“My name is Haji,” I said to the Australian man. The man looked into my eyes as if I was nothing more than a boy who had slipped through the cracks.
“You say you’ve graduated college?’ he asked me.
“ Yes sir,” I said. I was not at all shocked by his reaction to my saying so, only eleven other Malaise people had ever graduated as a college student before me.
“Very well,” he said. The white man asked me only two or three more basic questions before concluding the interview.
I did not get the job. At the time, having just gone through a six-year medical school program and two years of training, the news was crushing. Had I listened to my father years before, I’d had not had to experience the first of many rejections in my career.
“The white man only hire the white man,” he’d said. “School only a waste of time,” he’d said. “Now come, chop this coconut my boy. It is all you will ever be good for.” But what did my father know? After all he had only worked on a plantation all his life. I used to tell myself that I would never be that man. Australia had owned the West Islands for over 100 years now, and most of the small businesses had been shut down. But I was determined to be the change. I would become the first Malayan doctor on the Cocos Islands.
Now I was fifty years old, and the furthest I’d gone in my career was a doctor’s assistant. I was not the only of the Cocos Malays to have taken the “high” road. Many others became teacher’s assistants or business assistants just as I had. While my brothers fooled around in school and spent their time surfing and fishing, I was exploring the ocean for injured marine life that I could practice aiding. My family shunned me as a boy. They felt as if I believed that their lives were not worthy. The truth is, for a time I did. I hated so much to watch the little white boys running around on our islands mastering our skills and eating from our tables. I hated sitting in the same classrooms with them and watching them play with the toys that my father could not afford. Worst of all, I hated how our business came from tourist attractions.
Often times I would disobey my father’s orders. In the early mornings when we would attend the Mosque for a mass, I would sneak out to the schoolyard and sit under the palm trees to read the latest books in medicine. He would be so furious that he would beat me and send me home with no food for the night. As bad as it might sound now, nothing was worse than working in on the coconut plantation. Slicing coconut after coconut like some sort of drone was humiliating to me. Faking a smile and handing a little tourist girl coconut wedges was the most painful thing to do. Acting like life, as a Cocos Malay was the most luxurious thing while all of our three hundred Malayan people suffered, felt like being slapped in the face by the Australians, and I hated them.
That was my biggest motivation to work hard in school. I did everything I was told in class and got A’s on every quiz and test. My fellow classmates made fun of me during the day, and when I came home, my father only shrugged at my grades and said, “Ay, your coconut carving could use some improvement.” I found that the more my father disagreed with me the harder I worked to prove him wrong.
One day, I came home and told my father one of the hardest things I would ever tell him. “Bapa,”I said. “ I am going to the mainland to study as a doctor. My father stared at me the same way that the Austrians had in so many of my interviews later in life, but he also knew me well enough to know that I would not stop until I proved him wrong.
My father cried that day as he begged me not to leave and I was surprised to find how much he really did care for me. I promised him I’d come back and visit him, but we both knew that I was lying.
Fast forward through my years in school, and as an assistant doctor. I had received a call from one of my dearest schoolmates. “ Haji, your father is sick. He has requested that I seek you out and ask you to see him.” Here I was, a seventy-year-old man being asked to visit my father after all of the years we’d been apart, and I hadn’t even become a doctor. What was I going to tell him about my career? There was no way I could look into his eyes and tell him that I was a failure.
I ended up visiting him anyways. He told me about the unemployment rates on the Cocos Islands, especially for the Malaise men and women. He asked me about my career as well, which I very well expected, and after countless hours of practicing my lines I ended up telling him plain an simple. “Bapa, I am a doctor’s assistant, and I’m sorry.” My father cried again that day. He was always a man of strong emotions. He told me that he was very proud of me and that if anyone should be sorry, it was he for the way that he had treated me as a boy. My father died only days later.
Life after my father got better. My brothers were working for the Cocos Island District School, and I as Dr. Haji the first Malayan doctor of the Cocos Islands. Of course I am so old now that it has become very difficult for me to operate. I consider myself to be more of a director to the younger set of doctors, but still, I have become the most well known doctor on the Island. Many Australian leaders had visited the Island with talk of improving the schooling, housing, and employment rates. Although I may not live to see my Islands’ improvements I know that one thing is certain, there can only be new beginnings for the life of a young Malaysian boy.