1 - Introduction

Summary

When I began to put this volume together, I recalled my links with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS). That reminded me of the time fifty years ago when Goh Keng Swee talked to me about establishing the institute. I was most intrigued by his foresight (see Chapter 4 on Remembering Goh Keng Swee in this volume). Other memories flooded in as I collected some of my recent writings to affirm my ISEAS connection. As a result, the book is now also a book of personal reflections and encounters about the region that the Chinese knew as Nanyang, often projected through images of Malaysia and Singapore. Behind the events after the end of World War II that shaped the new nations and settled the fates of their Chinese populations, a number of issues touching on a mixed heritage also came to mind.

In January 2016, my wife Margaret reminded me that we have lived in Singapore for twenty years. We were surprised how quickly the years had passed and noted that the period is the longest both of us have ever spent in any one place in our lives. I had spent some seventeen years growing up in Ipoh. Margaret spent the first twenty-four years of her life in Shanghai, Penang, Singapore, Cambridge, London, and back to Singapore. We then had in succession nine years in Kuala Lumpur, eighteen years in Canberra and ten years in Hong Kong. As a student, I had spent a year and a half in Nanjing, five years in Singapore and three years in London. This volume is thus also one that marks some of my changing perspectives on Singapore, Malaya and Malaysia.

I grew up as a Chinese in Malaya among millions of other Chinese in the Nanyang. Like many others, I was taught to think of China as home and my parents prepared me to return there. That day came in 1947, when the three of us moved to Nanjing, my father to teach at the school attached to his alma mater, by then renamed National Central University, and I to take the entrance examinations to seek a place at his university.