MY NINE MONTHS in Ipoh passed quickly because so much was happening around me and in China. I was gradually distancing myself from the dramatic events in China and concentrating on getting to know the new Malaya that the British were hoping to establish with the Malay leaders. For the first half of 1949, trying to understand what the Emergency was doing to the local Chinese community that I belonged to was uppermost in my mind.
I was less innocent than I had been in 1945–46 when the Anti-Japanese Army came out of the jungle and supporters of the MCP joined trade unions to organize strikes against their employers. Now the MNLA was fighting a guerrilla war inspired by the successes of the People’s Liberation Army in China. During my months in Nanjing, I had learnt about a guerrilla strategy that led to the growth of a formidable army when the CCP successfully persuaded many in the peasant and working classes to join them to fight against those who supported a corrupt and incompetent government. I had also experienced the demoralizing effects of runaway inflation and the financial fiasco of August 1948, when the new currency introduced was a devastating failure.
In addition, my exposure to the compulsory course on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People, however poorly I understood the book, had introduced me to the vocabulary of politics, something that my father and the education I received in school had carefully avoided. Taken together with what I saw around me in China, that course made me aware that abuses could negate idealistic calls for social progress. I had also become more sensitive to propaganda. The Three Principles course alerted me to the power of ideas behind words like nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood, but it also warned me of the extreme measures that political activists were prepared to take to capture power, and seek more and more of it.
One of the first things my parents told me was that as a result of the Emergency, political pressure was being applied to Chinese schools throughout Malaya. As inspector of Chinese schools, my father’s responsibility was to assure the schools that they would receive government support if they kept strictly to their educational goals and provided quality teaching. My father was also very keen on providing teacher training to ensure that there would be enough teachers to meet the growing demand. He regularly visited the schools around the state to talk to principals and teachers as well as key members of school boards. Perak was where the MCP secretary-general, Chin Peng, had his headquarters and the party there had many supporters. With frequent reports of Chinese community leaders being killed, my mother feared for my father’s life when he visited smaller primary schools in remote rural areas. He occasionally had to spend the night in a nearby town and my mother had sleepless nights whenever he made such trips. I offered to accompany him. My parents did not agree, but I insisted and did go with my father on two occasions.
The first was when we went south to three schools near Bidor and had to spend the night in Tapah. I remember visiting Chenderiang, a small town off the beaten track, where I was taken to see a beautiful waterfall near the local primary school. There were reports of communist activity and we had to go through several roadblocks manned by British soldiers and Malay policemen. My father insisted on traveling unarmed and unescorted because he was convinced it was safer for him that way. The trip was uneventful. My father called on all those responsible for the schools and we never felt unsafe.
Some months later, we made a second trip, this time to Lenggong and Grik in the north. My father planned to visit several schools, including one in the town of Kroh (now named Pengkalan Hulu) bordering Thailand and the state of Kedah. We were told when we got to Grik that the road beyond the town was not secure, so we did not go any further and spent the night in Grik. It was a long journey, and most of the way, apart from a few rubber estates, it was all jungle. I was surprised so many Chinese lived there. The community was mainly from Guangxi province in China, and had fought the Japanese during the occupation, not with the communists but as patriots in support of the Guomindang government. By 1949, the MNLA had moved some of their units close to the Thai border and these local Chinese decided to help the Malayan forces fight against them. My father told me that this was the first time that a Chinese school inspector had visited Grik after the war and he was impressed with the dedication of the teachers, and with how strongly the community supported the school.
The two trips made me realize how large Perak was. But, more than that, they gave me a sense of belonging to it that I had not felt before. Everywhere the mix of peoples was similar to what I had grown up with before leaving for China. No one thought I was foreign or strange. In fact, the only thing unusual about me was that I had studied in a university in China and circumstances had forced me to return. When people learnt that, they made clear that they were aware that China was on the cusp of historic change, and that their future home was likely to be Malaya.
One other matter impressed me. During both trips, we met people who spoke of the help they were getting from the newly formed Malayan Chinese Association. The MCA was formally established in February 1949, soon after I returned, but the event had not registered in my mind. I had thought it consisted mainly of businessmen seeking to help the government defend their interests. Because many of them were identified as Guomindang sympathizers, they were targeted as enemies by the communists. In the towns we visited, I found that MCA members were leaders of the local community and were generous supporters of the local schools. I began then to pay more attention to what the party was doing.
