Why Tell

SOME YEARS AGO, I started to write the story of growing up in Ipoh for my children. I knew it was also for myself as I tried to remember what my parents were like. My childhood until I was nineteen, with the exception of nine months in 1948, was the only time when I lived with them in the same town. I thought I should tell my children how different my world was before I left home so that they would understand what has changed for them as children and for us as their parents. My wife Margaret knew my story and agreed that I should tell it while I could.

My decision to publish this story came about when I met a group of heritage activists in Singapore. They made me more conscious of the personal dimensions of the past. As someone who has studied history for much of my life, I have found the past fascinating. But it has always been some grand and even intimidating universe that I wanted to unpick and explain to myself and to anyone else who shared my desire to know. Even when I read about the lives of people high and low, I looked from a critical distance in the hope of learning some larger lessons from them. In time, I realized how partial my understanding of the past was. I was using a platform that was dominated by both European historiography and elements of my Confucian self-improvement background.

My heritage friends reminded me that, while we talk grandly of the importance of history, we are insensitive to what people felt and thought who lived through any period of past time. We often resort to literature to try and capture moments of joy and pain, and that can be a help to imagine parts of one’s past. But we have too few stories of what people actually experienced. Focusing on local heritage is a beginning. Encouraging people to share their lives might follow. I began to think that what I wrote for my children could be of interest to people who are not family. So I set out to finish my story and have taken it to the time when I left Ipoh in 1949 to study at the newly established University of Malaya in Singapore. My parents moved to Kuala Lumpur after that and never went back to Ipoh. In preparing this account for a wider readership, I have revised and updated parts of the story wherever I could.

Many friends tell me that they wish they had talked to their parents more when they were alive. I remember thinking the opposite when I was in my teens. I thought that my mother talked too much about China and not enough about the things that I really wanted to know. Instead, I recall how I wished my father would tell me about himself, especially about his life as a child growing up in China along the Yangzi valley. My parents both loved their China very much and, as long as I can remember, they constantly dreamt of returning home.

China was strangely imbalanced in my mind. There was my mother’s view of a traditional China that she was afraid would disappear. She wanted her only child to understand something of that. She saw it as her duty to let me know as much as possible because I was growing up in a foreign land.

I thought I should tell the story of how all that came about for my children to read. As I did so, I came to regret I did not talk more with my parents when they were still alive. My mother did finally write about her life and I have included here what I had translated for my children. I wish I had asked her to tell me more. But what I missed most of all was to hear my father talk to me about personal things, about his dreams and what it was like when he was growing up. I sometimes wished that he did not live so close to his ideal of a Confucian father and showed me something of his real self. I would have loved to know how he turned from child to adult in the turbulent times he lived through. Perhaps it is that sense of loss that has driven me to tell this story.

Before my mother died in September 1993, she left me with the manuscript of her “memories of fifty years” that she had completed in 1980. She had written it for me in her very neat xiaokai . She said that there were so many things about her life that she wanted me to know, but we had never sat down long enough for her to tell them to me. I read the memoirs with great sadness. There was so much about her life that I had missed by not hearing her tell me face to face. Using parts of her memoirs, I told Margaret and our children about some key moments in her life. When writing my story for our children, I then went on to translate for them to read the relevant parts of what my mother remembered. That would be more authentic. They would have the chance to see her words and thus have a better sense of the mother she was to me. When I decided to publish my growing up story, I thought I should also include her story as annexes to what I have written.

I cannot remember when my mother began to tell me her stories but believe it was even before I started school at the age of five. She did so to make me conscious of my family in China and thus prepare me for our return to China. She wanted to make sure that I would see the total picture of what she knew and therefore would know what to expect. If I had a sister, perhaps my mother might not have told me so much. But as I was an only child and she was far from her home and had no one else to tell her stories to, she made sure I would not forget what she told me. Ours was a first generation nuclear family. Both my parents grew up in extended families that lived under one roof among many close relatives of at least three generations. And other relatives lived nearby, so it was not normally necessary to say much about them.

My mother made sure I absorbed her stories because she told many of them again and again. It was a kind of cultural transmission exercise for her because I never felt that she told her stories for my entertainment. She always exuded a strong sense of duty in everything she did or said, and I soon realized that she was educating me about my identity as the son of my father and someone from families that were deeply rooted in traditional China. She wanted me to know my place in the Wang clan. She also wanted to do her duty as a Chinese mother to a son born in a distant foreign land.

