Multilingual Malaysian struggles?????

Waking up to my high school friend (whom I haven't met in YEARS) speaking in a British accent on instagram was the ... most... amusing thing ever.

I am honestly not going to judge her by saying it's wrong or pretentious, because I know how hard it is to... still maintain your Malaysian accent when everyone else around you is speaking so differently. And I know an awful lot of Malaysians have already written posts/made vlogs/constantly complained that Malaysian students who study overseas tend to or want to adopt a "westernised" accent and Malaysians can be very very harsh on that. They want us to still be Malaysians, speak in a Malaysian tongue, not bow down to white supremacy etc but tbh, Malaysia, you're just another anglocentric country.

Well people can argue that changing your accent is essentially trying to be what you're not. And okay, fine, for example, the majority of Americans don't just change their accent if they were to be put in UK or Australia, but the thing about Malaysian English is that.... we were brought up being told that Malaysian english is.... wrong. Even though everyone else here speaks it. It's *alternative* woohoo. No. More like, it's grammatically flawed, it does not sound progressive, it sounds... Asian. And many of us were fundamentally hard-wired to think that how we speak is incorrect, and have always opened a small secretive pathway to try to speak "correctly".

But I say 'secretive' because - Malaysians do not like you changing your accent too. 

And here, I would like to make a confession: I am too, very guilty of that.

I still don't know why I do it.... I unconsciously.... "tweak" my accent whenever I speak to someone who doesn't have a Malaysian/Singaporean accent and "tweak" it back whenever I'm talking to someone from Malaysia/Singapore.

I sometimes catch myself doing that and ... honestly... I feel guilty?

But what's worse is that I don't even fucking know what's my first language - because even though I'm trilingual (yeah basic malaysian la), I'm not even good at any of those languages... Despite being brought up knowing how to speak English first (because mom insisted I do that before primary school), I quickly lost my English-speaking abilities once i got to primary school. I don't speak much English at home anymore because my dad (who is an actual banana) speaks hokkien and mom speaks mando. And me?????

And now that I've come to Australia, I'm genuinely finding it hard trying to find a balance on how to speak 'correctly' so people can understand me but also to not sound phoney to my fellow Malaysians. But the real thing that's bothering me isn't my accent tbh, it's my grammatical structure lol. The way I phrase my words is so awkward even I cringe after hearing myself say it out loud. Also I never realised I never knew the real pronunciation of my name until I got here and someone asked me how to say it correctly but I couldn't answer him because in actual fact, I do not know.

But then again,

I'm not even sure if these are my personal struggles or general things that Malaysians struggle with.

what's so scary about being human is that very often we just can't bear the idea of living alone for our entire life. but i want to be fearless. i don't like this fear.