It was a dark, cold, stormy night…
Ok ok, it wasn’t really cold or stormy. It was in fact, fucking hot and sticky. But it was dark alright. (Nights are always dark). I added those to make the whole opening sounds nicer…
So.. it was a dark night, when an old Malay man in a white skullcap stumbled into the petrol station. He looked exhausted and confused. He was looking for something for his employer (I later found out). It was ‘Nanyang Siangpau’, a local Chinese daily, first edition of the night.
But he had a problem, he didn’t know how does that thing looked like. I mean, to him, those Chinese newspapers looked all the freaking same. They all had the same kind of chicken scratch mark writings on them. How the hell could he pick the right one amongst the heaps of Chinese dailies for his retarded boss?
No shit, he figured that he’d just randomly ask any Chinese guy who happened to be there. And he picked a rather slack one… who happened to be me, in my shoddy casuals.
Old man : “Maaf dik, you tau tak yang mana ni Nanyang Siangpau? Boss saya suruh beli, tapi saya tak reti baca…”
(translation: “Dude, you know which one of these is Nanyang Siangpau? My boss asked me to get him a copy, but I can’t read no shit…”)
‘Dik’. He’s addressing me as ‘Dik’. That’s ‘brother’ in Malay. A man of his age addressing me brother, that could only mean 2 things
1) He was actually a young man who partied too much and looked too old to be his age, or
2) I looked like a young man trapped in an old man’s body…
Whatever that was, I didn’t take a moment to reflect on either of that possibility, but lent a helping hand to that distressed senile chap instead. (that’s so thoughtful of me…)
MichaelOoi : “Maaf, bang. Saya tak reti baca jugak, ahahahhahkss!”
(translation: “Sorry bro, I don’t read no [Chinese] shit neither, ahahahhahkss!”)
But I then explained to him, that we don’t need any ability to read Chinese to get a Chinese newspaper. That’s because they all have this Roman phonetic writings on its main page header to aid us illiterates in getting the RIGHT vernacular newspaper for our spouses, grandparents or bosses. How convenient.
And so, I brought the old Malay man over to the newspaper shack at the petrol station operated by a Bangla, to look around for the Romanized phonetics on a stack of Chinese newspapers, and on my way out, I cussed an Indian fart who sped through the petrol station driveway like he’s drunk or something, and went off to buy a couple packs of Thai fried rice for dinner…
Aren’t we glad that we’re not fighting each other like those bunch of diaper-heads at Middle East? And that’s the only reason that I like about being in Bolehland – peace and tranquility (alright, maybe not ‘tranquility’. I’ve always wanted to shove a can of insecticide up my neighbor’s ass and implode it inside his rectum… for being such a fucking noisy sod… for waking up my Regine up every unforgiving night).
I’m just glad that the war’s over, for the time being at least…
Happy ‘impending’ Independence day, brothers/sisters (and now you’re as old).
