‘Crucial to record history of our lives, culture’
AN old African proverb attributed that, ‘when an elder dies, a library burns to the ground’.
This is an old saying of which significance we do not fully appreciate the wisdom of until it is too late.
Our source of information and knowledge that we had relied upon from our elders, are no longer there for us to refer to.
Personally I have always been a keen and receptive audience to the elders within my family (and outside too) when they wax lyrical about their past – heroics, blunders and mishaps – as well as insider information about famous people from their past and present.
Sometimes their stories would verge on the edge of the fantastical or be so comedic that I might have to take them with a pinch of salt, but they had, for the most part, rung true; or proven true when repeated from another separate source.
It is a sad state of affairs that the majority of our society’s most interesting histories – of their own families, of life in the early days from as far back as their forefathers’ time – often die with them; a very small percentage are recorded for posterity in journals, magazines or books.
Oral history often does not survive beyond two generations, if at all.
If one ventures into a brickand-mortar bookstore, or go online to a bookshop site, there is a dearth of written material available on the history of our human lives and cultures within Sarawak.
Most would be written about Malaya or Singapore, but only a couple of dozen titles could be found on how life was in Sarawak from a personal point of view, or indeed, a family’s history or on ethnic cultures, livelihood and ways of life – the sociology of it all: social, economic and cultural variables.
By sheer coincidence, this past week I was approached by two very different personalities with regard to this very subject.
Datin Valerie Mashman, who is very active in both the Sarawak Heritage Society as well as being the British Council’s official representative in Sarawak, and herself runs a highly successful English language centre, had contacted me with a request from a retired professor from Canada who had wanted to interview a member of the Ong family.
It appeared that my greatgrandfather Ong Tiang Swee had a property called ‘Batu Kinyang Estate’ at the Mile 2 in the Rock Road area, very close by to the Batu Lintang Japanese prisoner of war (POW) camp (where the Batu Lintang Teachers Training Institute now stands).
There were numerous accounts, written by the prisoners themselves, of having contacts with members of the Ong household and their workers – ranging from the regular exchange of information of goods, food, medicines and so forth, at a certain secret spot alongside the fence or just outside the camp.
These exchanges had also included the supply of certain electrical parts and batteries to construct the contraband camp radio; even shooing the odd pig or chicken into the campsite whenever a POW work gang was around the area.
Clothing and textile materials were also being smuggled into the camps for the women and children internees. There were stories of a few survivors of the Batu Lintang POW camp who had returned to Kuching to pay visits to their benefactors in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, we have no one left among the Ong family who had been part of all this, although from tales told when they were still with us, I can recall that my father, Ong Kee Bian, and his brothers Kee Hui, Kee Chong and Henry, being all involved in this ‘Operation POW’ during the Japanese War years between 1941 and 1945.
Dad would have been 16 in 1942 (the Japanese occupied Sarawak between Dec 16, 1941 and June 10, 1945).
Last Wednesday, I was contacted by a Ms Chen
Yu, assistant professor at the National University of Singapore who has written two books: ‘Lim Clan Association Kiu Leong Tong: An Ancestral Bequest’ and ‘Where Land Meets Sea: Hui’an Revisited’, both published by the NUS Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, Singapore.
These two volumes are splendidly illustrated with colour and black-and-white photos, and show an in-depth insight coupled with wellresearched scholarly authority.
On the Lim book, which had included a history of the late Dr Lim Chong Yu’s family, Prof Chen Yu had spent more than three years on her research work in Penang.
She was keen on interviewing me for more information on the life of Ong Tiang Swee and Ong Ewe Hai, their ancestors and their families in Sarawak and in Singapore.
Along the same vein, she had also wanted to find out more about Datuk Wee Kheng Chiang and his Singapore and Kuching families, and the connection through marriage between the Ong and the Wee families.
Her research would eventually be formalised into her next book on these two Sarawak families.
So far, the only available publication has been Ong Boon Lim’s biography of ‘Ong Tiang Swee of Sarawak’.
For her first visit to Kuching, Prof Chen had stayed at the Marian Lodge, which used to be the Ong Mansion back in the day; wandered around the street built by Ewe Hai (Ewe Hai Street); been to both the Chinese Museum (where there is some minimal historical record of the family); and spoken to people mostly about the oral history of Kuching.
She hopes to return soon to start gathering more materials, memories, photographs and anecdotes, and family trees of both the Ong and Wee families of Sarawak.
We should all be encouraged to put into words, either by writing them ourselves or in partnership with others more literary-minded than us, our very own unique stories – they can be life stories of our parents, their ancestors, and even ourselves – so that we will have recorded for our future generations our times; stories of how we had lived, the customs and the differences (or similarities) in our cultures; and just simply how different it was between then and now.
After all, who knows what the future holds?
On this note, I must say that I fully support all those in recent times who have championed the cause for the revival of the Borneo Literature Bureau, which was somehow ‘shuttered’ suddenly back in the 1970s.
It was established on Sept 15, 1959, as an interstate department by the governments of Sabah and Sarawak to ‘meet all the literature needs of the people of Malaysia that are not met in other ways’.
Another was the Sarawak Literary Society, started in 1972, led then by Abang Yusuf Puteh (who had become the State Secretary of Sarawak).
My fellow scribe, Uncle Sidi Munan, was an early pioneer of the Sarawak Literary Society – can we hope to see a revival sometime soon?
We would all be a part of our own personal history one fine day – can we make sure that it will be recorded somehow, somewhere?
God only knows.