I particularly recall the afternoon when my father attended a Perak Chinese Chamber of Commerce reception for the MCA president, Dato’ Tan Cheng Lock. It was in April 1949, two months after the MCA was formed, and communist agents threw a hand grenade at Tan Cheng Lock while he was addressing the gathering. Although badly wounded, he survived the attack. My father was lucky. His seat was near the blast but he was not hurt. That event had made my mother even more nervous about my father’s travels outside of Ipoh. After our two trips south and north of Perak, I became more aware of the important role the MCA was playing in lobbying for the jus soli principle to be applied to everyone in the country so that more local Chinese could be given federal citizenship. The political stakes were not only about defeating the communists but also about the future of Chinese who wished to make Malaya their home. This added an extra dimension to my understanding of the difficult road ahead for the new country.
My father had looked out for ways that I could continue my studies after I returned to Malaya, and he saw no alternative for me other than to study locally. Being in education, he knew of the British plans to merge the two colleges in Singapore into a new university. It also occurred to him that I might stand a better chance of studying there if I became a federal citizen of the new state. I was qualified to apply but it would mean giving up my Chinese citizenship. I was surprised to see how carefully he had thought this through and how willing he was for me to turn away from a China that he seemed to have mentally written off. He never explained what made him urge me to take this step and what made him act so politically, something I had never seen him do before. I could only guess that his exposure to the threats by the MNLA against his beloved Chinese schools in Perak added to his disillusionment with the corrupt Nationalist government in China, had hardened his resolve to act that way.
I was admitted to the University of Malaya before I finally received my federal citizenship, on 16th September, three weeks before I set off for Singapore. By that time, I had been preparing for the new university. I had learnt some elementary French before going to Nanjing; there, in the Department of Foreign Languages, I took German as my second foreign language. My father thought that, for a British university, it would be advantageous for me to know Latin. He found someone who could teach me Latin and encouraged me to improve my French and German. In between my teaching jobs, this kept me busy.
As it turned out, the university in Singapore assumed that in a plural society most of their students would have at least another language and did not require its students to learn a second language. So I gave up studying Latin but continued for a while to keep up my reading knowledge of French and German. Eventually, I realized that my bazaar Malay was inadequate and concentrated on the national language so that I could read its literature, not least the Generation 1945 writings coming out of Indonesia.
When I left for Singapore in October 1949, I did not foresee that I would never live in Ipoh again. I returned once for a brief stay during the summer vacation, but my father was transferred to Kuala Lumpur soon afterwards. It was many years later, in the 1960s, before I visited Ipoh and only for a day. I found that almost all my friends were working elsewhere. Walking the streets in New Town that day brought memories of how insecure and confused I was when I was growing up there because I was always preparing to go somewhere else. Ipoh had taught me that nothing was permanent, that change was always around the corner and that people could easily be cut off from their roots.
In 1949, I spent nine months reassessing my future after seeing all our family plans for China come to nothing. That led me to weigh the sense of heritage and duty that I was brought up with against the desire for my mind to be open and free. My brief encounters with an ancient civilization trying to modernize did not give me confidence in what China had become. I also realized that the slogans about race and nation that were being broadcast in Malaya had little appeal. What I knew I had was the love of my parents. They had given me my most precious possession, the urge to study. I longed to make new friends and hoped to earn trust and respect wherever I was destined to go. For that, I knew that order and harmony was best and not violence and war.
The week before I left to study in Singapore, on October 1st, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. I was happy that China had been reunified and a new China was being born, but sad that I would not be part of what would happen there. I was sure I would always be Chinese at heart and admiring of the China that my parents and my Nanjing teachers and fellow students had taught me to love. I also wanted the best for the new China that the people in China have longed for during the past half-century. I had lived nearly seventeen years in a Malay state and eighteen months in China. Yet it seemed sometimes that I cared for both in equal parts. The pull of a plural society was great, but the cultural attraction of China in all its dimensions was deep and irresistible. I was not to appreciate until much later that there was no conflict there and that the co-existence of the two had become normal for me. And then I would recall how I struggled in 1949 to adjust to the new Malaya and the new China and wonder if my life had really begun anew during that year in Ipoh.