Back in May, my parents dragged me on a roadtrip through Perak. So when they found out I had 3 days off back-to-back on a weekend, they quickly made trip to head to Ipoh, Menglembu and Papan this time round.
Hit the road right early in the morning, stopping at Menglembu for breakfast. Had a hearty breakfast of pan mee (which was the best I’ve tasted so far), dry noodles, and also ordered a roast platter to try. Char siew was so-so, but the siew yok (roasted pork) was fantastic.
We then headed out to Papan after asking a local for directions. Dad was bent on showing me where my paternal grandmother once lived, and gave birth to his older brothers. Only the eldest brother remembered how the shophouse which he was bornt in looked like, while the others were too young to have any recollection of it.
You see, long ago, around 93 years back, my paternal grandmother was born in Papan, Perak. Her father worked at the mines, and he had considerably large authority. My grandmother lived well, until he married her off to my grandfather, a poor fellow who had arrived in Malaya after he ran away from Guangdong because the Kuomingtang killed my great-grandfather. He followed a kapitan to Perak after surviving 3 months on a boat to Malaya, and went to work in the mines. My grandmother’s father thought he was honest, so he married her off to him.
When the communist insurgency came by, they started recruiting young men and women to join in their cause. My grandfather was terrified, because he had ran away from Guangdong from the Kuomintang, and they killed his father because they refused to either join the Communists or the KMT. So, my grandfather decided to send his eldest son back to China first, and the rest would soon follow suit and join him later. Unfortunately, it never worked out, so my first uncle was stuck in China despite being bornt a Malaysian, and the rest of the family would never see him again until 40 years later.
What is saddening, is that while we know that we are the 3rd generation of Chinese here, if you count my mother’s side, we are the 5th generation. But we never really felt like we are treated like real Malaysians, and everyday, you are being reminded of your skin’s colour and your religion. I was told that if I couldn’t speak Malay well, I wasn’t a good Malaysian, so we had 11 years worth of education to master and speak it fluently. Then, they tell you, its your religion. Next, they tell you to go back to China. It’s sad, its disheartening, but for most of us, it’s nothing new to us.
When we drove past the graveyard, and see hundreds, maybe thousands of the dead, mostly ethnic Chinese, with some probably dating back a few hundred years, it’s kind of sad to think that most of them wanted to return home, but couldn’t. Maybe it’s karma? Since we are their younger generation, and now we are being asked to leave, and go back to China. The irony of it all.
We then headed back to Ipoh, to take a stroll around the old town, and spent our time seeking out murals on the old shophouses and buildings. But the older part of the town was significantly quieter, and had less people going about their business except for tourists, eager to seek out the drawings like us. When we walked past the clock tower, which was dedicated to the British Resident, J.W.W. Birch, no one else was in sight.
The last time my Japanese friend visited Ipoh, he said it felt very lonely. Perhaps he wasn’t wrong at all. It’s heyday as the heart of the mining community was over, and only the buildings stand as a reminder of it’s past, of what it once was, of what everyone left behind before moving out elsewhere.
As a Malaysian, it felt terribly lonely to be haunted by its past.
この長い旅で 