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2006-09-16 - 2:57 a.m. You know a Malay mother is scolding you when: 1) She makes reference to having sent you to religious classes when you were young, which is to say that she has done her part in providing you with the best of moral instruction. Your descent into degeneracy, hence, is entirely of your own doing. "I sent you to read Arabic when you were young, but when you grow up you become worse than the devil.” 2) She alludes to her own death, along the lines of: "Now when I’m still around, this is how you treat me. When I’m gone, it’ll be too late for regrets." This, however, as testimony to the Malay mother’s verbal agility, can take on the form of sarcasm instead of self-pity. Responding to your request for breakfast, she snaps: "Later, when I’m dead, you go and dig up my grave, wake me up, and ask me to prepare your meals." 3) She invokes karma: "Later, when you have your own children, see what they’ll do to you." And that sinister warning, dark clouds on the horizon accumulating on the brows of a procession of all mothers, past, present and future, invoking their broken-hearted curses: "Not all retribution happens in the afterlife." 4) She bemoans her lack of foresight: "If I had known that you would turn out like this, I would have strangled you to death just after giving birth to you." 5) She resorts to the obscene to make her point: "Why are you so forgetful? If your testicles (or clitoris) weren’t attached to your body, you’d have lost it long ago." "Compared to your mouth, the chicken’s anus is a noble orifice." "What are you screaming like that for, did you get your breast slammed in the door?" "Why must you turn on the toilet light when it’s afternoon, are you counting your pubic hair?" 6) Working from the principle that calling your child a name (such as idiot, lazybones), will result in a self-fulfilling prophecy, she calls you instead, bertuah or ‘lucky’. But the way she intones bertuah is so full of venom that you feel the ominous tension between form and content. Nothing demonstrates the force of her anger than a gesture that signals the restraint of that anger. 7) She hides the (unspoken) explanation for using the word bertuah: "You are lucky to still have a mother around to scream at you." Or "You are lucky that I’m using my mouth and not my hands." A tautology functions in her speech: you are lucky enough that an inventory of curses is substituted, compressed, inverted by that word, ‘lucky’. 8) She uses food metaphors. The child, ultimately, is the product of a child-rearing recipe. Hence, when you behave like a spoilt brat, it is the result of giving you too much fat or coconut milk—banyak lemak. The expression for rudeness, or kurang ajar, is gastronomised to kurang asam, meaning ‘not enough tamarind’. 9) She insists how divinity is on her side. She reminds you that ‘heaven is located at the sole of the mother’s foot’ and tells you how you will ‘never get a whiff of paradise’ if you keep up with your wanton impiety. She provides examples of the supernatural grief of mothers: Tanggang’s mother turned her son into stone, and another one transformed hers into a gibbon by tapping his head with a spoon made of coconut shell. 10) She will ask you a barrage of questions like “Who taught you to become like this?” or “Don’t you have any pity on your own mother?” or “When are you going to repent?” When you raise your head from its hour-long downcast position, she will yell, “Yes, the only thing you know is to answer back at me! I send you to school, and the first thing you learn is to talk back to me!” Each time, you realise too late that all her questions were merely rhetorical.
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