志异 Draft by Drama box december 2013 (english) | Page 31

I was born in June 1942, in Malaya (there
was no Malaysia then), speci?cally in Kulai,
a small town in Johor. At the time, the
Japanese army had already occupied the
state of Johor for six months, and I lived
under Japanese rule for three and a half
years. (The Chinese had a derogatory term
for the Japanese ?ag: they called it the
‘plaster ?ag’). My parents were rubber
plantation workers, and my mother started
work before dawn every day even when
she was pregnant with me. She had no other
choice, as we were not well off at the time,
and not working meant no income. She was
still tapping rubber on her due date — as a
result, I was born in the rubber plantation,
a true son of the rubber forest.
In August 1945, the Japanese surrendered.
By September, the British had returned to
Malaya and restored their colonial regime,
and I became an overseas British subject.
From 1946 onwards, I settled in Singapore.

In 1948, I turned six years old. By today’s
standards, this would be the age for starting
kindergarten. However, at the time, there
were very few kindergartens in Singapore
and most of them charged very high fees
that could only be afforded by the wealthy.
As a result, the Chinese-medium schools
of the time lowered their admission age for
Primary One to six years old. Under these
circumstances, I began my primary
education at Catholic High.
In my second year of primary school,
our relatives in Hainan sent word that our
ancestral home was in a bad state due to
lack of maintenance, and urgently required
repairs. My father couldn’t leave his work at
the provision shop, so he arranged for my
mother, my two younger brothers and I to
return to Hainan to take charge of repairing
the house. We later discovered that repairs
proved too difficult, so we simply built a
new house next to the old one.