by Tash Aw
I’m not certain why Johnny Weissmuller appealed to my father. The similarities between the two are nonexistent. In fact, the comparison is amusing, if you think about it. Johnny Weissmuller: American, muscular, attractive to women. Johnny Lim: short, squat, uncommunicative, a hopelessly bald loner with poor social skills. In fact it might well be said that I have more in common with Johnny Weissmuller, for I at least am tall and have a full head of thick hair. My features, as I have already mentioned, are angular, my nose strangely large and sharp. On a good day some people even consider me handsome.
It is not unusual for men of my father’s generation to adopt the unfeasible names of matinee idols. Among my father’s friends, there have been: Rudolph Chen, Valentino Wong, Cary Gopal and his business partner Randolph Muttusamy, Rock Hudson Ho, Montgomery Hashim, at least three Garys (Gary Goh, “Crazy” Gary, and one other I can’t remember—the one-legged Gary), and too many Jameses to mention. While there is no doubt that the Garys in question were named after Gary Cooper, it wasn’t so clear with the Jameses: Dean or Stewart? I watched these men when they visited the factory. I watched the way they walked, the way they smoked their cigarettes, and the way they wore their clothes. Did James Dean wear his collar up or down in East of Eden? I could never tell for sure. I did know that Uncle Tony took his name from Tony Curtis. He admitted this to me, more or less, by taking me to see Some Like It Hot six times.
So you see, I was lucky, all things considered.
My father chose my name. He called me Jasper.
At school I learned that this is also the name of a stone, a kind of mineral. But this is irrelevant.
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.
· I tell a lie. There are a few schools, but they are reserved for the children of royalty and rich people like civil servants. These were founded by the British. “Commanding the best views of the countryside, these schools are handsome examples of the colonial experiment with architecture, marrying Edwardian and Malay architectural styles” (I quote directly from Mr. Unwin in this instance). When you come across one of these schools, you will see that they dominate the surrounding landscape. Their flat lawns and playing fields stretch before the white colonnaded verandahs like bright green oceans in the middle of the grey olive of the jungle around them. These bastions of education were built especially for ruling-class Malays. Only the sons of very rich Chinese can go there. Like Johnny’s son—he will go to one of these, to Clifford College in Kuala Lipis.
· There the pupils are taught to speak English—proper, I mean.
· They also read Dickens.
· For these boys, life is good, but not always. They have the best of times, they have the worst of times.
· Going back to the subject of toilets: actually, the platform lavatory continued to be used way into the 1960s. But not for me. In 1947, my father installed the first flush cistern and septic tank north of Kuala Lumpur at the Harmony Silk Factory. Before that, we had enamel chamber pots. My favourite one was hand-painted with red-and-black goldfish.
· So imagine a child like Johnny, growing up on the edge of a village on the fringes of a rubber plantation (say), tapping rubber and trapping animals for a few cents’ pocket money. Probably, he would have no idea of the world around him. He only knows the children of other rubber-tappers. They are the only people he would ever mix with. Sometimes he sees the plantation owner’s black motorcar
drive through the village on the way to the Planter’s Club in town. The noise of the engine, a metallic rattle-roar, fills Johnny’s ears, and maybe he sees the Sir’s pink face and white jacket as the car speeds past. There is no way the two would ever speak. Johnny would never even speak to rich Chinese—the kind of people who live in big houses with their own servants and tablecloths and electricity generators.
· When a child like Johnny ends up being a textile merchant, it is an incredible story. Truly, it is. He is a freak of nature.
· Unsurprisingly, many of the poor Chinese become Communists. Not all, but many. And their children too.
Mr. Unwin’s excellent book paints a vivid picture indeed. However, it is a general study of all villages across the country and does not take into account specific regions or communities. This is not a criticism—I am in no position to criticise such scholarship—but there is one thing of some relevance to Johnny’s story which is missing from the aforementioned treatise: the shining, silvery tin buried deep in the rich soil of the Kinta Valley.
