A customer came in and ordered a bowl of laksa from her. He then sat down at a table with his friend. Both men looked like office executives, in long-sleeved shirts and ties.

Laksa is a rice-noodle in turmeric and fish-sauce curry, topped with cockles, shrimp, fried beancurd, bean sprouts, fishcakes, egg, and flavoured with laksa herb

Halfway through preparing the laksa, the younger of the 2 women, about 35 years old, came in, and the older woman passed the order to her as she needed to run off to the restroom. I overheard the older woman tell the younger one, in Hokkien Chinese [1], "the laksa is for the keling kia." Keling kia is a rather pejorative Hokkien slang term for South Asians.

A minute later, the laksa was ready, and the younger woman looked around the dining room for an Indian-looking customer. There was none.

Just then, the older woman came back.

"Where did the customer go?" the younger one asked, anxious that the customer had absconded.

"There! He's sitting there, the keling kia," pointed out the older woman.

"Where? Which one?" asked the younger, still not seeing anyone meeting that description.

Louder now, "There, that one in the corner."

"He's Malay, he's not keling kia," said the younger, matching the decibels of the first woman.

By this time, the 2 men at the table, Malay and Chinese, were more than aware that the women were discussing them, as were nearly everybody else in the room.

The younger server was the outgoing type, and taking the laksa to the Malay customer, she didn't hesitate to speak to him as if she had known him for ages. Setting the bowl down before him, she asked, in an attempt to prove she's right and the older woman was wrong, "You Malay, right? You not keling kia, izzit?"

She was using low Singlish [2].

"Of course I'm Malay," the customer said.

"Where got keling kia?" interjected his Chinese friend. "He Malay lah, you cannot see or what? His name Mustafa, that is Malay name, what."

Mustafa was just bemused by all the attention.

From 8 metres away, the older woman at the stall spoke up in her own defence, in broken English, "Very hard lah, sometimes keling kia also got Malay one."

I wasn't sure what she meant by that, but I think she was saying that some people of Indian ancestry were also Muslims.

Insisting on proving her point, the younger woman continued speaking to the customers. "So, keling kia and Malay different, right?"

Both Mustafa and his Chinese friend laughed out loud, "Different lah! How can mix up?"

On a winning streak, the woman continued, "But Malay and mangala same right?" trying to prove her mastery of racial terminology.

The men were taken by surprise. "What? How can?" said Mustafa.

"No lah," the Chinese guy said. "You don't know what mangala is? They wear turban, that type," using his hands to make the shape of a pointed Sikh turban over his head.

By this point, I was completely knocked off my seat. This is what passes for racial awareness and tolerance in Singapore.

* * * * *

For the sake of foreigners reading this, here's an explanation of the various terms:

Keling kia, as mentioned above, is a rude term used among Hokkien Chinese to refer to people with South Asian looks. Besides the rudeness, the older woman seemed to be using it to refer to all people with a complexion darker than the Chinese. It didn't matter to her how other people saw themselves, as long as they weren't Chinese, they were keling kia. Furthermore, she didn't even seem to realise that it was an offensive term, using it aloud to refer to her customers -- even Malay ones -- whom she thought were keling kia.

While there are a few Malays who have partially Indian or Arab looks, Mustafa was certainly not one of them. He looked very typically Malay. There was no excuse for confusion, certainly not if you've spent a lifetime in Singapore.

Mangala (often mangali) is another Hokkien Chinese slang term, again pejorative, for Sikhs. It is a misnomer too, in that the term was derived from 'Bengali', but Bengalis aren't Sikhs. Sikhs are generally Punjabis.

So even the educated Chinese man was off the mark.

Why did the younger woman think that Malays and mangalas were the same? My guess is that since Singapore now has a significant population of migrant workers from Bangladesh who call themselves Bangla, which translates to Bengali in English, this is destabilising the old meaning of the similarly-derived term mangali. The woman probably understood mangala as the Hokkien equivalent of Bangla -- the way she inflected mangali into mangala indicates that -- and since Banglas are Muslim, and Malays are Muslim, so Malays and mangalas are "the same".

Both the men however retained the older (though still erroneous) understanding of the word "mangala/mangali", equating it with Sikhs.

Everybody was using pejorative slang, everybody understood slang differently and nobody cared about being sensitive.

As you might also have noticed, there was major confusion between religious identity and ethnicity. What kind of ignorant place is this?

* * * * *

Late one night, I was watching an episode of a police detective serial on TV. I had come into it a little late and the first scene I caught was of a Chinese- or Korean-American family being killed by an unseen intruder.

Later into the story, the detectives spoke about a Cambodian family being murdered, and I thought, oh, there's a serial killer on the loose.

It took me a while before I realised that that Cambodian family that was being referred to was the same family I had seen being murdered a few minutes previously. I didn't make the connection immediately because the actors in that earlier scene didn't look Cambodian at all to me. They were clearly Korean or Chinese, not even Japanese.

