Shared idea of ‘home’
Historian Wang Gungwu and his late wife found home was where they were.
ON the eve of historian Wang Gungwu’s move from Kuala Lumpur to Canberra, Australia in 1969 – one of a long series of uprootings throughout his life – his wife Margaret looked around at the house they were leaving, contemplated what they were bringing and said to him: “Home is where we are.”
Years later, this would become the title of the memoir they wrote together, though Margaret would not live to see it in print.
Professor Wang, a National University of Singapore (NUS) professor much garlanded for his work on Chinese history, published the first volume of his memoir, Home Is Not Here, in 2018.
The key shift between the two parts, says the 90-year-old in an e-mail interview, lies in the word “we”.
“‘We’ became central to the story because, as we became a family and made a home in Malaya, we also discovered that it was possible to understand that home did not have to be a country, a city or a house, but could be found wherever we were.”
Home Is Not Here spans his youth, from his childhood – he was born in Surabaya, Indonesia and raised in Ipoh, Perak while ever conscious that his immigrant parents held China as their homeland – to his 18th year, when he was called back from his studies in Nanjing to Perak.
Home Is Where We Are chronicles the next 20 years, beginning with his time at the nascent University of Malaya, as the British prepared to depart Singapore and a young English-educated generation of locals grappled with how they might shape the nation to come.
Then a budding poet, he had his poems published in Pulse, a booklet put together in 1950, which would come to be regarded as the first book of poetry published in Singapore.
That Singapore’s literature might one day hold its own on the world stage was a phenomenon few in the 1950s dared to imagine, he says.
“In those early days, we were at the beginning of a decolonisation process that was to end with Singapore becoming part of Malaya. No one was clear what that Malaya would be like except that it would be a country of many languages and cultures.
“With the country being anchored in the Malay States, the national language could not be English. The official and legal language of governance might remain English in some parts of the country and literature could still be written in English, but that literature would not be expected to shape the national identity.
“Had the 1965 separation from Malaysia not happened, it is hard to imagine the majority of people in Singapore using English as their first language.”
It was at university that he met fellow student Margaret Lim, who first caught his eye at a talk he was giving about the poet William Wordsworth. She would subsequently marry and accompany him around the world as he pursued his academic career, from Britain to Malaysia to Australia.
His illustrious career would go on to include being Emeritus Professor at Australian National University, founding chairman of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS and former chairman
of the ISEAS-YUSOF Ishak Institute. In June this year, he was awarded the prestigious Tang Prize for Sinology.
Neither of the Wangs had intended to write their memoirs. About 15 years ago, Margaret began to regret that she did not know enough about her parents’ history because her mother had not told her about their lives.
She thus set out to write her own story for their three children, who asked Prof Wang to do the same.
“We had been living with a time-free conversation between us, but we never thought it would end in a book,” he says.
Home Is Where We Are combines his narrative with extracts from Margaret’s writings.
She died on Aug 7, aged 86, ahead of the book’s launch last month.
Prof Wang believes that if she were here today, she would say: “Yes, we made it. Home has indeed always been where we were.” – The Straits Times/asia News Network