3. The Kinta Valley
THE KINTA VALLEY IS a narrow strip of land which isn’t really a valley at all. It is seventy-five miles long and twenty miles wide at its widest, and runs from Maxwell Hill in the north to Slim River in the south. To the east are the jungle-shrouded limestone massifs which you can see everywhere in the Valley: low mountains pockmarked with caves which appear to the eye as black teardrop scars on a roughened face. There are trails through the jungle leading up to these caves. They have been formed over many years by the careful tread of animals—sambar and fallow deer, the wild buffalo and boar, the giant seledang—which come down from the hills to forage where the forest meets the rich fruit plantations.
As a boy, I used to walk these trails. The jungle was wet and cool and sunless, but by then I had learnt where to put my feet, how to avoid the tree roots and burrows, which could easily twist an ankle. The first time I discovered a cave I wandered so deep into it that I could no longer see any light from the outside. I felt with my hands for somewhere to sit. The ground and the walls were damp and flaky with guano. The air was rich with an old smoky smell, like the embers of some strange sugar-sweet charcoal fire. There were no noises other than the gentle drip drip of water. The darkness swallowed up my movements. I couldn’t see my hands or my legs, I couldn’t hear myself breathing. It was as if I had ceased to exist. I sat there for many hours—I don’t know how long exactly. Nor do I know how I found my way out of the cave or what made me want to leave. Night had fallen by the time I emerged, but it did not seem dark to me. Even the light from the pale half-moon annoyed my eyes as I made my way home.
As long as a hundred years ago, the first Chinese coolies discovered these caves and built Buddhist temples in them. For them too these caves were a place of comfort and solace and refuge. A few of the larger temples survive today. My favourite is the Kek Loong, which contains an enormous Laughing Buddha. People say his expression conveys infinite love and wisdom, but to me he has always looked like a young boy, naughtily chuckling because he has done something wrong.
You would expect that a valley would be bounded by two mountain ranges, but that is not so with the Kinta Valley. To the west, as soon as you cross the Perak River, the mangrove swamps begin to unfold before you. The land is flat and muddy, crisscrossed by slow-running streams. The journey to the coast takes you past coconut plantations and fishing villages. Everywhere there are flimsy wooden racks of fish, slowly drying and salting in the sun and the sea breeze. In most places along the coast it is difficult to know where the land ends and the sea begins. There are a thousand tiny inlets which break the coastline, an intricate tapestry of coves. This is where the notorious nineteenth-century pirate, Mat Hitam, used to hide, deep among the mangrove trees. From here he would launch raids on the hundreds of trading ships following the trade winds down into the Straits of Malacca, for three centuries the most lucrative shipping lane in the world. The Straits were, and still are, sheltered and calm—the ideal route for a ship laden with tea, cotton, silk, porcelain, or opium, travelling between India and China. Here, the men of such ships rested their weary, wary souls. Shielded from the open, treacherous waters of the Indian Ocean, they gathered their spirits before striking out for the South China Sea. It was said by fishermen and merchant seamen that the Straits were the most beautiful place in the world. The water was smooth enough for a child’s boat to sail peacefully—the gentle waves caught the amber light of the setting sun, and the breeze, steady and warm, propelled you at a speed so constant that seamen were said to have become mesmerised. Some insisted that they felt in the presence of God.
It is here, in this idyll, that Mat Hitam and his men struck. For nearly twenty years, his small fast boats terrorised the stately ships filled with valuable cargo. Mat Hitam himself became a godlike figure, feared for his ruthlessness. It is an established fact that he was the rarest of all people: a Black Chinese. No one was certain where he came from. Some theories say that he was from Yunnan Province, in southern China, but it is more commonly believed that he was not an exotic foreigner, and was instead born within these shores. Whatever the case, I have no doubt that his mysterious appearance aided his exploits. He died in 1830 (or thereabouts), in the early days of British rule in Malaya. His last victim was Juan Fernández de Martín, a Jesuit missionary who, as his throat was cut, placed a curse on Mat Hitam so powerful that, two weeks later, the Black Pirate died of a twisted stomach. He was bleeding from his eyes as he died, and the expression on his face was “empty as hell and full of fury.”
His spirit lives on in the hidden coves and apparently sleepy fishing villages which dot the coastline. They are impossible to police, and it is here that Johnny smuggled twenty thousand tons of rice from Sumatra during the drought of 1958. I am told that small boats carrying illegal Indonesian immigrants land here every day. I’m sure that if Johnny were alive today he would find some way of making money out of this.
