The Harmony Silk Factory (3 page)

 

· When a child like Johnny ends up being a textile merchant, it is an incredible story. Truly, it is. He is a freak of nature.

 

· Unsurprisingly, many of the poor Chinese become Communists. Not all, but many. And their children too.

 

Mr. Unwin’s excellent book paints a vivid picture indeed. However, it is a general study of all villages across the country and does not take into account specific regions or communities. This is not a criticism—I am in no position to criticise such scholarship—but there is one thing of some relevance to Johnny’s story which is missing from the aforementioned treatise: the shining, silvery tin buried deep in the rich soil of the Kinta Valley.

THE KINTA VALLEY IS a narrow strip of land which isn’t really a valley at all. It is seventy-five miles long and twenty miles wide at its widest, and runs from Maxwell Hill in the north to Slim River in the south. To the east are the jungle-shrouded limestone massifs which you can see everywhere in the Valley: low mountains pockmarked with caves which appear to the eye as black teardrop scars on a roughened face. There are trails through the jungle leading up to these caves. They have been formed over many years by the careful tread of animals—sambar and fallow deer, the wild buffalo and boar, the giant seledang—which come down from the hills to forage where the forest meets the rich fruit plantations.

As a boy, I used to walk these trails. The jungle was wet and cool and sunless, but by then I had learnt where to put my feet, how to avoid the tree roots and burrows, which could easily twist an ankle. The first time I discovered a cave I wandered so deep into it that I could no longer see any light from the outside. I felt with my hands for somewhere to sit. The ground and the walls were damp and flaky with guano. The air was rich with an old smoky smell, like the embers of some strange sugar-sweet charcoal fire. There were no noises other than the gentle drip drip of water. The darkness swallowed up my movements. I couldn’t see my hands or my legs, I couldn’t hear myself breathing. It was as if I had ceased to exist. I sat there for many hours—I don’t know how long exactly. Nor do I know how I found my way out of the cave or what made me want to leave. Night had fallen by the time I emerged, but it did not seem dark to me. Even the light from the pale half-moon annoyed my eyes as I made my way home.

As long as a hundred years ago, the first Chinese coolies discovered these caves and built Buddhist temples in them. For them too these caves were a place of comfort and solace and refuge. A few of the larger temples survive today. My favourite is the Kek Loong, which contains an enormous Laughing Buddha. People say his expression conveys infinite love and wisdom, but to me he has always looked like a young boy, naughtily chuckling because he has done something wrong.

You would expect that a valley would be bounded by two mountain ranges, but that is not so with the Kinta Valley. To the west, as soon as you cross the Perak River, the mangrove swamps begin to unfold before you. The land is flat and muddy, crisscrossed by slow-running streams. The journey to the coast takes you past coconut plantations and fishing villages. Everywhere there are flimsy wooden racks of fish, slowly drying and salting in the sun and the sea breeze. In most places along the coast it is difficult to know where the land ends and the sea begins. There are a thousand tiny inlets which break the coastline, an intricate tapestry of coves. This is where the notorious nineteenth-century pirate, Mat Hitam, used to hide, deep among the mangrove trees. From here he would launch raids on the hundreds of trading ships following the trade winds down into the Straits of Malacca, for three centuries the most lucrative shipping lane in the world. The Straits were, and still are, sheltered and calm—the ideal route for a ship laden with tea, cotton, silk, porcelain, or opium, travelling between India and China. Here, the men of such ships rested their weary, wary souls. Shielded from the open, treacherous waters of the Indian Ocean, they gathered their spirits before striking out for the South China Sea. It was said by fishermen and merchant seamen that the Straits were the most beautiful place in the world. The water was smooth enough for a child’s boat to sail peacefully—the gentle waves caught the amber light of the setting sun, and the breeze, steady and warm, propelled you at a speed so constant that seamen were said to have become mesmerised. Some insisted that they felt in the presence of God.

