Me and my (none existent) letter-writing skills...(Melayu oh melayu..)

With London games drawing nearer, I had to draft a letter to invite the director of MSD to come for the event. When I was assigned the task, I thought 'kacang je nih...' since I'm not alien to secretarial work. However, when I sat down at my computer then I remembered that ALL surat rasmi(s) have to be written in Malay. I froze. Literally. Oh darn...

You see, although I can assure you that I'm 100% Melayu, I eat belacan and cencalok and I love tempoyak like no one has loved it before and I know how petai and kerdas and jering look like, my written Malay is, well, not as good as it should be. Despite the fact that my mom is a Malay Language teacher (sorry, mak!).

I remember when I was in F5 in school. I was the only Malay girl in a sea of Chinese and Indian girls in my class (the rest of the Malay girls had gone off to boarding schools, and left me to fend for myself). Alhamdulillah, I held my own in many things, except for Malay Language, my own native tongue. Those girls, with their Malay tuitions and their Dewan Masyarakat and Dewan Siswa left me trailing miles behind when it came to written Malay. They astounded me with their bombastic Malay phrases, while I amused them with my half-cooked Negeri Sembilan accent (no prizes for guessing who the winners are and who the joker is).

It is not an unusual phenomenon; non-Malay students being much better than Malay students when it comes to the Malay Language subject in school. Being my mom's unofficial secretary, I frequently had to type out good compositions written by her students to be used as model essays, and 9 out of 10 of them would've been written by a non-Malay. It's quite tragic, I must say. But I suppose that us Malays have been speaking the language since birth, and the use of colloquial Malay so ingrained in us that the thought and the act of using the language in its proper form seems difficult. After all, it is a greater challenge to unlearn things than learn them for the first time, as in the case of non-Malays, since their largest exposure to Bahasa Melayu would've been from school (I know there are exceptions; it's just a generalized statement, don't argue with me on this one).

So back to the letter I had to write. What did I do? Well, I took a deep breath, loosened my fingers, and with a big wince I steadfastly typed the letter, not stopping even for a minute (except during those times when I had to crack my head for the appropriate word/phrase to write). Once it was done, I saved the file, and emailed it to the appropriate recipient for further action.

After half an hour, my blood pressure and pulse went back to normal. My acute attack of migraine (started at the beginning of the letter-writing) went away as mysteriously as when it came.

THAT is one experience I do not wish to repeat in the near future.