The Harmony Silk Factory (2 page)

As far as it is possible, I have constructed a clear and complete picture of the events surrounding my father’s terrible past. I say “as far as it is possible” because we all know that the retelling of history can never be perfectly accurate, especially when the piecing together of the story has been done by a person with as modest an intellect as myself. But now, at last, I am ready to give you this, “The True Story of the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny.”

SOME SAY JOHNNY WAS BORN IN 1920, the year of the riots in Taiping following a dispute between Hakkas and Hokkiens over the right to mine a newly discovered tin deposit near Slim River. We do not know who Johnny’s parents were. Most likely, they were labourers of Southern Chinese origin who had been transported to Malaya by the British in the late nineteenth century to work in the mines in the Valley. Such people were known to the British as coolies, which is generally believed to be a bastardisation of the word
kulhi,
the name of a tribe native to Gujerat in India.

Fleeing floods, famine, and crushing poverty, these illiterate people made the hazardous journey across the South China Sea to the rich equatorial lands they had heard about. It was mainly the men who came, often all the young men from one village. They arrived with nothing but the simple aim of making enough money to send for their families to join them. Traditionally viewed as semi-civilised peasants by the cultured overlords of the Imperial North of China, these Southern Chinese had, over the course of centuries, become expert at surviving in the most difficult of conditions. Their new lives were no less harsh, but here they found a place which offered hope, a place which could, in some small way, belong to them.

They called it, simply, Nanyang, the South Seas.

The Southern Chinese look markedly different from their Northern brethren. Whereas Northerners have candle-wax skin and icy, angular features betraying their mixed, part-Mongol ancestry, Southerners appear hardier, with a durable complexion that easily turns brown in the sun. They have fuller, warmer features and compact frames which, in the case of overindulgent men like my father, become squat with the passing of time.

Of course this is a generalisation, meant as a rough guide for those unfamiliar with basic racial fault lines. For evidence of the unreliability of this rule of thumb, witness my own features, which are more Northern than Southern, if they are at all Chinese (in fact, I have even been told that I have the look of a Japanese prince).

I have explained that my ancestors probably came from the South of China, specifically from Guangdong and Fujian provinces, but there is one further thing to say, which is that even in those two big provinces, people spoke different languages. This is important because your language determined your friends and enemies. People in our town speak mainly Hokkien, but there are a number of Hakka speakers too, like my Uncle Tony who married Auntie Baby. The literal translation of “Hakka” is “guest people,” descendants of tribes defeated in ancient battles and forced to live outside city walls. These Hakkas are considered by the Hokkiens and other Chinese here to be really very low-class, with distinct criminal tendencies. No doubt they were responsible for the historical tension and bad feeling with the Hokkiens in these parts. Their one advantage, often used by them in exercises of subterfuge and cunning, is the similarity of their language to Mandarin, the noble and stately language of the Imperial Court, which makes it easy for them to disguise their dubious lineage. This is largely how Uncle Tony, who has become a hotel tycoon (“a hotelier,” he says), managed to convince bank managers and the public at large that he is a man of education (Penang Free School and the London School of Economics), when really he is like my father—unschooled and very uncultured. He has, to his credit, managed to overcome the most telltale sign of Hakka backwardness, which is the lack of the “h” sound in their language and the resulting (and, quite frankly, ridiculous) “f ” that comes out in its place, whether the person is speaking Mandarin, Malay, or even English. For example:

Me (when I was young, deliberately): “I paid money to touch a girl down by the river today.”

Uncle Tony (in pre-tycoon days): “May God in fevven felp you.”

He converted to Christianity too, I forgot to say.

