Let us call him by his old name. The name by which we knew him before the Malays became Arabs and the Chinese became Mandarins. In those days Kong Hee Fatt Choy had not yet lost out to Gong Xi Fa Cai and Cheng-Ho was not yet Zheng-He.
By today’s standards Laksamana Cheng-Ho’s story is riddled from beginning to end with sins and ugly notions. The mixing and equating of diverse faiths; the meddlings of foreign intruders; porous racial and religious and geographic boundaries; the supposed irrelevance of God’s will as manifested in the bodies He creates for each and every one of us. For Cheng-Ho was born a boy but with two slices of a sharp infidel blade he ceased to be one.
You’ll be glad to know that unlike Cheng-Ho I draw the line at castration without consent but as to the rest: what passes for progress when you look at GDP and all its visual markers (number of malls skyscrapers luxury hotels gated communities) suddenly smells like the decline and fall of civilization when you compare the Laksamana’s world to ours. At the peak of his career the Laksamana built a great shrine to all faiths. This before we had the word interfaith with all its nasty Orwellian undertones and despite the fact that he had inherited three generations of Islam at birth: his father and grandfather were hajjis. Yet wherever Cheng-Ho went he demanded that equal offerings be made to the Buddhist and the Hindu and the Muslim shrines because God is One and we are all brothers. What the poor Laksamana would say if he could see us using all our resources to build walls instead of bridges! Protecting our hoards with higher and higher gates and erecting monuments to our own hubris to one-up the other fler. The Admiral would rise from his ashes to set us right.
For my father he was a natural model: a skilled diplomat; a formidable warrior (oho yes my father may have been a different kind of warrior but a warrior he was); a man in whom eclectic influences had produced all-embracing impulses. My father undoubtedly drew inspiration from his varied reading material but rewind his story a few more years and you will see that heterogeneity ran in his very blood. He was only the latest descendant of a variously proud and variously upright Indo-Anglian family that could supposedly trace its ancestry all the way back to one Francis Drake whose ship the Golden Hind was almost smashed on a reef in the Moluccas in 1579. In other words: as mixified as we come even by the standards of this peninsula and its surrounding islands.
Francis himself was known to the Spanish as El Draque, or The Dragon (even though when you look at him in his tights and bloomers and goatee he looks like a bloody pondan). The bastard son who sired our line, James, could not call himself Drake so he took the nickname and wore it proudly—and why not? Dragons are fiery and proud and not to be trifled with whereas a Drake is nothing but a male duck.
By the eighteenth century our family was English Portuguese Indian Dutch Chinese. What remained was only to add a drop of Malay, stir stir mix mix and we would be the whole history of Malaysia in microcosm. The perfect advertisement for the forthcoming 1Malaysia phantasm if they could have imagined such a thing. Except back then they had no slogans and no advertisements. They were exactly the opposite of us: all action no talk. When James Dragon lands up in the new colony of George Town in 1792 he finds that the great Captain Light himself, finder-keeper of the island, has a dusky-skinned mistress and, like a man truly ahead of his time, is busy 1-ing up Malaysia before the country even has a name.
For the next two hundred years we Dragons do not budge from the Malay peninsula and Singapore. Oh, we go this way and that way and that way and this way but there we are for two hundred years growing roots so tough and fat that you cannot walk around any city there without tripping on them.
Well. That was our prehistory. There was a time when the word prehistory could not even have crossed my lips because in this country we like to pretend nothing existed before us. By which I mean that they— our lords and masters—liked to pretend their princes and sultans sprang from the forehead of Allah in a land without form, and void, or at any rate uncontaminated by lesser faiths; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of UMNO moved upon the face of the waters. And UMNO said, Let there be civilization, let there be plantations and mines and mosques and schools, let there be villages and ports and markets and schools: and there was civilization. That is the official narrative of the august standard-bearers of the United Malays National Organisation. That is our creation myth accepted and perpetuated by all the good vassals of the Party.
They have their myths, I have mine. Here’s the thing: even when you were there and you think you have proof, the truth is that there is only your story versus my story. There are a billion stories and until you have heard them all you got no special claim to The Story so you know what? You may as well shaddup and listen to mine.