Archive for the 'Family Memoirs' Category

I’ve never appreciated roast turkey with all the trimmings. I find it bland and lacking in celebratory festiveness. I am especially not fond of brussel sprouts! So the traditional Christmas meal is a bit of an ordeal for me. Which is not to say I don’t like turkey as such. We often eat turkey steak or turkey escalope or diced turkey throughout the year - but cooked with wine Italian-style or soy sauce or curry Asian-style.

The problem with the traditional roast turkey meal for me is that when I was a child in Malaysia, Christmas food was just so much more - more tasty, more spicy, more varied, more exciting. We would spend Christmas with my grandparents in Taiping and the preparations would start weeks in advance. As a child, I never was aware of all the effort and hard work that Grandma put into it - with the help of all the aunties, great-aunties, cousins and second cousins all over Taiping. But everyone in the large extended family would have got involved in the vast cooking marathon that would have been needed to lay on the feast that fed over a hundred people.

In the heat of the tropics, we would have a full-blown Christian Christmas, complete with tree, Santa and carols.

The kids’ job was to decorate the house. The older second cousins would be in charge - tall, good-looking Paul who seemed so grown up to us and broad-shouldered, grinning Jason. They would be the ones up the ladders stringing the paper chains, placing the balls on the higher reaches of the Christmas tree. We younger kids would drape tinsel on the lower branches of the tree, balance cards on shelves.

On the day of the big party itself, the living room would be cleared and chairs set out for the carol service. There would be a churchful of people in there, singing our hearts out. One of the fat great-uncles would always dress up as Santa in the red suit and jolly mask, arriving at the end of the service when the lights went out. He would have a sack full of presents and ho-ho-ho his way round the room, scaring the babies with the strange staring mask.

But when it came to the food, we celebrated Malaysian-style - with curries and spicy fried dishes, rice and satay: and enough to feed an army. Memories of delicious Asia will always be associated with festivities and celebration for me so a pallid turkey for Christmas, no matter how moist you might claim it is or how Christmas-y just does not do it for me at all.

What are your memories of childhood Christmases? Please add a comment and let me know!

Photo: thanks to Mr_Woo from flickr.com (CCL)

When I was a child, we spent most Christmas’s at my grandparents’ in Taiping.

We would drive up from KL along the single lane trunk road, passing all the little towns and villages on the way. It was always exciting as we left the city, weaving our way north through Templars Park with its clusters of forest and glimpses of rocky streams. We’d sing songs and play Eye Spy, munching at the chicken sandwiches that my mother had made. And then the boredom would set in. I would stare up at the endless line of the telephone wires overhead and it would seem interminable.

And then we would see the chalk hills near Ipoh loom up, strangely shaped mounds eroded by wind and rain. We were nearly there! In the back of the car, my brother and sister and I would perk up and look out of the windows, finding the shapes that we knew. There was a man sleeping on his side. There was Grandma’s head - a hill that for a moment, just at the right angle as the car whizzed by, looked like a woman’s head with a 1940s haircut.

And before long, we’d be at the crossroads at Simpang, turning towards Taiping. The ramshackle shophouses and roadside shacks would give way for awhile to more jungle and rubber trees and atap huts hidden in the foliage. And then we would be driving into the bustle of Taiping past the Indian temple and mosque, heading towards the central market and town clock.

Even as a child, I always struck by the contrast of small town Taiping to the big city of KL. The town was laid out in a neat grid and you could never get lost. There was hardly any traffic which was great when you were a kid and wanted to roam a bit further away from the adults. The streets were like toy streets, easily walkable and everybody seemed to know who we were, smiling and greeting us whenever we strolled down covered walkways.

I remember my mother wearing a backless top once, sauntering down the small town streets in her fashionable, big city way and my Grandma walking at a distance in horror at her daughter’s baring her back so brazenly - “What must they all thinking be thinking, May?” she kept saying. My mother just shrugged and laughed, “It’s just my back, so what? It’s not like it’s my front.”