 

 

JOHNNY LIM WAS OBVIOUSLY NOT my father’s real name. At the start of his life, he was known by his real name, Lim Seng Chin, a common and truly nondescript Hokkien name. He chose the name Johnny in late 1940, just as he was turning twenty. He named himself after Tarzan. I know this because among the few papers he left when he died were some old pictures, spotty and dog-eared, cut carefully from magazines and held together by a rusty paper clip. In each one, the same man appears, dressed in a badly fitting loincloth, often holding a pretty woman whose heavy American breasts strain at her brassiere. In one picture, they stand on a fake log, clutching jungle vines; his brow is furrowed, eyes scanning the horizon for unknown danger while she gazes up at him. Behind them is a painted backdrop of forested hills, smooth in texture. Another picture, this time a portrait of the same barrel-chested man with beads of sweat on his shoulders, bears the caption, “Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic Champion.”

I’m not certain why Johnny Weissmuller appealed to my father. The similarities between the two are nonexistent. In fact, the comparison is amusing, if you think about it. Johnny Weissmuller: American, muscular, attractive to women. Johnny Lim: short, squat, uncommunicative, a hopelessly bald loner with poor social skills. In fact it might well be said that I have more in common with Johnny Weissmuller, for I at least am tall and have a full head of thick hair. My features, as I have already mentioned, are angular, my nose strangely large and sharp. On a good day some people even consider me handsome.

It is not unusual for men of my father’s generation to adopt the unfeasible names of matinee idols. Among my father’s friends, there have been: Rudolph Chen, Valentino Wong, Cary Gopal and his business partner Randolph Muttusamy, Rock Hudson Ho, Montgomery Hashim, at least three Garys (Gary Goh, “Crazy” Gary, and one other I can’t remember—the one-legged Gary), and too many Jameses to mention. While there is no doubt that the Garys in question were named after Gary Cooper, it wasn’t so clear with the Jameses: Dean or Stewart? I watched these men when they visited the factory. I watched the way they walked, the way they smoked their cigarettes, and the way they wore their clothes. Did James Dean wear his collar up or down in
East of Eden
? I could never tell for sure. I did know that Uncle Tony took his name from Tony Curtis. He admitted this to me, more or less, by taking me to see
Some Like It Hot
six times.

So you see, I was lucky, all things considered.

My father chose my name. He called me Jasper.

At school I learned that this is also the name of a stone, a kind of mineral. But this is irrelevant.

Returning to the story of Johnny, we know that he assumed his new name around the age of twenty or twenty-one. Occasional (minor) newspaper articles dating from 1940, reporting on the activities of the Malayan Communist Party, describe lectures and pamphlets prepared by a young activist called “Johnny” Lim. By 1941, the quotation marks have disappeared, and Johnny Lim is Johnny Lim for good.

Much of Johnny’s life before this point in time is hazy. This is because it is typical of the life of a small-village peasant and therefore of little interest to anyone. Accordingly, there is not much recorded information relating specifically to my father. What exists exists only as local hearsay and is to be treated with some caution. In order to give you an idea of what his life might have been like, however, I am able to provide you with a few of the salient points from the main textbook on this subject, R. St. J. Unwin’s masterly study of 1954,
Rural Villages of Lowland Malaya,
which is available for public perusal in the General Library in Ipoh. Mr. Unwin was a civil servant in upstate Johore for some years, and his observations have come to be widely accepted as the most detailed and accurate available. I have paraphrased his words, of course, in order to avoid accusations of plagiarism, but the source is gratefully acknowledged:

 

· The life of rural communities is simple and spartan—rudimentary compared to Western standards of living, it would be fair to say.

· In the 1920s there was no electricity beyond a two- or three-mile radius of the administrative capitals of most states in Malaya.

 

· This of course meant: bad lighting, resulting in bad eyesight; no nighttime entertainment, in fact no entertainment at all; reliance on candlelight and kerosene lamps; houses burning down.

 

· Children therefore did not “play.”

 

· They were expected to help in the manual labour in which their parents were engaged. As rural Malaya was an exclusively agricultural society, this nearly always meant working in one of the following: rice paddies, rubber-tapping, palm-oil estates. The latter two were better, as they meant employment by British or French plantation owners. Also, on a smaller scale, fruit orchards and other sundry activities—such as casting rubber sheets for export to Europe, making gunnysacks from jute, and brewing illegal toddy. All relating to agriculture in some form or another. Not like nowadays, when there are semiconductor and air-conditioner plants all over the countryside, in Batu Gajah even.

