My sister recently related a family story about my father. But first, some background.
I grew up near Penang airport in Bayan Lepas. On a fateful day in December 1941, my mother, tapping rubber on a hill opposite the airport, witnessed it being bombed by Japanese planes. It was the start of their invasion of Malaya.
She fled home in terror.
My father then was a soldier under the British, tasked to defend Penang with a rifle and two bullets. The Japanese overran the island within days. He ditched his gun and ran back home, most likely in terror, too.
My mother had some Indian Muslim blood. That side of my ancestry used to run the “tongkang” business, tongkangs being the barges used to load and unload ships in the harbour early in the 20th century before shipping containers came into being.
My father had mostly Malay blood but also some fancy Sumatran and even bits of exotic Thai DNA, something he was inordinately proud of.
That made me and my siblings a mongrel breed, something we’re inordinately proud of ourselves. I wouldn’t say we’re multiracial, as that’s apparently unconstitutional, but I’d say we’re as Malaysian as they come.
Being pure is overrated. It is said pure water can kill you, whereas it’s the mineral impurities that make it a tonic. Even the purest of us have “impurities”, perhaps some Mongol DNA, maybe even of Chinggis Khan himself, in us. Isn’t that cool?
Family fortune
Anyway, the tongkang business created a lot of wealth. I grew up seeing a huge dilapidated and abandoned bungalow that was just one of the family’s many properties. It even had a concrete pen where they kept their pet crocodiles!
As with most generational wealth, it was squandered away through family feuds and profligate offspring. All that was left when I was born was a small piece of land being fought over by the larger family and even assorted strangers.
It took years of dealing with crooked lawyers and fixers before my mother finally gained ownership of the land. A towkay offered her 75,000 ringgit for it, a princely sum in the early 1970s, but she refused to sell.
Soon, the entire kampung was acquired by the government for the expansion of the airport. Half of the kampung, including the cemetery, became part of the airport, while the other half was used to resettle those who were displaced.
Taken by government
What did the government offer us? A measly 16,000 ringgit for what a few years earlier was worth almost 5 times higher.
It certainly wasn’t fair. The government would never have dared to do that to some fancy lands owned by some fancy people, and not where, as the saying goes, “djinns go to rumble”.
The landowners were predictably unhappy, as were my parents. Some neighbouring Chinese landowners came to ask my father to join them to fight for a higher price. They said they couldn’t do it alone: being Chinese, it was likely they would be told to go back to China if they didn’t like it.
That was true then, and it seems, still true even now.
My father wasn’t afraid of being told to return to Sumatra or Thailand. He himself was pretty good at telling people where they can go to, usually to someplace where the sun doesn’t shine.
But he refused to join them, and for a very interesting reason. One likely contributing factor to his decision was the fatalism of many such strongly religious people. If God wills it, then so be it. Don’t fight God’s will.
Another was the feudalistic Malay respect for authority. That’s how we’re so easily exploited by any idiot with the merest cloak of authority, such as a title or even just a perception of being “learned”.
Wealth in education
But my father’s reason was simpler. It’s had to do with me earlier being selected to attend a special school that otherwise would have been beyond the reach of us kampung folk.
If it wasn’t for that, I’d still be a poor fisherman in Penang, opinionated like hell but barely scraping by, making a living from the increasingly barren and polluted sea.
My father said his son was already benefitting from the government’s generosity, and he would be happy to offer a little bit of generosity too. He said his son would be able to take care of him in his old age, and that was payment enough.
I did take care of my parents to the end of their days. It wasn’t always easy, especially in the beginning when I was starting my own family, but never for a moment did I resent it.
It’s an honour and a privilege to give back, the blessing of which dwarfed any monetary return I may have forfeited.
That’s how my father saw it too – an opportunity for him to balance the ledger of his life a little bit by taking a generous perspective on things.
Many of the smarter and more worldly people of today (and even then) would say that’s such a naive way to see the world and to let yourself be exploited.
To these people, I’d say two things. One – you’re probably right, and I’m not always that naïve in dealing with the world around me. Two – go jump in a lake.
Balancing the books
Sometimes in life it is wisdom, and not smarts, that matters more.
My parents always looked at the big picture. Their kids had grown up into responsible adults. Life was fine. The matter of some unfairness and inefficiency here and there was nothing to worry about.
Don’t sweat the small stuff. None of us is going to get out of this life alive. The saddest thing is to be at your richest on the day you die.
PS: Out of the 16,000 ringgit compensation for the land, a thousand was allocated to me. But I came home one day to hear it had been spent in the day-to-day grind of putting food on the table.
So the family tongkang legacy never reached me. Which was just fine by me. I went and created my own wealth, thank you very much.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
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