Grandma was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who had been sent as a missionary from China to look after the flock in Singapore. She was now a community leader in the Methodist church, a Rotarian and generally a respected figure in Taiping. She always dressed neatly and smartly, even when she was in the garden, tending to her beloved orchids. She moved elegantly, her back always straight and I never saw her slouch or loaf around. She never quite got her head round my mother’s a la mode, right out of Vogue, up to the minute fashion sense, what with the backless tops, strapless gowns, high heels, platform shoes and hot pants of the late 60s and early 70s.

At special occasions, like Christmas, Grandma would always wear a cheong sam, the traditional Chinese dress made famous recently by Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love. Most of the younger women in the family would be in cheong sams , too, hair done up in Western style - bee-hives or page boys, set in place with Ellenet hairspray. My mother would do the same but some years, she would be elegantly dressed in whatever was the latest fashion - one time, it was a billowing, white kaftan with a pattern embroidered in rich royal blue: what can I say, it was the 70s and we’d just come back from the Philippines where kaftans were all the rage.

For me, I loved the Christmas holidays and festivities but the one thing I absolutely hated and dreaded was the party dress. Being a tomboy, I was happiest in jeans and gym shoes. I slouched and sat with my legs apart instead of demurely crossed at the ankles. The party dress with its bows and ribbons and puffy sleeves, its tutu-like flare, it’s gauzy, prickly material - it was just the most hideous ordeal and torture! When it was time to get dressed for the big Christmas party, I would invariably throw a tantrum and sulk, filled with stress, anxiety and horror at having to put on such a monstrosity. For me, my whole sense of self was at stake - my dignity, my pride, the essence of who I was was utterly offended by the costume I was being forced to wear. I envied my brother and the boy cousins in their smart dark trousers and simple, ironed shirts. Why couldn’t I wear a smart pant-suit? Why did being a girl involve wearing something that looked like a pom-pom?

But, for most of my childhood, the adults would always win the battle and I would have to drag myself around the whole evening looking - in my eyes - like a total idiot. Poor Grandma would keep telling me I looked so pretty but I would just glower and slouch in an attempt not to be seen.

And then one Christmas, I won. I don’t know exactly what happened or how I won the battle but in all the family Christmas photos for that year, everyone is beautifully and festively dressed in gender specific garb - all the girls and women dolled up in feminine dresses and all the boys and men in masculine menswear - except me. There I am, a skinny, gawkly teenager, in a pair of corduroy jeans and my gym shoes - slouching.

My father has been inspired again to share another story from his childhood as part of his guestblogging series, Memories of Malaya. Being my father, there is the invariable section on food. So there are no suprises there - however, I am surprised to learn that he was taught gardening at school - hmm, he’s kept that a secret all these years: the next time he comes over to the UK to visit me, I shall have to set him digging and weeding in my garden….

He has just turned 70 this year so the time that he is writing about in this post would be around 1947:

English speaking

At the age of 8 or 9 years old I was sent to an English language school which is a school where the teaching was in the English language and the use of the expression “English school” in this note will refer to this category of schools unless otherwise specified. I do not know the discussions that might have taken place by my parents as to what type of school their child and later on children would be sent. I suspect that there was little or no discussion and it was a matter of course that I would go to an English school. Both my parents and paternal grandfather were educated solely in English. There were many families where the fathers were educated in English and their mother tongues though usually at an elementary level for both languages. Many Chinese were very passionate about the Chinese language. They consider it as a mark of patriotism to China and culture both of which they felt would be lost if the Chinese language was not taught to their children. Despite glaring evidence in every day life that those who were educated solely in the Chinese language enjoyed a lower standard living, many families still insisted on sending their children to these schools.

So much to learn

Anyway there I was in the Pasar Road English School sitting at a bench desk and on a bench sharing it with 2 other boys. There were 40 boys in a class. One of the earliest lessons, I remember, was the teacher teaching us by asking us to repeat the five vowels.

