KEY POINTS:
Rule Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves: Britons never shall be slaves.
These are the lyrics of Rule Britannia, a poem turned into a song and often sung as the unofficial national anthem of Britain.
My father was made to sing this song, and other British patriotic songs with words that reinforced British superiority almost every other day when he was at school in Singapore.
Like New Zealand, Singapore was a British colony but unlike New Zealand, which became a self-governing colony early on, Singapore continued to be ruled by the British until 1957.
Singapore is now an independent nation, and it has been a decade since the last major overseas British colony - Hong Kong - was handed back to China. But last week, I received an email which showed that some people are still caught up with the hangups of the colonial past and one reader felt I had no right to comment on the use of the language of the colonial masters.
After my piece criticising reports which said text language would be allowed in NCEA exams, R.J. Smith wrote: "An Asian commenting about the use of English now that's a joke just remember that it was the British who taught you people in Singapore how to read and write the language."
Yes, the British did teach us people in Singapore how to read and write English and it is my opinion that English should continue to be taught in the way it has been taught to us in New Zealand classrooms.
But the part of his email which saddens me was when he implied that as an Asian, I was unfit to be writing in the pages of this newspaper. Smith wrote: "For the Herald to engage [an Asian] like yourself shows how much of a downhill slide it has taken."
It is sad that bigots such as Smith are still around in modern-day New Zealand, and I do not agree with his view of Asian inferiority. But I do wonder if, over the years, Asians have contributed towards his view of Western superiority.
When the British ruled over Singapore, which during its pre-independence days was part of Malaya, people resigned unquestioningly to British rule and the white man was held in awe.
Pro-British propaganda abounded in schools and work places, and many locals came to regard the British as a superior race. Those like my father, who were educated in schools run by the British and who worked for British bosses, looked up to Westerners.
Some of their views and attitudes towards Westerners were passed on to their sons and daughters - people of my generation - who had never experienced British rule.
I remember the first postcard I received from New Zealand sent to me by an Army mate who had gone to Waiouru for a joint military exercise with the New Zealand Army.
I was serving my national service and it was my friend's first trip to a non-Asian country. He had sent the postcard soon after spending a weekend in Taupo.
"New Zealand is a fascinating country," he wrote. "It has a lake bigger than the size of Singapore, and what's even more fascinating - white people here actually sweep roads and clear rubbish bins."
I too remember experiencing the same uneasy feeling when I was approached by a white man beggar on my first trip to Perth, Australia.
Growing up in a former British territory and in a society where Westerners made up the upper rung of society - mainly bosses and wealthy expatriates - seeing white people doing manual labour and begging was a culture shock.
Westerners continue to receive better treatment in many Asian societies. I recently met up with two new migrant couples who had lived and worked in Singapore before moving to New Zealand. They gave vastly contrasting accounts of their experiences there.
One couple, white and originally from Denmark, shared with me their wonderful memories of their time in Singapore. Everything was so efficient in Singapore, they said, and Singaporeans were so accommodating, often going out of their way to help.
The other, an Indian IT technician and his wife, gave a completely different picture of their two years in Singapore. Singaporeans in their experience were rude and they sometimes shouted at him thinking he was just a foreign labourer, the husband said. His wife also recounted how taxi drivers there would not stop for them and picked up passengers who were Europeans or Chinese instead.
Their stories reminded me of my own secondary school days, when our school hosted two exchange students from Australia; one was a white boy and the other of Pakistani descent.
The white lad got invited to the homes of many of my classmates for dinner, and their parents also took him sightseeing and shopping. The Pakistani boy, however, was left very much on his own with his host family.
Girls from a neighbouring school were also eager to get to know the white boy because it was a status symbol to have a white boyfriend.
Having lived in New Zealand for nearly 10 years and having worked and mixed with people of many ethnicities and cultures, I have long come to the conclusion that we are all essentially the same whatever the colour of our skin. No one race is superior to another.
The infallibility of the British and that Britons never will be slaves fell when the Japanese thrashed them in World War II, and the All Blacks too have shown time and again that British superiority and invincibility is something of a myth.
People should not feel they are superior or inferior to another purely on the account of race and ethnicity.
As New Zealand becomes more multicultural, I hope that the natural evolution taking place within our community, schools and homes will give us the ability to one day look beyond colour and creed in all that we do.
