The Harmony Silk Factory. Tash Aw
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 night-time 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 gunny sacks 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 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 it was either 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 over-indulgence. Malnutrition is also the reason so many people of my father’s generation are dwarfs. Especially compared to 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 verandas 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 motor car 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.
• 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.
3. The Kinta Valley
The Kinta Valley is a narrow strip of land which isn’t really a valley at all. Seventy-five miles long and twenty miles wide at its widest, it runs from Maxwell Hill in the north to Slim River in the south. To the east are jungle-shrouded limestone massifs which you can see everywhere in the valley: low mountains pock-marked 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 learned 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