In one of the sessions I remember wondering to myself as to how long it would take me to be educated to university level to study medicine and how this could be accomplished when there was so much to learn. My Father was a medical doctor so that was naturally my reference point. The school day started at 7.45 in the morning and ended at 12.30 in the afternoon. The school day was divided into periods of 40 minutes each with a half hour break or interval as it was called. Sessions consisted of reading aloud from simple English text books and doing arithmetic, drawing, singing, gardening and P.E. Not all subjects were covered everyday. The subjects were distributed throughout different days of the week.

The “reading aloud” part of the lesson consisted of the teacher calling out a boy who would read a few sentence or a paragraph and then another boy and so on to read the prescribed section of the book. This is good training as the boy would learn to stand-up and speak out. After each boy had finished the teacher would give an explanation of the part that had been read out. For arithmetic we used books which had the problems set out and we copied them into exercise books and added our answers to the problems. If there was anything meant for the whole class it was written on the blackboard using a white chalk.

The classrooms were airy and the teachers were competent, hardworking and did not shirk their work on the whole. If you were caught doing mischief you would be made to stand on the chair or outside the classroom and when the headmaster went on his rounds and he saw you he may on rare occasions add his own punishment which may include a stroke or two of the cane on your outstretched palm.

Gardening

An interesting feature in the curriculum was the period for gardening which was allotted two periods consecutively and once a week. During this period we would dig rows of beds and would plant sweet potatoes, beans and some other easily grown vegetables. If it did not rain for a week or so we would have to water the beds with water from the tap. The tools for the work were supplied and kept by the school and they were used by other classes as well. Peer pressure would force every boy to do some work even if it was merely weeding the beds. It is a shame that nowadays when we have all sorts of classes to prepare children, the gardening period is done away with. It would teach young children the dignity of manual labour and that dirtying ones hands is not beneath scholars. This period appeared to be a holdover from the schools during the Japanese occupation when we had such periods and we did the same thing. The reason for this I suspect is because Japan being very much dependent on its agriculture wanted its population to respect and love the land and also to plant for the war.

Food

As this was a period just after the war and many were suffering from lack of protein the school supplied free milk once a week. We would each be given a full mug of milk which we could drink it using our own mug there and then or take it home.

During the interval many of the boys would go to the tuckshop to buy their snacks which consisted of sliced fruits or fried noodles. Coming from a doctor’s family I was not allowed to eat tuckshop food for hygiene reasons. I would have sandwiches spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar brought from home. Because of the heat of the day the butter would have soaked into the bread and it was quite delicious but still I would pass by the tuckshop and longed to join in the crush to get some snacks. I think young boys do not like to feel left out of things. Most of the time I just strolled around the school. Some boys would put up a net and play a few games of badminton or kick a football in the field. But I did not and do not like sports and also did not like going back to class feeling hot and sweaty.

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A request for help: I don’t have any photos from that period either of a school or school boys. Can anyone help and donate a copyright-free photo for me to illustrate this post?

Photo: of a school in modern Malaysia thanks to gxianfu from flickr.com (CCL)

memmlya

I have been posting occasional posts by my father about his Memories of Malaya. He celebrated his 70th birthday earlier this year and recently found time to write another piece for the family about our family traditions in the time of British rule over Malaya. He writes his memories as an email to our family, who are spread out all over the world, and I edit and share the ones which have a wider general interest here on Fusion View.

While my mother’s side of the family are staunch Methodist Christians, my father’s side of the family comes from a Buddhist tradition. I grew up going to Sunday School and reading Bible stories so it’s really interesting for me to learn more about the traditions from the other side of the family.

He writes:

British rule

I grew up in Malaysia and until I was in my late teens in 1957 the country was one of the many British colonial possessions. There were roughly two kinds of colonial possessions, one, a colony and the other a British protected possession. The first is ruled directly from Whitehall and the other is one where the local chieftain or sultan had entered into a treaty with the British Government where the former had asked for British protection usually against other local chieftains, sultans or neighbouring states. The British Government then sent a British Adviser to help in the administration of the local chieftain or sultan. He would also set up the administrative institutions and infrastructure not unlike those of a colony and for practical purpose the country was administered like that of a colony. Examples of a colony were Singapore, Penang, Malacca, Hong Kong etc. Malaya is an example of the second type. The empire had not only a vast mix of racial types who spoke their own languages practised their own customs and worshipped their own gods. In all these respects British colonial policy was benign. There was no compulsions of any kind: the natives and immigrants need not go to English language schools, worship the Christian god in the manner of the Anglicans nor eat with knife and forks nor dress in suites. They did interfere to do away with inhuman customs or practices like widow burning or slavery. The policy of generally not interfering with local family laws, customs and cultural practices prevailed. The British must have adopted these policies from the examples of the Romans in their dealings with their empire. There was therefore little serious social or political tension in the possessions they ruled.

