The Harmony Silk Factory

IT WAS MANY YEARS before he could find work easily. Ordinary people were fearful of a person such as Johnny. He might not have been a criminal in the eyes of the law, but the law didn’t understand human nature. The law couldn’t always tell good from evil, people said. For a long time Johnny moved from town to town, village to village, plantation to plantation, never knowing how long he would stay or what he would do next. Without the kindness of strangers he would surely have perished. It was inevitable that he would experience his first real contact with Communists during this period of his life. The Valley was, during this time, teeming with them — guerillas, sympathisers, political activists. An ill-humoured youth full of hatred (for the British, for the police, for life), Johnny was perfect Communist material. Of the many journeyman jobs he was given during these years, I’m certain that all but a handful were Communist-inspired in some form or another. This wasn’t surprising, given that every other shopkeeper, farmer, or rubber-tapper was a Communist. These people offered Johnny more than an ideology; they offered a safe place to sleep, simple food, and a little money. That was all he cared for at that point in time.

5. Johnny and the Tiger

I LIKE TO THINK of those years which Johnny spent wandering from job to lousy job as his “lost” years, the years which became erased from his life, the years during which he vanished into the countryside. I see him disappearing into the forest as a boy and emerging as a man. That is certainly what seems, extraordinarily, to have happened. Who knows? Perhaps something terrible happened to him during those years in the wilderness, something which turned him into a monster. Or maybe it was the irresistible force of fate which led him down this path; maybe he was simply destined, from the day he was born, to jump off the back of a lorry onto the dusty, treeless main street in Kampar, in front of the biggest textile trading company in the Valley. No one knows about the small odyssey which led Johnny to Kampar. All anyone can be sure of is that one day he turned up and got a job, his first regular employment since the Darby Mine incident, at the famous shop run by “Tiger” Tan.

The reasons behind Tiger’s name were a mystery. By all accounts, he was a gentle, soft-mannered, home-loving man who, on account of his devout Buddhism, never ate meat, even though he was one of the few people in the Valley who could afford to eat it every day. He had plump arms which hung loosely by his sides when he walked. His movements were slow and unhurried, as if he had all the time in the world. He looked every bit the prosperous merchant that he was.

You would never have guessed that in his spare time he was also the commander of the Communist Army for the whole of the Valley.

By the time Johnny came under his employ at the Tiger Brand Trading Company, Tiger Tan’s life seemed, in every respect, a settled state of affairs. He appeared, after many years, to have laid to rest the unfortunate events relating to his short, sad marriage. His wife had left him very soon after they had married. She took their baby daughter with her and converted to Islam in order to become the third wife of the fourth son of the prince regent of Perak. She went to live in the teak palace on the gentle slopes of Maxwell Hill, and it was there that the child was raised, amidst the splendour only royalty can provide. The child was given an Arabic name, Zahara, meaning “shining flower,” though neither her name nor her hardy peasant-Chinese blood could save her from dying of typhoid when she was seven years old. After her death, her mother was sometimes glimpsed at the great shuttered windows of the palace singing old Chinese love songs at the top of her voice. She sang with perfect pitch, her tongue capturing the words and releasing them across the Valley like grass seeds in the wind. If you strolled along the path which ran along the grounds of the palace you could sometimes hear these songs:

A traveller came from far away,

He brought me a letter.

At the top it says “I’ll always love you,”

At the bottom it says “Long must we part.”

I put the letter in my bosom sleeve.

Three years no word has faded.

My single heart that keeps true to itself

I fear you’ll never know.