May We Remain Tentative When Understanding Others

By Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

October 2011 EDITORIAL
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Calling a spade a spade is easy enough when you live in a small monolingual and mono-cultural society – such societies are necessarily small. But try doing that in a multilingual and multicultural place like Malaysia and you quickly realise that a lot of empathy, skill and tentativeness, especially, are involved in daily communication.And I am not even thinking of the fact that all languages are full of dialectal nuances and class-based preferences; or that most people do not –...

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Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

is the Executive Director of Penang Institute. His latest book is Signals in the Noise: Notes on Penang, Malaysia and the World (Singapore: Faction Press) Homepage: wikibeng.com.


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