My mother began with her own story. She was Ding Yan , known within her family as . She was born in the county seat of Dongtai in Jiangsu province, a coastal town about fifty miles north of the Yangzi River and not far from my father’s hometown of Taizhou . This is a low-lying country close to the saltpans that dotted the coastline, the source of the wealth that her family had enjoyed during the 19th century. The Ding family had come from Zhenjiang , one of the great cities of the Yangzi delta at the junction of that river and the Grand Canal. Her ancestors included some who had been officials in the Imperial Salt Commission, and some of them continued to be connected with the salt trade after leaving office. Her own branch left Zhenjiang for Dongtai when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom forces were approaching the city in the middle of the 19th century.

The family, headed by successful literati, expected its young males to concentrate on classical studies as a means to public office. But it also had members who were well connected with the salt business. When the Qing government stopped the imperial civil service examinations in 1904, the Ding males went on studying in the same old way, partly because of family tradition and partly because they did not know what else they could do. But there were some of them who were more practical and turned to business ventures and these branches of the family remained wealthy during the early Republican era.

My mother had an elder brother who followed tradition. She told me how ill prepared he was to make a living in a China that was changing fast. That aroused the practical side of her nature and made her very ambivalent about what young Chinese males should study. With her brother in mind, her view was that, if a boy did not show talent and inclination towards study, he should not be pushed in that direction but should be advised to learn some practical skills. She also had a younger sister who was equally practical. She was very fond of her sister and approved of the way she chose a career as a minor functionary in the local government.

The three Ding children were all born when the family wealth was still intact, when over a hundred members gathered for every meal in a very large house of several courtyards. My mother spoke with awe of the gong that was sounded to call everyone together at meal times. The men ate at their tables in the main hall while she would eat with her mother and sister in the inner hall with all the other women. But this did not last long. Hers was the last generation to partake of this kind of family welfarism. Opium smoking was taking its toll of some of the men, and even some of the women. The end of the Qing dynasty and the disorder that followed, with rival militarists carving up the country, allowed the local garrison soldiers to “tax” the merchants and gentry landlords within their domains at will.

Together with the opium, the warlord exactions finished off the Ding family in Dongtai, although my mother remembers that the main branch of the family in Zhenjiang survived a little longer. Her stories about her family were tinged with regret, but my main impression was how harshly she judged some of the elders of the clan. She harped a lot on the effects of opium, on the waste and extravagance, on the mismanagement of funds, of the bloated size of the extended family and, most of all, on the failure of the males of her family to adapt to rapidly changing conditions in her part of China.

Her family was conventionally and provincially Confucian. The sons were expected to study hard and aim for official careers. Her father had not shown any exceptional ability with his classical studies and was encouraged to help the family manage the salt business. When she was born in 1905, the family was still wealthy but, soon afterwards, its past connections with officialdom were broken after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Thereafter, her father, together with uncles and cousins, struggled to keep the business going and hold the extended family together. It was a losing battle. New kinds of business skills were needed. The family produced nobody with real entrepreneurial talent, nor did they have the connections needed to deal with the unstable republican regime under President Yuan Shikai and his warlord successors. All the Ding family knew was to hang on to their Confucian values and prepare their sons for some kind of book-based career. They might have expected modifications to the imperial traditions that they could have adapted to, but never seem to have doubted that the core of Confucianism would remain the guiding principles of government.

One good thing did happen to my mother after the end of the Manchu rule. She was set to have her feet bound even though the dynasty had fallen and the republican regime supported the radical call to end foot binding for all girls. When she was told that she had to follow the custom, she cried and pleaded with her mother. They both cried but her mother insisted, and the binding continued. The servant who loved her could not bear my mother’s cries and pleaded with her mother, pointing to the fact that some families nearby had stopped the barbarous practice. Eventually, her mother relented. I thought my mother’s feet were rather small, but she could not say if they might have been bigger had they not been bound at all.