It is here, in this idyll, that Mat Hitam and his men struck. For nearly twenty years, his small fast boats terrorised the stately ships filled with valuable cargo. Mat Hitam himself became a godlike figure, feared for his ruthlessness. It is an established fact that he was the rarest of all people: a Black Chinese. No one was certain where he came from. Some theories say that he was from Yunnan Province, in southern China, but it is more commonly believed that he was not an exotic foreigner, and was instead born within these shores. Whatever the case, I have no doubt that his mysterious appearance aided his exploits. He died in 1830 (or thereabouts), in the early days of British rule in Malaya. His last victim was Juan Fernández de Martín, a Jesuit missionary who, as his throat was cut, placed a curse on Mat Hitam so powerful that, two weeks later, the Black Pirate died of a twisted stomach. He was bleeding from his eyes as he died, and the expression on his face was “empty as hell and full of fury.”

His spirit lives on in the hidden coves and apparently sleepy fishing villages which dot the coastline. They are impossible to police, and it is here that Johnny smuggled twenty thousand tons of rice from Sumatra during the drought of 1958. I am told that small boats carrying illegal Indonesian immigrants land here every day. I’m sure that if Johnny were alive today he would find some way of making money out of this.

At one or two points along this coast, the sea does appear cleanly and without interruption. One such place is Remis, where my father once took me to swim. It was the first time I had swum in the sea. As I walked onto the beach the dry needles of the casuarina trees, scattered across the sand, prickled underfoot. It was a very hot day, and even though the afternoon sun was weakening, the sand was still white to my eyes and warm to the touch. When I was waist-deep in the water, I turned to look at Father. He was standing in the pools of shade cast by the trees, watching me with his arms folded and his eyes squinting slightly. I walked until I could barely touch the bottom with my toes, then I started swimming, kicking off with uncertain froglike strokes. At some point, I stopped and began treading water, my arms flailing gently in front of me. The sea was deep green, the colour of old, dark jade. That was the first time I ever noticed my skin, the colour of it. Not brown, not yellow, not white, not anything against the rich and mysterious green of the water around me. I turned to look at Father. I could barely make him out in the shade, but he was still there, one hand on his hip, the other shading his eyes from the sun.

On the way home I asked him if I could go swimming again. I was twelve, I think, and I wanted to go to the islands around Pangkor, where I had heard the sun made the sand look like tiny crystals. I longed to see for myself the Seven Maidens, those islands that legend held disappeared with the setting sun; I yearned for their hot waters. But Father said he wouldn’t take me.

“Those places no longer exist,” he said. “They are part of a story, a useless old story.”

“Why can’t we go just for a day?” I ventured. “Have you ever seen them, Father?”

“I told you, I hate islands.”

“Why?”

“Actually I don’t like the sea much,” he said simply.

I knew better than to test him when he was in one of these moods. I noticed, however, that even though I had just spent the afternoon in the sun, my skin was white compared to his. It refused to turn dark, remaining pale and unblemished, a clean sheet beside his dirty sun-mottled arms.

No one ever stops to visit the Valley. Buses hurry past on their journey north to Penang, pausing briefly for refreshments in Parit or Taiping. Their passengers sit for ten minutes at zinc-covered roadside truck stops, sipping at bottles of Fanta and nibbling on savoury chicken-flavoured biscuits, and then they are away again, eager to leave the dull central plains of the Valley for the neon lights and seaside promenades of Georgetown. When I was young it was possible to spend a week in Ipoh without hearing a single word of English. No one had a TV in those days (apart from us, of course). Then, as now, Western visitors were rare. The only white people I ever saw were the ones who
had
to be in the Valley—alcoholic planters and unhappy civil servants.