Taoists

In our households like most Chinese household who were not Christians, we were actually Taoists although without very clear thinking we regarded and called ourselves Buddhists. We worshipped various gods and goddesses with an altar and little statuettes of each of them. I do not think we were even pure Taoist although to this day I do not know what Taoism is. A Buddhist generally means a person who follows Buddha’s teachings and there is no image or statuettes and no worship other then paying respect to a statuette or painting of Buddha in the usual eastern way of paying respect, by kneeling and the bowing to them. I will continue to refer to ourselves as Buddhists although by this it is really the kind of Taoism I have described above.

Daily rituals

There were certain daily rituals to be performed. In the morning after my Mother or the servant, Ah Hoe Chey (AHC) had done their morning toilet, they would place one joss stick for one deity into a bowl filled with a kind of grey powder which held the joss stick in upright position and would kneel with hands clasped bowed to each deity in turn.

The gods and goddesses were placed in a row on a long altar table and going from left to right they were the following:

1. the “Heavenly Emperor”: there is no image of Him. I think he rules the heaven;
2. the Warrior God (Kuan Kong): He was not a god to help people to fight wars like the Roman god, Mars. In his life on earth he was a warrior in the classical period of Chinese history; after his death, a cult arose in paying respect to him and sometimes people who did so also asked for favours and they were granted and he became deified like some Roman emperors although there is no record of a dead emperor granting any favours. There was a painting of him in his warrior robes famously with tucked up eye brows with a red face with two lieutenants standing beside him.
3. the Goddess of Mercy (Koong Yum): She was a human at one time who did a lot of good deeds and was known for her filial piety. Her life was portrayed in a film version with a famous Chinese star playing her part and there was a scene where she was shown to pluck out her own eyes to use them to cure her mother. Again she was deified after her death because she still performed good deeds in her answers to prayers. There was a small statuette of her made of white porcelain looking serene and benign, like a caring and loving mother.
4. next to her there was the Monkey God. There was a little statuette of him dressed in a yellow robe in the style of the classical Chinese time but with the face of a monkey. I do not know what his position is in the pantheon. I think it arose as follows: there is a Chinese legend that a Chinese monk traveled to India to receive the Buddhist scriptures and his traveling companions included two persons one with feature of a pig and the other a monkey and the legend is full of stories of their adventures in their journey to India. He must be the one with the features of a monkey. Because of this god in our house we would not use the ordinary word of monkey “ma lau” but a more polite word.

There was a small altar at the foot of the altar table. I do not know what god is represented there. There is the god of the kitchen who had a small altar over the kitchen stoves. He reports to the Heavenly Emperor at the end of each Chinese calendar year on the deeds of the household. On most mornings either Mother or AHC would chant prayers from a prayer book and this lasted about fifteen minutes.

First and fifteenth

On the first and fifteenth day of each Chinese calendar month the worship of these deities were a little more elaborate in that the appropriate temples must be visited and worship conducted there. The more religious minded, like Mother and AHC, would not eat meat for the two days. The temples would provide free vegetarian food for these two days for anyone who attended them whether they worshipped or not. In addition to joss sticks, joss papers were burnt.