 

· In the cool wet hills that run along the spine of the country there are tea plantations. Sometimes I wonder if Johnny ever worked picking tea in the Cameron Highlands. Johnny loved tea. He used to brew weak orange pekoe, so delicate and pale that you could see through it to the tiny crackles at the bottom of the small green-glazed porcelain teapot he used. He took time making tea, and even longer drinking it, an eternity between sips. He would always do this when he thought I was not around, as though he wanted to be alone with his tea. Afterwards, when he was done, I would examine the cups, the pot, the leaves, hoping to find some clue (to what I don’t know). I never did.

 

· So rural children became hardened early on. They had no proper toilets, indoor or outdoor.

 

· A toilet for them was a wooden platform under which there was a large chamber pot. Animals got under the platform, especially rats, but also monitor lizards, which ate the rats, and the faeces too. A favourite pastime among these simple rural children involved trapping monitor lizards. This was done by hanging a noose above the pot, so that when the lizard put its head into the steaming bowl of excrement, it would become ensnared. Then either it was tethered to a post as a pet, or (more commonly) taken to the market to be sold for its meat and skin. This practice was still quite common when I was a young boy. As we drove through villages in our car, I would see these lizards, four feet long, scratching pathetically in the dirt as they pulled at the string around their necks. Mostly they were rock-grey in colour, but some of the smaller ones had skins of tiny diamonds, thousands and thousands of pearl-and-black jewels covering every inch of their bodies. Often the rope would have cut into their necks, and they would wear necklaces of blood.

 

· Poor villagers would eat any kind of meat. Protein was scarce.

 

· Most children were malnourished. That is why my father had skinny legs and arms all his life, even though his belly was heavy from later-life overindulgence. Malnutrition is also the reason so many people of my father’s generation are dwarves. Especially compared with me—I am nearly a whole foot taller than my father.

· Scurvy, rickets, polio—all very common in children. Of course typhoid, malaria, dengue fever, and cholera too.

 

· Schools do not exist in these rural areas.

 

· I tell a lie. There are a few schools, but they are reserved for the children of royalty and rich people like civil servants. These were founded by the British.
“Commanding the best views of the countryside, these schools are handsome examples of the colonial experiment with architecture, marrying Edwardian and Malay architectural styles”
(I quote directly from Mr. Unwin in this instance). When you come across one of these schools, you will see that they dominate the surrounding landscape. Their flat lawns and playing fields stretch before the white colonnaded verandahs like bright green oceans in the middle of the grey olive of the jungle around them. These bastions of education were built especially for ruling-class Malays. Only the sons of very rich Chinese can go there. Like Johnny’s son—he will go to one of these, to Clifford College in Kuala Lipis.

 

· There the pupils are taught to speak English—proper, I mean.

 

· They also read Dickens.

 

· For these boys, life is good, but not always. They have the best of times, they have the worst of times.

 

· Going back to the subject of toilets: actually, the platform lavatory continued to be used way into the 1960s. But not for me. In 1947, my father installed the first flush cistern and septic tank north of Kuala Lumpur at the Harmony Silk Factory. Before that, we had enamel chamber pots. My favourite one was hand-painted with red-and-black goldfish.

 

· So imagine a child like Johnny, growing up on the edge of a village on the fringes of a rubber plantation (say), tapping rubber and trapping animals for a few cents’ pocket money. Probably, he would have no idea of the world around him. He only knows the children of other rubber-tappers. They are the only people he would ever mix with. Sometimes he sees the plantation owner’s black motorcar drive through the village on the way to the Planter’s Club in town. The noise of the engine, a metallic rattle-roar, fills Johnny’s ears, and maybe he sees the Sir’s pink face and white jacket as the car speeds past. There is no way the two would ever speak. Johnny would never even speak to rich Chinese—the kind of people who live in big houses with their own servants and tablecloths and electricity generators.