What would you choose?

Today I sat for the TOEFL. We had to fill in our native country and our native language. They had the code numbers for several countries written on the board...but no Malaysia! (what to do...only one Malaysian sitting for the test in INSA this year...they couldn’t have anticipated that) So I had to ask them to add the code. After looking up the country code, they asked me what language code I needed. There I went “er...” ‘cos one thing I’m sure of is that they won’t have Hokkien on the list! :P Then they found Malay in the list and added it to the board. Some of my Chinese friends (and by that I mean China Chinese) were telling me “there, you can put the code for Chinese!” (yeah, those people knew there were a lot of Chinese and Vietnamese so they had already written those codes on the board)

In the end I put the country code for Malaysia and the language code for Chinese. It just feels weird to say that Malay is my native language...it’s the national language of my country, but it isn’t my native language! The Chinese were wondering what I would put, ‘cos they know that my mother tongue is a Chinese dialect, but I doubt that the French even saw that there was a decision to make. To them anyone from any country simply speaks that country’s language.

Tell me, what would you have chosen as your native language had you been in my place? (obviously, this question is directed to Malaysians...:P)

(we needed country codes ‘cos it was the “blacken the circle” type of answer sheet)

Anyway it’s been pretty hot these last few days... this morning it rained for a while, a heavy shower that lasted about 15 minutes (or was it half and hour?) I was in my room when I suddenly heard the sound of the rain pouring down...I was kinda shocked, thinking “It can’t be rain, it’s so hot and sunny outside!” (and what’s more, a little earlier I just went out to the supermarket to buy stuff, and it was SO HOT!) But then I looked out of the window and yeah, it was rain all right. With the sun.

The TOEFL was in the afternoon, and nearing the end, it felt so hot in the exam hall, it was lucky I didn’t just burst into flames (ha, that would be a case of spontaneous combustion...) In my own room, thankfully I have a fan...