of guys who are doing a great job serving the army and my regret was not getting to know them better.

How childish was I for being so gleeful thinking I’ll never have to deal with BM after SPM when in actual fact Bahasa Malaysia is the one thing that ties me directly to my country and its people. It is the language we all know and it is the language that allows me to connect with anyone in this country. It is by speaking in a language two parties are comfortable with that we begin to understand each other. That story with the army guys shows how they misunderstood me for missing home due to my failure of communicating with them.

One thing's for sure, I don't ever want to feel like a foreigner in my own mother land again. Never.

I did finish my speech in the end. Maybe I should do another one in Mandarin and Tamil? ;p

Ai Jin 
Aren