Feast days

In addition to the daily prayers most Chinese also celebrate other feast days many of which were not religious but involved the cycles of the earth around the sun. The first major festival in the calendar is the Spring Festival or more usually known as Chinese New Year. Like all humanity it is a celebration of the beginning of new life - wearing of new clothes, cleaning house so that it looks new, wishing good fortune for the New Year. In our household we children wanted presents left near where we slept like on Christmas Eve. So we had Mother to give us presents in this manner. In one year Mother gave us a small magnifying glass to complement our stamp collection and packets of stamps and fountain pens. Father did not have relationship with his relatives except his elder brother. Mother was the only child. So we had no relatives to have to visit except Father’s elder brother and two ladies whom, like all Chinese, we call aunts although we were not related but were only Mother’s friends. We therefore received very few red packets and were impressed when some of school friends who related the amount they received. For the first day of the Chinese New Year even we children ate vegetarian and AHC made some delicious vegetarian food. When we grew up in secondary school Father would allow us to see any number of film shows for the two days of holidays. Normally we were allowed to see one film a week. So we packed as many as 3 shows into a day.

There was the mid-summer celebration which occurs on the fifteenth day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar. This is a harvest festival and the moon is supposed to be at its biggest and brightest. Children would stroll around the garden of their houses holding lighted lanterns.

There is the day the winter solstice is celebrated when everyone eats little dough balls cooked in sugared water with ginger. I personally did not like them but Mother did very much.

There is All Souls Day where families go to the graves of parents or grandparents to pay their respects and render filial piety by cutting grass and sweeping away rubbish around the graves. About 14 days are given for this duty. I feel very touched when I see photographs of cemeteries filled with the Chinese doing this. I know of several persons who have travelled from as far as Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to perform this duty and I have just heard a few days ago that a friend traveled from Hong Kong where he worked to do this duty.

Cowherd and the weaver girl

There is one particularly romantic festival and it occurs on the seventh day of the seven month in the Chinese calendar. It is the festival of the “Cowherd and the weaver girl.” A long time ago there was a cowherd who tended the cows and a girl who weaved cloth. They were so enamoured and spent time mooning over each other that they neglected their chores. The gods became angry at this and separated them and permitted them only to meet for that one day in a year on the rainbow bridge and it is this that the earthlings now celebrate. I think this would make a splendid opera. Imagine the last scene where the young couple meets on a rainbow bridge singing duets of love and longing and below on earth the people dance and sing in celebration of the meeting. Opera composers have always included one scene where there is a lot of spirited music and vigorous dancing and this can be it and be a very fine one too.

There are other festivals but regrettably I cannot remember them.

Deity of little children

When we children celebrated our birthdays we had to worship a very old lady deity whose altar was at the end of our bed. She looks after little children. When I use the word “worship,” I mean that one would kneel put our palms together and bow three times to the altar and if Mother or Grandmother is standing beside us she will prompt us to say “make me a good and filial boy and help me to be successful in the examinations.” To celebrate I had a bowl of rice and as a treat I was given the thigh of a roasted duck all of it for myself. I remember eating it by myself holding it by the bone and it was a treat not to have to eat together as usual with the family. Even then the birthday was not celebrated every year - only when Mother, Grandmother or AHC remembered it.

Photo: thanks to limeydog on flickr.com

memmlya

My father continues his memories of life under the Japanese during World War Two, when he was a young boy of about six.

He writes:

Lessons consisted exclusively of learning the language and the script - not the one that uses the Chinese characters. There was no Japanese literature or war propaganda in the lessons. Soon there was not much to teach us and a lot of the periods were spent in singing some popular Japanese songs.

After the British surrendered my Father had to get rid of his tin hat and gas mask with which he was issued when he was drafted or joined the medical service of the British Army. As a doctor the Japanese issued him some petrol and so he was able to use his car which had a red cross pasted in the front wind-screen and the back. This would ease him in passing through the check points that were erected on most cross-roads.

One matter caused me a great deal of anxiety and that was the radio. The Japanese had made it known that if anyone was found with a radio he was liable to have his head chopped off. So for a few mornings I would wake up with cold sweat worrying that Mother had not got rid of our radio. Eventually she did by dumping it into a deep mining pool. She could not have done it herself and must have needed someone to help her and it is a wonder that whoever he was he did not squeal to the Japanese about it.

