by Ann Yi Ngai
Looking out the window of my mother’s car, a striking campus came into view – it boasted grandiose, modern structures elegantly dressed in the official school colours, with the school’s coat of arms haughtily stamped across the tallest building. Several football fields spanned plenty of acres, with diligent sprinklers nursing the grass to maintain its lushness; straight fences erected around campus, with an imposing guard house amongst them inspecting visitors and opening the electric gates for the school’s clients. Sometimes you could spot luxury cars gliding in and out of campus dropping off their young inheritors, adorned with posh uniforms, at their boarding houses scattered across the depths of the campus.
Though I had been attending this school for over 6 years, the sight never failed to evoke a sense of guilt and indulgence within me. Its imposing, polished disposition clashed violently with its surroundings consisting of half-furnished, unkempt shop lots, uneven streets, open drains, broken down cars, stray animals, and barren construction sites. Stepping foot into school meant trapping yourself into a bubble, a vacuum – a world that revels so much in its own suffocating air.
As hyperbolic as it sounds, it is an attempt to recreate my own experience at a British international school in Malaysia. The international school industry has been a well-established one in my home country for decades now, with the oldest British international school being founded in 1946. The appeal of British education in Malaysia in particular comes from a number of places. Parents who choose British international schools over local education may cite greater chance at university acceptance, better employment opportunities, or wanting a more well-rounded education for their children than what local schools can provide. After all, learning English was the way to climb the social ladder. It is why the British international school to UK university pipeline is so entrenched, and why I am at LSE.
While I recognise my privilege in being able to access the resources needed to get into a university like LSE as a Malaysian, I still feel a sense of lingering resentment and frustration- an inkling that I have betrayed parts of my cultural heritage and national identity. Through my years rehearsing to pursue opportunities overseas, I started to realise that I have been participating in a chaotic arena of neocolonial politics: learning the rules of the game, the slick manoeuvres, the scheming from the moment I stepped foot into that glorious campus.
Tuition fees for British international schools in Malaysia can go up to RM100,000 (around £17,640) per year, almost the life savings for an average Malaysian. It is decidedly not a choice that everybody has, and exacerbates Malaysia’s deeply embedded economic and racial division. Malay-Malaysians and indigenous peoples, or Bumiputera, make less than three-quarters of the income of Chinese-Malaysians. These ethnic divisions can be traced back to colonial times and attributed to British colonial divide-and-rule strategies, which left some races more definitively affluent than others. In response to this colonial legacy, affirmative action policies, collectively known as the NEP, were implemented by the government in 1971 to combat these persistent racial inequalities. This involved introducing enrollment quotas in national universities that prioritise the Bumiputera over the Chinese and Indians; with the odds stacked against them the latter feel pushed to seek out international schools in order to get into UK universities instead. And amongst the interracial and economic grievances, the UK continues to embrace and benefit from a neocolonial present through service exports and exorbitant international tuition fees.
What exactly makes British education so appealing aside from escaping racial quotas and gaining economic advantage? For those who can spend more than a buck on their children’s education, British international schools stand as status symbols in front of family or friends. Beyond that, there is something to be said about the contradictory ideas of ‘Western-ness’ in Malaysia which perpetuate a ‘curated’ form of colonialism. On one hand, there is great resistance towards the erosion of ‘Malaysian culture’ through the imposition of Western values, which is often accompanied with impassioned debates about LGBTQ+ rights (see: one reaction to Matty Healy festival incident) and white saviourism, among other colonial evils. On the other hand, there is a quieter, more subtle ‘Anglophilic’ aspect – the continued championing of English over other languages and the glorification of private British education. Proximity to and characteristics associated with British education act as various forms of cultural capital that a large portion of the elite still prize. Completion of school at a private British institution acts as embodied, objectified, and institutionalised cultural capital – from proficiency in English, to certificates needed to apply to UK universities, to having been to a school that has accreditation from COBIS – all of which facilitate upward social mobility.
Even within the microcosm of the British international school I went to, these white-coloured glasses are put on. From the mistreatment of local teachers juxtaposed against the greater visibility of white teachers to adverts heavily featuring a white kid regardless of the ad’s content (with the non-white students in the background scoring DEI brownie points), British international education panders towards the Anglophilic gaze. It does seem ironic though, as there is a sense of tired contradiction in feeling like you are constantly being alienated, chastised and exploited for your identity by a foreign institution in your country looking for profit, to whom you feel helpless to give huge sums of money anyway… Did I mention the frequent racist comments made by white teachers who got away scot-free?
The most troubling implication for me, however, is the role of former colonies in upholding this neocolonial legacy. How much is the Malaysian state accountable for it? How much can we oppose neocolonial structures and make our own? How much actual agency do we have? The tightrope between neocolonial structure and postcolonial agency is in constant tension in Malaysia: if we comply with the Structure and sing its praises, we attract more direct investment from the UK, climb the ranks of economic development, and get a couple steps closer to our decades-long desire of becoming a high income country. How sustainable is this compliance, however, when the British international school to UK university to overseas employment pipeline, but more specifically the interracial inequalities that prop it up, is one of few factors contributing to high levels of brain drain in Malaysia?
I don’t pretend to know what postcolonial Malaysia means, but I do believe we are not quite there yet. Inequalities in race, class, and transnational mobility continue to be persistent features of the Structure left behind by an Empire with a fetish for division. At the same time, I can’t entirely blame the Malaysian government for projecting an illusion of progress, for no matter how much I lament over my postcolonial heritage, my hands, like my country’s, are bound. We both cannot afford to forfeit the rules of this (neo)colonial game. So, we play on.
