Racial Harmony Day

Yesterday must have been Racial Harmony Day because all the primary school kids in the train were out of school uniform and the Chinese kids were in satin qipao tops, the Malay kids in baju kurong and the Indian kids in saris.

If you ask me, that's more like Racial Costume Stereotyping Day.

We didn't have Racial Harmony Day when I was in school. I guess we didn't need to. We intermingled without realising what race we were, and after school, were in and out of each other's houses, eating each other's food. And it wasnt just during Chinese New Year or Hari Raya.

Some time in the last 10 years, the education ministry realised we were going to have a serious problem if the Chinese kids didn't have Malay friends and so on, and instituted Racial Harmony Day.

I asked my nieces and nephew what they did. They said they could wear costumes to school and not school uniform. That's what the qipao, baju and sari were to them -- costumes. Because nobody wore stuff like that on ordinary days. They also said they had the day off classes and sometimes got to watch concerts where the Chinese kids would stage a Chinese fan dance and the Malay kids did a Malay harvest dance and the Indian kids did an Indian dance. Ah, Cultural Show for Tourists Day, then.

When I was in junior college, we had a lot of oversea students, so we had an Overseas Students Day when the Malaysians, Indians and occasional Korean and Japanese would show up in national costume, perform a few folk dances and passed around home-cooked goodies. The Singaporean students thought the foreign students shouldn't have all the fun, so they started turning up in national dress and brought along food that you would normally see during their festivals. Only being Singapore, there was no national dress, so the Chinese kids turned up in something Chinois, the Malay kids dug out their Hari Raya baju and the Indian kids turned up in saris. And later on, it got boring wearing your own costume, so we switched. Indian girls who would normally never wear qipaos borrowed one from a Chinese friend and that was when I learnt how to tie a sari. Now that, if you ask me, was truly Racial Harmony Day.