To the casting director, I suppose that was close enough. To large numbers of White Americans, and to African-Americans as well, all Asians look alike.

* * * * *

The other day, the movie Syriana came up in conversation between myself and a friend. We both agreed that the narrative was a bit difficult to follow. There were parts that seemed confusing. I wondered aloud to my friend whether it was because we couldn't tell who was who? Did many of the White actors look alike?

"No," he said, "the Arabs all look alike."

* * * * *

It blights all of us. When we are not familiar with another group of people, we see the entire group as a uniform mass.

To the older woman selling laksa, everybody who was darker-skinned was keling kia.

Though the younger woman was slightly ahead, I'd venture to say she really saw only two types of the darker-skinned Other: the Hindu ones from South Asia and the Muslim ones which comprised Malays and mangala. (Possibly at the margins of her consciousness, there might have been a third group, the Africans). We also see on analysis how she used religion as a classifier, which others didn't.

To White Americans, Asians all look alike. To East Asians, Arabs all look alike. And in the film Syriana, the Iranians seemed to have been bundled together with the Arabs too.

The Malay Mustafa didn't seem at all upset with the behaviour of the Chinese women. Arguably, I was more upset than he was.

More interestingly, the tabloid New Paper in its 3 March 2006 edition wrote about a singing group called "Juz-B" who had entered themselves in the SuperBand, a Chinese-language (Mandarin) singing competition organised by Mediacorp TV. The catch: Juz-B comprises 6 Malay guys, who have to learn a number of Chinese songs in order to participate. They're going to sing in a language they don't understand, trying to get the diction right when Chinese has vastly different phonetic features from English and Malay.

Juz-B, photo from The New Paper.
In my view, they can do with a better image.

Why did they want to enter the contest?

Band leader Muhamad Hafis told The New Paper it was the challenge that made them do it. He also mentioned the lack of Malay singing competitions for groups. The Malay minority here suffers from the disadvantage of numbers.

Many of us tend to associate Malay boys with heavy metal, but here is a group that must be pretty good at a refined form of singing: a capella. And now, they're setting out to do it in Chinese. If we still want to wallow in stereotype about what Malays are, we should be ashamed of ourselves.

* * * * *

Kirpal Singh, who teaches creative thinking at the Singapore management University, lamented at a recent symposium that we don't attach enough importance to literature. I cannot agree with him enough.

It is through literature, and art too, that we get to discover the thoughts of a world beyond that of our own tight confines. We get to live for a moment under the skin of another person and experience the world from his perspective.

There is no better way of transcending the narrow-mindedness of a self-referenced existence. What does it feel like to be a woman who has spent an entire life as a dutiful wife and homemaker, only to discover after 35 years that the marriage was a sham and now that he has left, she must venture out into the job market?

What does it feel like to be someone with in love with another man in 1960's Wyoming?

"I'm not interested in gays," he tells me, "so I don't think I'm going to see Brokeback Mountain."

Well, fair enough, no one should feel obliged to do what doesn't interest him, but somewhere in that reply, you also get the feeling that that very dismissal of the Other may suggest he could learn a thing or two from the film.

* * * * *

I was browsing through a bookstore yesterday and came across The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. From its backcover synopsis, it seemed an interesting tale that would take the reader into an Afghan expatriate's life, and how it had been shaped by violent politics when he was a boy in Kabul. Specifically, the protagonist Amir was haunted by how he had betrayed his best friend Hassan, the son of his father's servant. Beyond politics, the tale is also intertwined with issues of class and ethnicity (Hassan is Hazara), and for Singaporeans, so remote from Afghanistan, it should open our eyes to that country's history and social complexities.

Unfortunately, I was already late for another appointment, and the queue at the check-out counter was too long. So I made a note of the title, resolving to buy it another day.

It won't run out of stock. Singaporeans don't have a reading habit; we are too comfortable in our cocoons to want to disturb ourselves by learning about others.

* * * * *

3 hours later, I was on the bus home. Sitting opposite me was a young Malay guy, perhaps about 22 years old, but what first caught my eye was the work uniform that I had not seen before. It said on his shoulder-patch "Singapore Airlines... Apprentice Aircraft Mechanic".

I figured he might be a polytechnic graduate starting on his first job, and it looks like, career-wise, he's going to do well in life.

All around us were passengers, mostly Chinese, either chattering away with each other or on their mobile phones, or else plugged into music.

Young apprentice was plugged into music too, but throughout the journey, he was also reading. I was curious about the book in his hands – it looked like a novel – but I couldn't make out the title. Perhaps it was an action thriller or science fiction. He's a mechanical engineer after all, and it would stand to reason those might be the kinds of books he'd prefer.

Why is it so rare in Singapore to see minds at work?

Instead, why is it not rare at all to see mouths at work?

As we approached his stop, which coincidentally was the same as mine, he closed his book, but in that brief moment before he stashed it into his rucksack, I caught a glimpse of the title: The Kite Runner. I was ashamed to have stereotyped his taste in books.

© Yawning Bread