The only time I came across some Japanese soldiers was when a few of them came round to the vicinity of our house. They were intent on catching some chickens and they asked me to help them to round-up the chickens; we didn’t catch any. I wondered if that amounted to collaborating with them! By the third year of school I was quite fluent in writing and speaking Japanese but I soon forgot all of it after the return of the British. Being young I did not know what happened to the production of rubber and tin and how trade was conducted. What we know was the scarcity of food. We had also dug vegetable plots at the back of the house and planted the easily grown vegetables but it was not enough to be self-sufficient.

As the Allies fought back and in the last months of the Occupation we could see the B-29’s dropping bombs over the airfield, the Central Railway Workshop and unexpectedly the National Museum. The places bombed were quite far from where we lived so we did not suffer any collateral damage as it would be called now. Some people watched and cheered but a lot were still apprehensive because the Japanese had not surrendered yet.

Finally the Japanese surrendered and the occupation was over. I did not witness the ceremony of the signing of the surrender which was conducted in the school hall of the Victoria Institutions, the school I attended in later years.

Written by Guest Blogger: Ooi Boon-Leong

Photo: thanks to indianaradios.com

memmlya

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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

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

memmlya

My father seems to be on an inspired roll. Ever since his first contribution to Fusion View, about his first experience of coming to England as a young man, he has been writing down his memories for our family. Here, he writes about his experience of the Japanese occupation of Malaya as a very young boy - stories that I never knew about at all before the email he sent earlier this week.

For people of my father’s generation, their childhood / young adulthood were indelibly marked by the Japanese occupation of Malaya during the Second World War. However, I think it’s important to make the point that these days the relationship between Japan and its Asian neighbours is peaceful and there are many Japanese families living in modern Malaysia, thriving and co-operating together with Malaysians.

My father writes:

When the Japanese in their conquest of South East Asia reached Malaya in 1941 I was 4 years old. Certainly not old enough to read about or understand the politics that gave rise to the war with Japan or the European war. This account is merely that of a family of the professional class in a British Colonial possession in the Far East which underwent about 3 years of the Japanese occupation and survived without any death in the family through torture or other atrocities.

I had 3 other younger brothers each younger by 1 year than the next. My Father was a medical practitioner who graduated in the 1920s from the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore. It was one of the two finest medical colleges in the British Empire, the other one being in Hong Kong University. It produced solidly competent doctors. My Father’s elder brother and their brother-in-law also graduated from the same college. My Father-in-law was also a graduate of the same college at a slightly later date. My Father’s Father (i.e. my paternal grandfather) taught Latin in the secondary school.

The earliest memory of the state of the war was our fleeing to Singapore by train when the reputation of Singapore as an impregnable fortress was still intact. We went to our maternal grand aunt’s house in Bukit Timah where she and her family of her grown-up children lived in a large rambling wooden house in the midst of a pineapple plantation with fruit trees of rambutans and also chickens. A new experience for us was to live in such a large open space with so much greenery and fresh air without electric lights and having to draw water from a well for our baths. Soon the myth of the impregnable fortress was eroding and we fled back to Kuala Lumpur by train and the journey took hours, stopping every time there were hostile planes overhead. My parents must have heard of the rapes and atrocities committed by the Japanese in Shanghai and other parts of China and we then moved deep into a rubber estate with the whole family and livestock (mainly chickens and ducks.)

Here life was quite idyllic. We lived together with other families in rooms one next to the other. There was no electric light again and had only kerosene lamps so we went to sleep very early. The rubber trees kept the temperature cool and there was a stream with clear and clean water in which we could bathe. We were disturbed by the Japanese only once when they came in trucks. We heard the rumbling of their trucks when they went over a bridge which they had to cross to reach the rubber estate. All of us then ran deeper into the jungle which surrounded the rubber estate. All the younger women would put on ugly torn and patched peasant clothes and make themselves as uninviting as possible by rubbing ash or mud on their face or arms and were the first to run away for everyone had heard of their rapes. In this instance none was raped. They were after men who were alleged to have been conducting anti-Japanese activities.

Each one of us had a few clothes and some homemade biscuits tied up in a pillow case standing in the bedroom to be picked up when we had to flee from the house. The peasant clothes were also always ready to be put on.