As she grew up, my mother saw her family break up as the business declined. She saw her brother immersed in the Confucian classics all day long, his only pleasure and relaxation being calligraphy and chess. She and her sister were also taught to read and write at home. She was well trained to appreciate prose literature and read widely, including some traditional fiction like the Dream of the Red Chamber that she was not supposed to read. She studied texts about female virtues, all the home duties and various practical arts essential in a large household that she was expected to help her mother manage when she grew up. Her proudest achievement was to cultivate through much practice a beautiful hand in writing the standard xiaokai calligraphy, a skill all the girls in her family were expected to have. She told me often how hard she had practiced with an older female cousin and how she became as good as her cousin whose calligraphy everyone admired. But she admitted that she could never paint as well as her cousin who was not only the local beauty but also regarded as the most talented woman painter in her town. When I saw her cousin again in Shanghai in 1980, when she was nearly eighty years old, she was still strikingly beautiful and the painted autographed fan she asked me to bring for my mother was a real gem.

I eventually visited Dongtai in April 2010, but I looked in vain for the large house and grounds that my mother talked about. People in the area told me where it had been, and how it had been sold and redeveloped. They pointed out the houses built later on the land, where dozens of families now live. I met members of a family who lived close by who recalled stories of the Ding Gong Guan , the Ding family home. One of them showed me the bridge over a stream a couple of hundred yards away that is still called Ding Gong Bridge, marking the boundaries of the Ding family lands. While not sure how accurate they were, I was happy that what I saw confirmed my mother’s stories.

I was told most of these stories when I was growing up, before the war came to Ipoh in 1941. The first stories were pleasurable. There was no immediate family around us in Ipoh, but they placed our small family of three within a network of numerous aunts and uncles, and cousins near and distant. Further in the background were grandparents and all the kinfolk of their generation. I received meticulous instruction about all the identifiable relatives brought to life by an anecdote or two about each of them, and each was precisely placed in relation to my mother and father and ultimately to me. Thus was my mental world peopled with blood-kin, shadowy on my mother’s side except for her brother and sister but, thanks to my mother, sharp and clear about those on my father’s side, up to four generations of Wangs.

My mother was always gentler with her stories about my father’s family than about her own. Whether this was because she really respected the Wang lineage or thought that her Confucian duty required her to teach me to respect it, I was never sure. It was probably a bit of both, as the Wangs were never wealthy and held firmly to Confucian literati tradition, had no truck with business and stayed clear of opium smoking. At least, that was the positive image she left me with through her carefully selected stories.

My father, Wang Fuwen , also known as Wang Yichu , was reticent about himself and did not talk about his family, and I never thought of asking him about his youth. What I know about how he grew up came from my mother, whose curiosity about the Wang clan led her to piece their story together. My father was born in Taizhou in 1903. He was with his parents in Wuchang (now Wuhan) on October 10, 1911, the day the revolution started that ultimately overthrew the Manchu Qing dynasty. The Wang family, with the help of a Cantonese friend who was doing business in Wuchang at the time, escaped from the city with their lives and returned to Taizhou. My grandfather Wang Haishan (Yunchang ) had no prospect of government employment. He turned to business and was introduced by friends to work in a bank, but did not seem to have done well in the business world. He later sought other work without much success.

My father had started his education in Taizhou. He greatly admired his granduncle, Wang Zongyan (Leixia ), one of the leading Confucian scholars of the time, and studied at the son Wang Yashan’s () school in Wuchang. There he learnt the classics under the guidance of his uncle who supervised his mastery of the key Confucian classics and encouraged him to write classical prose and taught him to appreciate the best poetry from the Book of Poetry to the great poets of the Tang and Song dynasties. Following his granduncle, my father learned to write in the style of Yan Zhenqing , and then in the ancient zhuan style of calligraphy . He never stopped practicing zhuan calligraphy and I recall as a child watching him do that every evening after dinner. In addition, he admired his family’s love of the literature of the Six Dynasties, and wrote his own poetry in that style all his life.

By the age of twelve, my father was deemed to have learnt enough of the classics. After he returned to Taizhou, he studied in one of the new modern schools in Taizhou and concentrated on studying English and mathematics, subjects that were completely new to him. When I visited the school with my family in September 2010, I was shown the official history of the school, and found the names of several Wang men who had taught there, including my father for a brief period immediately after he graduated from university in 1925.

