Permit me to share two personal experiences as a background to my comments.

First incident - In the late 90s, I was in Thailand as part of a due diligence process for a possible investment by my (then) company in a manufacturing plant owned by a US multinational located about two hours outside Bangkok.

Over lunch, the discussion was more casual. Seeing that one of the Thai managers of the plant looked very obviously Chinese, I asked whether he was in fact ethnic Chinese. The answer was both startling and a revelation: 'In Thailand there are no Chinese, we are all Thais, we speak Thai, no Chinese and maybe some of us, a little English...'

The second incident was in Paris, in one of the many shops in the hotel lobby. I was then already in both France and Germany for close to three weeks and very much missing the tropical weather and our food.

I then heard this very vocal, animated and linguistically standard conversation between Indonesians in Bahasa Indonesia. So I thought why not just say 'Hi' maybe I could perhaps get some leads as to where the Indonesian restaurants were in Paris.

Plus the opportunity to converse in Bahasa Indonesia felt like an acceptable substitute to conversing in Bahasa Malaysia after being away like seemingly forever from home. But when I walked to where the source of the animated conversation was, I was totally surprised to discover that the group in fact was made up of five ethnic Chinese who were from Indonesia!

Hence, this question: what is distinctively Malaysian about the Chinese Malaysian? How is the Chinese Malaysian any different from the Chinese in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan or even mainland China?

Second question: why do the ethnic Chinese in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines or Vietnam appear to be more culturally and socio-politically integrated than the Chinese in Malaysia?

I am often amused by the many self-nullifying arguments put forward by the proponents of Chinese culture here in Malaysia including the 'reason' they register their children in droves for Chinese schools due to the national schools having become 'more Malay'.

The logic is, therefore, as the national schools get 'more Malay', the Chinese need to be even more Chinese.

No one seems to realise the simple fact that in any society, the majority gives a dominant cultural 'flavour' to the environment they are in. It may be a national school in Batang Kali, a white-dominated public school in a Boston suburb or a black-dominated school in an urban ghetto in New York.