13-Year-Old Arrested After Posting TikTok Describing "Bad Experience" As a Malay In Vernacular School
A five-minute heartfelt message from a teen expressing mental health struggles caused outrage among the Chinese community as 187 police reports were made nationwide and leftist Malays raced to protect the feelings of the oppressed minority.
Having only recently joined TikTok to post introspective videos, Bradley Neo Kamaruddin, 13, was shaken when police officers swarmed his house last night and apprehended him for questioning.
As the MCMC worked to get the video removed from the social media platform and Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil warned Malaysians to stop sharing it, proponents of the vernacular school system condemned the hate speech as divisive and a threat to harmony in the country.
“Don’t talk about vernacular schools. Unless you want to praise them, the topic is off-limits. So either you only highlight the positives or we’ll have you arrested,” wrote one columnist in an English-language news outlet.
Malaysian English news media across the board assisted in damage control by simultaneously publishing articles painting vernacular schools in a highly favorable light.
“I have nothing negative to say about it,” Akash, 9, a student at an SJKC was quoted as saying in one review.
“I will have a job in the future,” Nur Mira, 10, said confidently in Mandarin in another review.
Siti Mastura, a parent to two kids currently enrolled in an SJKC commented that she and her husband wanted their kids to learn discipline and work ethic. When asked if the Chinese are better at teaching those qualities to children than Malay parents, Siti Mastura blinked and replied, “Well, yes.”
Experts were also called in for good measure.
“There is no division in vernacular schools,” Parent Action Group for Education (PAGE) chairman Noor Azimah Abdul Rahim, an accountant with no education or humanities background, said in a statement. “Malaysians are united.”
The PAGE chairman didn’t respond when asked via email if her last statement was patently false and if she’d like to rethink her answer, given that it doesn’t coincide with reality.
A headmaster at an SJKC in Melaka echoed the PAGE chairman’s views by avoiding the significant and complex problems of self-segregation, competing languages, and stalled nation-building. “There are no issues related to race,” he said before commending the media’s concerted efforts to handle the hateful narrative.
On Monday, Bradley Neo revealed his struggles with being a Malay in Malaysia in a TikTok video that had reached 18 million views before it was taken down. He said that having attended an SJKC for five years and being the only Malay in his class inspired some questions in him.
“I think I became a little bit depressed,” Bradley Neo said in his video. “I felt lost and confused and started to wonder about my identity. My parents kept insisting life would be easy for me when I got older and there would be many job opportunities. They said the same thing about English when I was in kindergarten. I asked them why couldn’t I just go for Mandarin tuition classes but they told me not to ask questions. That I should be more open-minded like them. I don’t understand a lot of things right now, like why they gave me this name, but maybe one day it will all make sense.”
Bradley Neo, or Brad as his parents refer to him, is currently being investigated under Section 233 of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Act which criminalizes online content that’s considered offensive with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person.
