Memories of Malaya - 2. Japanese School

*

Following on from my father’s post last Friday about his boyhood experiences of the Japanese occupation of Malaya during the Second World War, the story continues with an account of life at Japanese school.

The family hid deep in a rubber estate when the Japanese troops swept through the country. Now, a few years on, life has settled into a new routine under the occupation.

My father writes:

In our family there was my Mother, my maternal Grandmother, the four of us and a servant who has since become very close to the family. Father was away with his first family which will be explained later. The servant’s name was Ah Hoe but we children called her Ah Hoe Cheh (AHC) - the “Cheh” means sister a term the children of the house used for these young girls who came from China to work in the various households in Malaya. She came to work for us soon after her arrival from China until she retired. She had shared the privations and happy times of the family, and never grumbled about her work and was and is an excellent cook. As I write this she is 82 years old and she now lives in Hong Kong with her niece in well deserved retirement. Very unusually she was literate in Chinese and as children we listened to the Chinese folk tales and ghost stories that she would tell us and stories from some of the Chinese classics which every Chinese knows. She even recited from a book the prayers for Kuan Yin (the Goddess of Mercy) before the latter’s image in the household altar and lighted joss sticks twice a day before the household Gods. (Mother was busy helping my Father in the clinic and we children would not know how to attend to these devotions.) As Mother was thus away she looked after us, fed and clothed us and did the household chores as well.

Almost all of these girls who had come over had sworn that they would not marry and very few broke this oath. A dozen or so of them would group together to rent a floor on top of a shophouse in town where they would go for a rest on the occasions they could get away from their work. There were no fixed off days. Most of them would use letter writers who wrote in Chinese to send letters back to their homes. They would send money and it was done this way: they would give some person who has a trusted reputation the money meant for the family and the agent of this trusted person in China would give the equivalent to the family. I have never heard any of them being cheated.

For food the adults’ staple was boiled sweet potatoes, boiled tapioca or tapioca flour made into pancakes and occasionally rice porridge boiled with sweet potatoes. For us children we had rice porridge boiled with sweet potatoes. We became quite experts on the quality of sweet potatoes; they came in various colours: orange, yellow and purple. The purple ones were rare but they were usually the sweetest. In the early days of the Occupation we would slaughter the chicken and ducks because soon there would not be enough food to feed them. So for a short while we had good food.

I cannot remember the exact age but it must have been about 6 that I was enrolled in a Japanese school. It was a Japanese school in that it taught us the Japanese language, arithmetic and drawing. There were about 40 Chinese boys in a class and the form master was also a Chinese. There were other teachers who were Indians, a Sikh (the locals) and a Japanese woman. I later found out that the locals had been teachers in English schools before the coming of the Japanese. They must have taken a crash course in Japanese to teach Japanese. Later on after the Occupation they went back to teach in English schools. The Japanese lady was in her early thirties and she wore skirts and blouses and taught us singing. She was a quiet and dignified person and quite pretty and there was no trace of any arrogance.

The whole school would assemble every morning in the school field in orderly lines and the Japanese flag was raised. The whole school sang the Japanese national anthem and a teacher more fit then the others climbed on to a table tennis table and led the whole school in free hand exercise for about 15 minutes after which the boys marched back to their classes and the day’s lessons began. In a visit to Tokyo a few years ago I could see some Japanese doing the same exercise as we did, standing in front of their shophouses.

There was a gardening period twice a week. During this period the boys were expected to and did plant sweet potatoes, tapioca and vegetables. The plants did not bear much fruit. (But strangely when the British came back we also had gardening periods in the English schools.) The teachers’ salary was supplemented by sweet potatoes, yams and noodles given periodically. AHC would send me to school on her bicycle with me seated on the back seat. When two more of my brothers went to school she would take all three of us with one sitting on the cross bar in front and two of us on the seat at the back.

Written by Guest Blogger: Ooi Boon-Leong

~~~~~~~~~~~

*This photo and others illustrating my father’s posts are taken from the internet and not from our family albums.

memmlya