PREFACE
I was born in 1949 in the then colonial
Malaya. World War II had ended, but Malaya was just entering into a period
called The Emergency when the colonial government declared the Malayan
Communist Party (MCP) illegal. Members of the party had to go underground; many
retreated to the jungles to fight for their cause. The party had many
sympathizers; new villages were formed by the colonial government to fence the
more rural Chinese in, lest they became the lifelines of the Communists.
My grandpa hailed from Jinjiang (晋江- Back to my earlier argument, shouldn’t the pin-yin of it be Chin-Jiang? 😎), a county in the province of Fujian. He married a Peranakan of heavy Javanese heritage. My father was schooled in classic Chinese, and he married my mother who, although born into a “school-fragrant” family, was not sent to be schooled. Nonetheless, she had the opportunity to learn a great deal about wisdom and virtues from my maternal grandmother who was apparently very knowledgeable about Chinese classics and legends. My mother would always fill us with “historical” lessons when she had to discipline us. The morals in the stories she told have remained the guiding philosophy of my life.
Father and Mother had to start their own home; however, they had to leave their eldest child with Grandma, a common expectation then. My eldest brother was sent to an English school. The rest of us were sent to Chinese school.
My grounding for Chinese history and Chineseness was further reinforced during my primary school days. I loved to read about our great sages, legends, deities, and scholars and poets.
Reality sept in. There was hardly any “future” for Chinese school leavers then!
My family decided to switch me to English school when it was time to begin my secondary education. I had to do a year of “Remove” class before I could enter Form I. The school was quite discriminatory; it lumped all those from Chinese schools in the two bottom classes of the form until we sat for the Lower Certificate of Education at the end of Form III. We were an outcaste class. Hok-Kien (Hokkien), the Mǐn-Nán (閩南) version of Fujianese, became our lingua franca. We sought comfort in our own world, and most of us got engrossed with the books of the martial arts varieties. I was fortunate that my home was full of Chinese literature. I got the opportunity to read, besides the classics, Lu Xun (鲁迅) and other more modern scholars. (My older brothers were still studying in a Chinese high school.) We continued to identify ourselves differently from those who streamed in from the English schools.
I completed my degree at the University of Malaya in 1973. By then, English was already the “universal” language. Although we continued to practise Chinese culture and traditions, we neither looked up to China as our motherland. Few could be proud of mainland China at that time. Japan was fast rising, and China was still time-warped with Mao’s Cultural Revolution madness. Despite Japan’s atrocities to Chinese during World War II, we were willing to learn from them, even culturally.
Like most other parents, we sent our children to English schools, thinking that was the best way of assuring a good future for them. But I also engaged a tutor to teach my two children Chinese. Unfortunately, because of lack of emphasis, they hardly learned any Chinese from their tutor. My wife was born into an English-educated family and Chinese in Mandarin and in writing was totally alien to her. We spoke English at home. Apart from the Chinese customs, my two children have had hardly any knowledge about Chinese history and our sages’ teachings and wisdom. As their only source of geopolitical acknowledge is from western media, they naturally take a very negative view about news in or from China. I feel concerned. (I am not saying what you are reading or hearing from Chinese sources are authoritative. Many narratives are the Qian-Long[1] variety – blind to truths and actual developments, and China is right wholesale, regardless.)
I believe there are many ethnic Chinese who are like my children. One does not have to swear allegiance to China. (Your loyalty must be given to the country where you are a citizen.) But China today, even if you do not agree with its “totalitarianism” (as the West want you believe), is a country that you certainly can be proud of – for what the “dictatorship” has achieved so phenomenally for the country for the past thirty or so years.
I am most dismayed by the worldview of many ethnic Chinese who seem to pride themselves as “Whites”. We love to use the term “Yellow Bananas” to describe them. You can excuse those who have been born into a Western environment, but for those who have emigrated, like the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s aide Yu Mao-Chun (Miles Maochun Yu), you just cannot imagine they can be so anti-China, even though they were the beneficiaries of China’s talent-grooming policy. I also have highly educated folks who live in Whites suburbs in Australia, who for reasons of their own, are quite negative about China. To them anything good about China is not to be believed!
Chinese can only stand tall if China is respected. (We also can help change China in our own small ways!) To help disseminate this seemingly simple message is now my mission. And this is precisely the reason why I am compiling this book. (I cannot say I am writing this book, for much of what I am writing is “plagiarized” from somewhere. I only organise the contents to suit the messages I am trying to put across.)
Readers may find the book’s organisation somewhat strange – with boxes of “facts” or “legends” appearing all over the chapters. The dynasties and eras are written in chronological order. The “boxed” materials are facts and legends that first happened in the appropriate period, hence their sporadic appearances. Hope readers can live with them and appreciate their significance.
The Author/Kuala Lumpur/March 2023.
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