After finishing school, my father received a scholarship to study at the Nanjing Higher Normal College, the year when it became the National Southeastern University, the predecessor of the National Central University, the university that my father later determined I should attend. There my father studied Foreign Languages and Education. The university’s president was Guo Bingwen , who had been trained in America in the philosophy of education by scholars like John Dewey and Paul Monroe of Columbia University. He brought both of them to lecture for several months and made the university famous as the most progressive education centre in the country.

My father spoke with admiration of Guo Bingwen as the man who recruited Tao Xingzhi , a fellow alumnus of Columbia University, to head the school of education. Tao Xingzhi, he said, introduced much-needed innovations to educational methods. My father often told me how much he was inspired by what John Dewey, Tao Xingzhi’s teacher, had taught a whole generation of teachers in China about the latest ideas in education philosophy. I do not know what my father was like as a young teacher in China and in Malaya, but I do know that he practiced his brand of liberalism when he was the headmaster of Foon Yew High School in Johor Bahru in 1959. He is credited with introducing methods of learning and teaching that gained the school its fine reputation, one that it still enjoys today.

For myself, I can say that he was certainly liberal where my education was concerned, allowing me great freedom to enjoy school and read what I wanted. This often worried my mother, who thought I needed more discipline in my life, but my father avoided as much as possible giving me the kind of traditional education that he had to go through. Living far from China, it would have been difficult for him to do otherwise even if he had wanted to, but he practiced what he believed by sending me to an English school where modern teaching methods were gaining ground.

My father chose to study English literature because he felt that he knew enough Chinese literature and needed to improve his understanding of the outside world. He did this knowing that National Southeastern was famous for its scholars of post-Han literature and especially that of the Six Dynasties period, which he loved, and he never lost his fondness of the poetry of that period. When he turned to English literature, he paid special attention to development of its poetry. He was taught by professors who had studied at Harvard, such as Wu Mi , a student of Irving Babbit, who introduced the field of comparative literature to China. As a student in the English department, my father remembered fondly a young American professor named Robert Winter, who introduced him to the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and the Romantics (notably Wordsworth and Coleridge) and told him about the Chinese influences on Ezra Pound’s poetry. All this confirmed the romantic in him, and I believe he was also much influenced by Winter’s liberal ideals. Throughout his life he carried in him a conflict between the traditions that he was brought up with and the world of imagination that English literature opened for him.

As I grew up, I began to realize that, although he said little about political matters, my father was at heart deeply patriotic. I think his patriotism came from his university experiences and his admiration for the revolutionary forces in South China that eventually overthrew the warlords that had divided the country and made it so vulnerable to foreign powers. Before the Northern Expedition of the Nationalists captured Nanjing in 1927 and ended a wasted decade, he left the country to teach in the Nanyang. He did teach briefly in Taizhou after graduation and was teaching at Zhongnan High School in Nanjing when he was encouraged to go to Southeast Asia to teach the children of the Nanyang huaqiao (Overseas Chinese).

He keenly supported education for the huaqiao and started his new career in Singapore at the Huaqiao High School. There he learnt about the philanthropic work of Tan Kah Kee (Chen Jiageng ) and the establishment of Xiamen University a few years earlier. He told me later that he began to read the writings of Lim Boon Keng , the local Peranakan Chinese intellectual who was president of Xiamen University. He appreciated Lim Boon Keng’s ability to marry Western learning with his faith in Confucian precepts, and he greatly admired Lim Boon Keng’s translation of the poems in Li Sao , attributed to Qu Yuan , the famous minister of the state of Chu during the Warring States period. He was amazed at Lim Boon Keng’s ability to identify the plants and flowers mentioned in the poems.

My father also taught in Malacca, at Peifeng High School. The son of one of local community leaders who founded the school, Shen Moyu , was one of my father’s favourite students. Shen Moyu later became an education leader who enthusiastically supported my father’s work at Foon Yew High School and played a key role in the development of Chinese schools in post-war and independent Malaysia.

My father was single during his first years in Malaya. But in 1929, he was offered the job of headmaster of the Huaqiao High School, the first Chinese high school in Surabaya, Java in the Netherlands East Indies. He could now afford to get married. He returned to his hometown, Taizhou, to see his parents, and married my mother, the woman they had chosen for him. His father was unemployed and the family was poor. Given their difficulties, the income he could earn outside was important, so he did not stay long after the wedding, and brought his wife with him to Southeast Asia.