Only once do I remember seeing a tourist, and even then I was not certain he had come to the Valley by design. I was indulging in a favourite childhood pastime, climbing into the lower reaches of the giant banyan tree that dominated the riverbank near the factory. I reached for the thick hanging vines and swung in a broad arc, rising high until I faced the giddying sky; and then I let myself go, tilting and falling into the warm water. When I surfaced I saw an Englishman sitting on the bank, his folded arms resting on his raised knees. A canvas satchel hung limply across his shoulders. The other children who were with me ceased to play; they splashed quietly in the shallows, nervously hiding their nakedness in the opaque water. I wanted to climb the tree and dive into the river again, but the Englishman was sitting at the base of the trunk, perched uncomfortably on the lumpy roots. It did not occur to me to be afraid; I simply walked up the slippery bank towards the tree, passing very close to him. I noticed that he was not looking at me, but staring blankly into the distance. He was not an old man, but his face was just like my father’s, scarred by a weariness I had rarely seen in other men. He looked lost; I am sure he had wandered into the Valley by mistake. I climbed swiftly up into the branches and crawled out to the end of a large bough, and as I fell forward into the water I caught a glimpse of the man’s thick silvered hair. When I surfaced from the water he had gone, and the other children were singing and shouting again. The white man was a spy, we agreed, laughing, or a madman. Or perhaps, said Orson Lai, he was a ghost who had returned to haunt the scene of some terrible crime. Yes, we decided, our voices hushed with childish fear, he had to be a ghost. No one ever visits the Valley.

Nowadays there is even less traffic through the small towns of the Kinta. The new North-South Highway allows a traveller to speed past the Valley in less than three hours. The journey is soothing, untroubled. You fall asleep in air-conditioned comfort, and in truth you do not miss very much. Between the hills and the invisible sea, the landscape is flat and unremarkable. Nothing catches your eye except for the many disused tin mines, now filled with rainwater. You see them everywhere in the Valley, quiet, gloomy pools of black water. I used to search for the largest ones, the ones so big I could pretend they were the ocean itself. But this pretence rarely worked. Once I stepped off the tepid, muddy shelf which ringed the pool, I was in water of untold depth, water which now covered the work of my ancestors. The temperature plunged. Every year boys from my town drowned in such pools. The shock of the cold made their muscles seize up. This was how my friend Ruby Wong died. He was my only friend from my childhood and he was a good swimmer, one of the best. Although not nearly as strong as me and slight in build, he had a smooth, easy stroke which barely broke the water yet propelled him steadily at considerable speeds. He could swim without coming to shore for an hour at a time. Once we swam across the swirling brown waters of the Perak, Ruby leading the way. We were not even out of breath when we reached the other bank.

This time we had chosen the old mine near Kellie’s Castle. It was known that only the bravest could swim the biggest pools, and there were few larger than this. We were only fourteen but we did not think twice about swimming it. Night had begun to fall when we got to the pool. I undressed quickly, eager to feel the water. Swimming in the dark felt different, special: the absence of light made my skin look less pale. The sky was blank and black with cloud. There was no moon; nothing was illuminated. Even the ripples of the water as we slid into the pool did not show.

On this swim, as on every other, there was no purpose, no silly race, no “first to the other side wins.” We just swam. A few feet from the edge, where the shelf fell away, I prepared myself for the cold. It gripped my whole body, squeezing the air from my chest. I breathed sharply, chokingly, but I had known that feeling before and so I continued to strike out. Pull. Kick. Pull. Kick. I heard Ruby’s choking breaths echoing my own, but I kept on swimming into the blackness, my eyes closed.

“Jas,” came the first call. Ruby’s voice breathed the word, it did not speak it.
“Jas.”

I opened my eyes and searched for him in the infinite darkness. “Ruby?” I said, still swimming forward.

By the time I realised, several seconds later, that he was no longer there, it was too late. I swam furiously in different directions, not knowing where to look, where to turn next. In the moonless night I thought of the chickens we kept in the yard behind the factory. I don’t know why they came into my thoughts. When you entered the coop to select one of them for slaughter, they would run away in zigzags, never knowing where they were going or who they were escaping from. The victim always had a vacant expression on its face, not terrified or even sad, just lost.

Of course it was fate that the first car I met, after walking an hour on the deserted road, was Father’s. It had to be Father who found me, naked and wild-eyed. I shouted out what had happened to Ruby. Whether I made sense or not I don’t know.

“He’s not playing tricks on you,” Father said. That was just how he spoke. Never asked questions, always statements.

“No, I’m sure!” I screamed.