At one or two points along this coast, the sea does appear cleanly and without interruption. One such place is Remis, where my father once took me to swim. It was the first time I had swum in the sea. As I walked onto the beach the dry needles of the casuarina trees, scattered across the sand, prickled underfoot. It was a very hot day, and even though the afternoon sun was weakening, the sand was still white to my eyes and warm to the touch. When I was waist-deep in the water, I turned to look at Father. He was standing in the pools of shade cast by the trees, watching me with his arms folded and his eyes squinting slightly. I walked until I could barely touch the bottom with my toes, then I started swimming, kicking off with uncertain froglike strokes. At some point, I stopped and began treading water, my arms flailing gently in front of me. The sea was deep green, the colour of old, dark jade. That was the first time I ever noticed my skin, the colour of it. Not brown, not yellow, not white, not anything against the rich and mysterious green of the water around me. I turned to look at Father. I could barely make him out in the shade, but he was still there, one hand on his hip, the other shading his eyes from the sun.
On the way home I asked him if I could go swimming again. I was twelve, I think, and I wanted to go to the islands around Pangkor, where I had heard the sun made the sand look like tiny crystals. I longed to see for myself the Seven Maidens, those islands that legend held disappeared with the setting sun; I yearned for their hot waters. But Father said he wouldn’t take me.
“Those places no longer exist,” he said. “They are part of a story, a useless old story.”
“Why can’t we go just for a day?” I ventured. “Have you ever seen them, Father?”
“I told you, I hate islands.”
“Why?”
“Actually I don’t like the sea much,” he said simply.
I knew better than to test him when he was in one of these moods. I noticed, however, that even though I had just spent the afternoon in the sun, my skin was white compared to his. It refused to turn dark, remaining pale
and unblemished, a clean sheet beside his dirty sun-mottled arms.
No one ever stops to visit the Valley. Buses hurry past on their journey north to Penang, pausing briefly for refreshments in Parit or Taiping. Their passengers sit for ten minutes at zinc-covered roadside truck stops, sipping at bottles of Fanta and nibbling on savoury chicken-flavoured biscuits, and then they are away again, eager to leave the dull central plains of the Valley for the neon lights and seaside promenades of Georgetown. When I was young it was possible to spend a week in Ipoh without hearing a single word of English. No one had a TV in those days (apart from us, of course). Then, as now, Western visitors were rare. The only white people I ever saw were the ones who had to be in the Valley—alcoholic planters and unhappy civil servants.
Only once do I remember seeing a tourist, and even then I was not certain he had come to the Valley by design. I was indulging in a favourite childhood pastime, climbing into the lower reaches of the giant banyan tree that dominated the riverbank near the factory. I reached for the thick hanging vines and swung in a broad arc, rising high until I faced the giddying sky; and then I let myself go, tilting and falling into the warm water. When I surfaced I saw an Englishman sitting on the bank, his folded arms resting on his raised knees. A canvas satchel hung limply across his shoulders. The other children who were with me ceased to play; they splashed quietly in the shallows, nervously hiding their nakedness in the opaque water. I wanted to climb the tree and dive into the river again, but the Englishman was sitting at the base of the trunk, perched uncomfortably on the lumpy roots. It did not occur to me to be afraid; I simply walked up the slippery bank towards the tree, passing very close to him. I noticed that he was not looking at me, but staring blankly into the distance. He was not an old man, but his face was just like my father’s, scarred by a weariness I had rarely seen in other men. He looked lost; I am sure he had wandered into the Valley by mistake. I climbed swiftly up into the branches and crawled out to the end of a large bough, and as I fell forward into the water I caught a glimpse of the man’s thick silvered hair. When I surfaced from the water he had gone, and the other children were singing and shouting again. The white man was a spy, we agreed, laughing, or a madman. Or perhaps, said Orson Lai, he was a ghost who had returned to haunt the scene of some terrible crime. Yes, we decided, our voices hushed with childish fear, he had to be a ghost. No one ever visits the Valley.