Other than this disturbance, life was without any untoward event although at all times there was at the back of our minds the worry as to what would the next day bring. The adults must have had a great deal of anxiety especially people like my Mother who had four very young children to feed and bring up.

Next Friday: Japanese school

Written by Guest Blogger Ooi Boon-Leong

memmlya

My father has recently been inspired into a spate of creative activity. He submitted a Fusion Story a little while back, about his first experience of coming to study in England. He is of that generation of men - particularly in the Chinese tradition - who were never encouraged to share personal moments publicly. And he has never been known to write much creatively. So I am really touched that recently, he has been sharing his personal reminiscences with us in writing - and really proud of him.

This piece about his grandmother also gives us a flavour of a Malaya of a different time - before the freeways and high rise buildings and Starbucks.

He writes:

My earliest memory of Grandmother was when I was four or five when we moved to Cheras. I had gone with her to clean the house before the family moved in. Some day she would buy durians from the Malay vendors who came with a huge basket of the fruits stacked on the back of his bicycle. We would eat them squatting at the front door. She was very fond of durians.

In the little garden in the front of the Cheras house there was a pomegranate tree to which she seemed very attached. She would water it with water which had been used to clean fish and would hang empty crab-shells on the branches because they would help the tree. It seldom bore fruit and when it did she was very pleased with it.

She doted on his grandsons and I think particularly me. She would make sure to buy Nyonya kuih from the Indian vendor who would come around with his 2 huge baskets on a pole across his shoulder hawking his wares. And very often he had a pot containing assam curry with a charcoal stove underneath it - for making assam laksa. A word about this Indian gentleman. He was already quite old then, I would say at a guess about 50 years. He would carry these two baskets and the pot and walked many miles a day to sell his food. It must really be a very hard life. I still remember his gaunt but cheerful face wearing a brown felt hat like an inverted flower pot. He would disappear every now and then for 3 months or so and then he would appear again saying that he had gone back to India.

There are two things which Grandmother wanted me to do which caused me some pain - as little boys would have when they are asked to do things which caused them to stand out amongst their peers. The first was to part my hair on the right side because she said that if I used the left side all the time, the hair along the line would drop out. The second was to wear braces to hold up my shorts. It was, of course, a sensible thing to do but little boys did not do sensible things when the others do not do it. I can’t remember how I got her to allow me to revert back to normal. May be I complained to Mother who must have stepped in.

She would tell very earthy stories to AHC and I heard some of them which I can still remember but it is not suitable for re-telling as my secretary types all my letters.

When Mother went out with Father she would bring back Hokkien mee about 11.00 at night and Grandmother would eat the mee with me in the bedroom. As far as I can remember my brother BT never joined in the eating. Was it because of my known greedy nature that I was that she woke me up. Grandmother was full of common sense and it was she who told us that Queen Victoria had lots of children whom she married off to all the royal houses in Europe and thus she was related to them making the likelihood of disputes or war less likely. (Although it did not prevent the First World War.)

I had always thought she had a noble face with good cheekbones and bone structure. She did not chew betel nut but she smoked self-rolled cigarettes but did not have the dirty habits of the smoker. I remember using up my savings of Japanese paper money to buy her, just before the Japanese surrender, tobacco in packets and the cigarette paper.

Later on when we were in secondary school she lived in the Imbi Road temple and we would see her when we visited the temple on the first and fifteenth day of the Chinese month and other feast days of the Gods. Still later on when she lived on top of the dispensary we would see her on Friday evenings after going to the Rex and Madras cinemas.

She was so effacing that she would not stay with anyone of us for fear of disturbing our lives. I remember saying to myself on her death which occurred on a Saturday that she is so understanding that she would not want to inconvenience anyone and have them to take leave to come to her funeral.

Written by Guestblogger: Ooi Boon-Leong

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We end the current Fusion Stories series with a post from my father, Ooi Boon-Leong, about his first experience of England in the 1950s as a young, naive student from the colonies. Dad will be 70 next April and still busy with his law practice. I am really pleased and touched that he has taken the time to write this piece for me and to share his perspective of a different time in a country that was foreign to him then but home to me now.

