The Harmony Silk Factory

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.