DELEGATES at the Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu (PBB) 15th Conference in Kuching, Sarawak were in stitches when their president Tan Sri Abang Johari Openg shared stories of the restroom and the phrase, ‘Four Push Two’ yesterday.
He said when he was serving as the Sarawak tourism minister in the Cabinet led by the fourth chief minister Tun Abdul Taib Mahmud, he heard of a tour guide who unintentionally caused an English-speaking tourist a hard time due to his poor command of the language.
According to him, the tourist was asking the guide to show him the restroom as he needed to ease himself but instead, the tour guide led him to a sofa and said, “You can rest here.”
“It was only after the tourist demonstrated to the tour guide that he could not hold it anymore and needed to use the toilet that the guide realised what the tourist meant by the ‘restroom’, which was actually the toilet,” said Abang Johari.
The crowd at the Borneo Convention Centre, where the conference was held, was again drawn into laughter when the Sarawak premier told them of a Bahasa Malaysia-educated teacher who was forced to teach Mathematics in English.
Abang Johari said he was also a state minister in charge of education during Taib’s administration where he was told that the teacher was not trained in the subject but had to take up the task as the Math teacher was on sick leave.
“This teacher had asked the students the answer for ‘four push two’, instead of saying subtract or minus as he didn’t know how to say it in English,” he said.
Abang Johari shared this when winding up the three-day conference where he reiterated the need to have a good command of English without compromising the position of Bahasa Malaysia as the national language.
“English is important, but we must have (good command) of both (Bahasa Malaysia and English),” he said.
When opening the conference yesterday, he said the state government’s decision for English to remain an official language in Sarawak alongside the national language was in line with the Federal Constitution. – June 20, 2022