He writes:

There were 3 of us from the same secondary school who had gained admissions to different universities in England, I to Cambridge University and the other two to London University. Two of us were 18 years old and the third a little older than 19. We lived in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaya (then) and none of us had travelled further than Singapore by rail, a city about 300 miles south. The three of us were “village yokels” really, although we spoke fluent English and had all completed the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate Examination. This examination was conducted for all English schools in the Empire with some local variations.

In those days you could go to England either mainly by boat or, more rarely, by air. By air, if you are very rich for it was very expensive and even then you had to spend a night in Bombay or another Indian city and a night or a long lay over somewhere in the Middle East for the plane to refuel. Most people travelled by boat and the most famous of the various lines was the P & O. We could not get a booking and so instead we booked a berth for the three of us in an Italian boat that sailed from somewhere in Australia, stopping in Singapore where we boarded it and the journey ended at Naples, its home port. We had to finish the journey from Naples to London by train.

Being on an Italian boat with lots of Italians going to Naples from Australia, it served Italian food. For the first evening I had my first experience of salami. When I put a slice in my mouth and turned it about, it spread around my mouth and it gummed up all my salivary glands and my mouth dried-up. It was not a pleasant feeling.

The spaghetti was alright because it looked like Chinese noodles but it was strange to eat it with tomato sauce instead of it being fried.

Except for going through the Straits of Malacca and the Suez Canal I was seasick all the way.

We arrived in Naples and went on to Rome. Then we went on by train to Paris where, because we had not booked a hotel we spent the night in the railway station, and went on to catch the boat train and then the ferry to go across to England. We duly arrived on the English side of the Channel and this was my first experience on English soil.

A porter helped each of us with our luggage on to the train. Each of us was in charge of tipping his porter. I was too tired and frustrated and was so relieved to have arrived and to be able to speak to someone without any effort that I happily tipped my potter one pound for carrying my two suitcases. He then said “Sir, this is too much. It’s not that much,” and handed back the pound note. I did not know how much it should be so I tipped him ten shillings anyway.

I was very impressed and still am impressed by his act. He definitely could do with the extra money – buy something for his kids or wife or stand his mates drinks in the pub. This has coloured my view of the English but I also remind myself that it was in 1955 when people all over the world, despite going through a terrible war not so long ago, were gentler, kinder and less greedy.

Another incident also shows the kindness and consideration of the English (or British.) I had settled down in my University and during one of the holidays I bought a ticket for a concert in the Royal Festival Hall in the south bank. It was not a pricey ticket but one in the middle range. When I went into the hall I was shown by the usher to a seat which I suspected was in the more expensive section. I mentioned to the usher that I thought that that could not be the correct seat. He insisted that it was and not to argue with him I took my seat. Sure enough before the concert started the person with the correct ticket came to claim his seat and I had to vacate it. I was, of course, very embarrassed and doubly so because I was a foreigner. I did not want the people who were seating behind and beside me to think that here was a foreigner who was trying to cheat by taking a more expensive seat than what he was entitled to. As I was slowly edging out of my row of seats someone, a man, said loud enough for me to hear “Don’t worry, it can happen to any of us.” I was somewhat relieved because there is at least one person who did not think that I had tried to cheat. Only a people who have a deep consideration for others can fathom without being told the discomfort and embarrassment what a person is undergoing and is kind enough to want to reassure him.

Another incident that deserves mention is this. A college friend had invited me to his home for a few days during the vacation. The first night when I went to bed, I found on my bed side table a pile of four or five books ranging from novels to essays for my night reading. Although I had not brought any reading materials I had not asked for any books. It was a gesture I thought very civilized. Another act prompted by their consideration.

These were not the only kindness I received when in England but they stood out. The others were ones one usually meets with in daily life: the “pleases” and “thank yous,” the holding of doors for one to pass. I think it was Orwell who wrote in an essay that only in England can you push an Englishman off the pavement when you two meet going in the opposite direction.