Raja Sara Petra, the daughter of controversial Malaysian blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin is irritated with rhetorics about Malays and Chinese on social media.
In a posting on Malaysia-Today, she tried to debunk the beliefs among the Malaysian Chinese community they brought development to the country, while Malays were lagging behind and living on trees.
Saying it irritates her ‘like hell’ that people were commenting that Malays would still be living in trees and would still be eating tapioca if the Chinese had not come to Malaya in the 1800s to help develop the country.
She said on the contrary, the Chinese came to Malaya in the 1800s fleeing famine in China.
“They did not do the Malays a favour by helping to develop the country. It is because of the 1810, 1811, 1846, 1849, 1850-1875, 1876-1879, 1896-1897 and 1907-1911 famines that took 115 million lives.
“Yes, 115 million Chinese starved to death over 100 years from 1810 to 1911, which was why the Chinese migrated to Malaya where there was plenty of food to eat.
“So, it is not true that if the Chinese had not come to Malaya the Malays would not have been able to eat. Hence please stop displaying your ignorance by posting nonsense,” she wrote.
Malaysia is what it is today because of the Chinese, they keep telling the Malays. That is not true, she wrote.
She said as a seafaring people, the Malay race never lived in trees.
“The Chinese may have developed the towns by building bangunan batu (concrete forest).
“But that was possible only because the Malays gave the Chinese the land to build them on. If not, the Chinese would have had to build their homes and shops on stilts in water like at Pulau Ketam,” was her response to the generic comments that have been circulating for years.
Sara Petra is of mixed race. Her father is a member of the Selangor Royal family and the mother is of Chinese-Malaysian origin. Raja Petra was born in Born in Surrey, England.
The family is currently living in England after RPK – as Raja Petra is commonly known – left Malaysia to escape ex-PM Najib Razak’s clampdown on critics.
The post got less than 500 shares and only five comments. But it attracted a hilarious comment from ‘Airport Bus Melbourne’.
It said. “Malaysia future cannot be reinventing the pasts like what Mahathir is trying his level best to make sure of continuation of his M dynasty and all future leaders have names starting wit M.
“Its such a BIZARRE Mahathir to name all his children starting with the alphabet “M” and it’s definitely MAHATHIRISM in practice.”