Someone quoted, " If someone do not embrace their
heritage, it is the same as a tree that have forgotten
about its roots.".
I am someone with mixed decent. My I/C is stated as Malay and I
grew up with the malay culture and upbringing. I recently
found out that I wasnt decended from 'pure' malays at
all.
My paternal grandfather = Javanese from Indonesia
My paternal Grandmother = sg malay
My Maternal grandfather = bengali from Mumbai, north india
My Maternal Grandmother = Chinese from China
So does this make me ONLY malay, or i actually have many
relatives that I have from other races and countries.
P.S. Dont try and flame me as i am not being a racist or
anything. I just want to explore my ancestors history and culture.
Or does their culture matter? Am I considered as part of each
heritage since I am of mixed decent.
As what you mentioned, you have already got the answer. You
actually have many relatives that you have from other races and
countries. It is up to your interest and free time to explore all
their cultures.
Those who do not really care about it usually just
agree/identify with what's assigned to him/her (eg. reflected in
NRIC). It was for the sake of simplicity these identities were
assigned in the NRIC as previously people felt that the
Austronesian-Muslimspeakingsubfamily big family of people
(Javanese, Malays, Bugis, Minangkabau, Acehnese, Boyanese) should
be able to identify with each other much easier than say
Indians/Chinese, though deviations still exist. Even within
Malay-speaking communities in Malaysia, Kedah and Kelantan Malay is
far from understandable to the Johor Malays who rather find
communication with neighbouring Riau people easier.
Ethnic classifications / Racial classifications at the end of
the day, are all classified by humans, thus will be
error-prone.
Serbs performed ethnic cleansing on the Bosnians, whom belonged
to a "different ethnic group". Linguist and anthropological experts
will be quick to point out that they are one people, based on
linguistic evidence. The differences emerged only late in their
history when the one people embraced two different religions and
developed two different set of cultures that look vastly
different outwardly and thus the self-identification of
different "ethnic groups".
Same for the Austronesian family, no one in the right mind will
consider the Filipinos in the same ethnic group with the Malays,
even though they both are Austronesian speaking. Only the linguist
and the anthropologist (and maybe some sort of fundamentalist) will
see them as one.
