There is no getting away it - I am an "orang putih". Occasionally I recognise these words when I overhear Malaysians talking together. My Malay dictionary tells me that "orang"means "man" and "putih" means white. So I am a "white man". "Hutan" means jungle, so in the same way an "orangutan" is a "jungle man". "Putih" sounds like "putty" which is not a bad description of the skin of the average Caucasian. Out of curiosity I searched on "orang putih" in Google images and found these rather neat cartoons. They seem to give a reasonably affectionate view of how some Malaysians may see white folk.
I don't usually sense hostility from local people, more curiosity because they see so few "orang putih". Sometimes I see someone do a double-take - "did I really just see a white man in Saratok, what on earth is he doing here?" Even in the days of British rule it would apparently have been very rare to see a white face outside of the major towns and cities. Actually, it's enlightening for a white middle-class bloke like me to be a victim of racial stereotyping, it gives me a tiny glimpse into what it might have been like to be a black person in London in the 1950s or a Bangladeshi working in the Persian Gulf today. But then I'm free to get on a plane any time I want and that feeling of being judged before I've even opened my mouth will just evaporate.
Very occasionally I get a sense of real hostility - someone pointedly avoids my gaze or a car seems to drive deliberately close as I cycle down the road. Maybe this is paranoia, but if I were a Malaysian might I not feel hostility to Caucasians? Britain exploited this country for its own economic advantage for at least a couple of centuries and now American culture and economic hegemony is threatening it in different ways. But, then there are some indigenous people in Borneo of non-Malay origin who view the government in Kuala Lumpur as just yet another Imperial power.
Maybe the best that I can do is to use this experience to try to be a bit more sensitive to my own tendency to hang labels on people.
I think your wrong. ORANG PUTIH is not the same as ORANG BELANDA. Orang Belanda is the name given to white people.
ReplyDeleteOrang means human indeed, but Orang Putih means white human
but not white as europeans. Putih means white like a death body !
If you look around in the world you will find other people like Berbers,
some turkisch etc that have withe skin, but the skin is clrealy not the
same as europeans.There excist a (azian) withe people in Indonesia
that have all the marks of azians but there skin is white like a death
body, not the same as yours. These are called orang putih. there hair
is somewhat the same as azians. they are not caucasians.