The Chinese in Java were different from those in British Malaya in that larger numbers of them were local-born and many more had been resident outside China for generations. Dutch and Indonesian (Javanese) attitudes towards Chinese Peranakan (local-born) and the new immigrants were also very different. In Java, political loyalties were complicated. The Dutch had begun to teach the local-born Chinese to look towards the West, while the new immigrants pressured all those of Chinese descent to be patriotic towards China. At the same time, young Indonesian nationalists were determined that everyone should be loyal towards the new nation that they were about to create, the country to be called Indonesia. Under such conditions, what role was there for the Chinese high schools? It was my father’s job to find out.

Both in Surabaya and later in Ipoh, we lived among non-Chinese as well as Hakka, Cantonese, Hokkien and other Chinese who saw us as somewhat strange. Because my father was a teacher, they always treated him with respect, but despite the kindness she encountered, my mother felt that the sooner we returned to China the better, before her son was totally confused as to who he was.

My father shared her concern that we should go home as soon as possible but, when I was growing up, he was curiously optimistic about how much he could teach me about the China that really mattered, the China of classical literature and Confucian thought. He seemed to have thought that, as long as he could provide me with the core of our cultural heritage, there was no fear of being anything but a proper Chinese. He was therefore confident about sending me to a local English school while waiting to return to China. He was an admirer of English literature but had only started to learn the language in his teens. He thought he should give me a chance to learn the language early when I had the opportunity to do so. He seems to have believed that the combination of Chinese and English literary culture would be a good start and fit me better for the modern world. I was aware that my mother was sceptical but bowed to my father’s judgment. At the time, they probably thought it would not do any harm because we would return to China before too long.

The Japanese invasion of China wrecked all their plans when I was seven years old. They decided to remain in Ipoh, and did not expect the war to drag on and be followed by the Japanese occupation of Malaya. After the Japanese defeated the British and pushed the war further north in Southeast Asia towards Burma and India, the different communities in Malaya found that their fates could not be more different under Japanese rule. The Japanese used British census categories of Malays, Chinese and Indians to support Japan’s divisive policies. They declared that the Malays, as indigenous people, were to be protected against the others. They encouraged Indians to fight for their country’s independence from the British Empire with Japanese help. The Chinese they set apart as enemies of Japan or at the very least as unreliable unless they acknowledged the Wang Ching-wei puppet government in Nanjing, which the Japanese controlled. Some Chinese and a few Malays and Indians, together with many Eurasians, continued to hope for Britain’s return and secretly supported underground activities, but the main consequence of occupation was to harden suspicion and distrust among the main races in the country.

We survived the war and, with the return of the British to Malaya and of the Nationalists to Nanjing, my parents again prepared to return to China. As we waited to travel back, civil war resumed in North China, but this did not deter my parents. When we finally left for China, our return had been delayed for more than ten years. I entered the National Central University in Nanjing and studied in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature. My parents told me how hard I would have to work to become a useful person in post-war China. They knew I had become someone different from what they had hoped for. Nevertheless, my father was optimistic that a few years at the university living among Chinese teachers and fellow students would remedy all that. My mother was more hardheaded and wondered what I could be useful for. At best, she hoped that, with my foreign educational background, I could serve the country as a diplomat.

I did not in the end spend the years in China that they thought necessary to make me more Chinese. Turning away from a China that looked to Stalin’s Russia and later became violently opposed to China’s heritage, I was neither the kind of Chinese this new China wanted, nor the kind that my father hoped I would become in order to be a useful citizen. The China that he loved could not survive the tribulations that Chinese society went through during the past century. My parents had hoped that the Nationalists would win and tried to settle down to a new life in Nanjing, but it was not to be. My father fell dangerously ill that winter. My mother was convinced that he could not survive another winter under the harsh living conditions that his school provided, and insisted on returning to Ipoh. At the end of 1948, nine months after they left for Malaya, the situation was hopeless for the Nanjing government and I abandoned my university studies to join them. Wars of independence were underway in Indonesia and Vietnam, and in 1948 a conflict known as the Emergency broke out when the British determined that they had to take military action against the Malayan communists. That stage of my life was thus linked to war to an unexpected degree, so much so that I almost viewed war as normal.