I'm That Yellow Banana

Banana power 

Hello there and I'm back again. College has been hectic in this past few days and it will only pile my misery even further in the coming weeks so this blog will be on a hiatus for a month or so. But not to fret, I have something to get off my back before taking a break from my usual posts on this lovely blog that I have grown to really like.

What issue am I addressing though? I mean there is so much to talk about . I live in Malaysia for heavens sake. We are probably the hotbed for everything controversial from the implementation of hudud laws to sedition laws being used aggressively by nearly everyone. And let's not forget about the protests that Malaysians hold. We protest about nearly everything these days.

But obviously I won't go into that but what I want to talk about is also something about Malaysia . The people in fact. Sort of. I think I can relate this to Malaysia somehow. Relate me being called a banana as a national thing? I don't know.

Yes, I am what the Chinese people call, a banana. For your information, a banana is a Chinese who do not speak or know their mother tongue which is Mandarin. In all honesty, I'm not exactly an actual bonafide banana because I can speak a good amount of Mandarin but nothing too hardcore. I mean I can get through a nice and simple conversation in Mandarin but if it goes too deep then I'll be as clueless as a blind person in a nightclub. I can barely read or write Mandarin but I do know some . Yet, I get abuse from my Chinese friends , from high school to college. Well, not exactly abuse, maybe much ridicule. Which isn't any better I guess. 

I'm probably not the worst banana out there but being the only banana in my secondary school class and now class in college , it's only a given that I would get plenty of ridicule from my Chinese friends who all got A+ in Chinese Language in SPM ..... oh wait. Not all of them did HAH ! And guess what I didn't too. Didn't even take the exam. Let me hide under a rock now. Damn.

The bullshit I faced from my friends was ridiculous. You would think that having a mediocre knowledge of the Chinese Language as a Chinese would be akin to murdering your tuition teacher to my friends. I got the usual '' embarrassment to the Chinese" shit spewed at me which was not exactly fair but I took it on the chin. I mean I'm pretty sure I'm better than a Chinese drug dealer, selling drugs and potentially killing lives just to make a quick buck, but I don't know. He speaks Mandarin fluently. I don't. Does that make me worse than the drug dealer?

To you readers who actually say yes, I'm sorry I wasn't Chinese enough for you. To be honest, I kind of point the finger at my parents in causing my sore weak point . I've seen a lot of home videos that my parents took back when I was a cute looking toddler , scheming on how to rule the world and still stay in my pram at the same time. Not a single word of Chinese was spoken to me. Just English. A lot of them. I even went to reading tuitions for English. A lot of English. It's a wonder I speak Chinese at all now.

I went to a few tuitions and even POL classes but I just couldn't fully grasped the Chinese Language as my own to be fluent in it. I was too in love with English back then and I still am . I was way too focused on strengthening my English oratory and writing skills that I pretty much abandoned my efforts in making Mandarin my own. I have more than a tinge of regret but my English didn't end up too badly . Every cloud has a silver lining.

Alright, blablabla....so-so Chinese.......get ridicule from friends......embarrassment......swag English........ That's the summary. Now, time to talk about what I face on a daily basis. This is starting to get interesting.

First thing first, those f*cking ironic claps. I really hate that. I really do. Whenever I speak Chinese smoothly to a person, there will definitely someone in the perimeter of the conversation eavesdropping on my pronunciation of the words. And when I get them right, cue the almost symmetric of ironic claps and cheers by a group of people . You would think I've just won the World Cup, the NBA Playoffs Final and got laid by every girl in the Playhouse Mansion by their bewildering reactions if you were happening to walk by. I mean if you look up the word sarcasm in the dictionary, their claps and cheers would be right in there. Ridiculous.

This is another good one. Those people who get a non-Chinese guy to speak a few simple words in Mandarin and then proclaim to the whole universe that I speak Mandarin even worse than him or her. Which is clearly not true. I know for a fact there are non-Chinese people whose command of the language would put me to shame, head bowed and all. But most of the times, I get compared worse than people whose pronunciation of Chinese is really poor. For example :

Me : Ni hao ma ( good pronunciation )

Random guy : Wo hen hao . Xie xie ( Bad, like seriously bad )

CHINESE FRIENDS : WALAO THIS GUY CAN SPEAK BETTER MANDARIN THAN YOU!                                    HE NOT EVEN CHINESE. YOU DAMN SIASUI

Me : F*ck off.

Being known as a banana by your dearest friends ? Meeting some new friends with them? Want to make a good impression? Well, you can stuff those hopes and drown them in the river of dreams 

(not Sungai Klang) and forget all about that. Because just when you are going shake that outstretched hand by a potentially new best friend for life, there will be that friend who pipes up, "Eh, this guy is a banana so speak English to him ah. " Gone. Poof. From now on, there will be awkward broken English conversations when we could clearly have a decent Chinese conversations with a bit of English mixed in them. You'll be marked as that guy who is a banana for life. Soon, everyone knows. Then, I'm better off having the word ''banana'' tattooed on my forehead.

If there was something called banana-zoned, then I was banana-zoned for a lot of my Form 4 days .Being excluded in Chinese conversations, their activities and etc. But slowly my grasp of Mandarin tightened and I was at least sort of included in their Chinese conversations. I was still clueless in 60 % of their conversations but I was picking up words up , left, right, down and center. Soon, I found myself speaking Mandarin to strangers with almost no problems. They didn't knew I was a banana and I happily kept it that way. Well until they spoke way too deep Chinese, then I just nodded. HAHA....sigh 

I could honestly create a whole new post based on frequently asked questions to bananas like me , but that would be much too tiresome for me. But here's a top 3 of FAQs that are so condescending that we bananas are insulted beyond comparison.

1. Can you write your name in Chinese ? ( Yes I can, you little mug . I can write that you're an idiot                                                      in Chinese too. Trust me. ) 

2. Do you speak Chinese to your parents at home? ( Seriously? )

3. Are you even Chinese ? ( From annoying to wanting to get slapped in a mere second )

Honestly, from what I write, you would think I suffer a lot from being a banana but you will be very mistaken. I don't suffer at all, far from it, but it does get intolerable very quickly. Very annoying indeed. But, being a banana has its perks. Being a banana pretty much means you have a great command of a language which is not your mother tongue. Which means you can have one lesser country to worry about in terms of language. 

Then, there's the certain blind pride of being a banana. I mean it's not nice to be one, and not something to be envied either. I mean who wants to always refer to Google Translate every five seconds when someone decides to Whatsapp or post an extremely long Chinese essay as a status on Facebook ? No one of course. But, being a banana means you're different. Different from all those Chinese people. Something different is something unique. And god knows we all need some uniqueness in our lives.

But obviously, I don't want to be a banana. Nobody does. Cut me some slack, I was born in a English bred environment. At least I'm trying. Forever trying in fact.

I'm a huge advocate for English as a language but Chinese will always be my mother tongue. I can still speak it but fluency in it remains a dream yet to be fully realized. Until then , I remain a banana. I hate that term though. Why compare us to a fruit ? We bananas are more than that. We are the embodiment of something special. Special failures which could grow as a flawless looking flower one day. And no, that flower does not produce a banana.

BIOLOGY SO PRO SIAL. OKAY I'LL STOP. ENJOY YOUR DAY.