When I went up to Glare College, Cambridge, in the following year,  I found a Chinese undergraduate from China, whose surname was Wang, teaching an English undergraduate by the name of Taylor Chinese characters.  Wang used a method I had never seen before.  He cut out small square pieces of thick paper, and on each he wrote on one side a Chinese character and its meaning in English on the reverse side.  Taylor, a science undergraduate and a boxing half blue, used to bring these pieces of paper to me  and hold them up one at a time with the English side facing me and the Chinese side facing him, so that I could check his rendering of its meaning.  Taylor was in fact learning to recognise characters without attempting to pronounce them.  This method I discovered years afterwards was a method favoured by the ancient Chinese, and was quite orthodox.  How strange it was for Taylor to come so soon into my life in the wake of that missionary woman I  If she impressed on me the importance of being able to write my name in Chinese, he shamed me by his desire to learn my language

On my return to Penang after finishing my law course and eaten my dinners at Lincoln's Inn, I was aflame with the desire to make up for my ignorance of the Chinese written language, so patently exposed while I was in England.  I engaged a teacher to come on some evenings to teach me again what I had once learnt and so completely forgotten.  It was hard going for me, because the demands of my law practice were heavy; but I went on learning, until I could read quite a lot of characters and wield quite an artistic brush. 

In addition I also became interested in the names of my Chinese clients.  I would stop in the midst of business to ask them to write out their names in Chinese for me. I found that  they liked being asked to do so.  I suppose it must have been because their Chinese names were so pretty and meaningful, and even flattering,  I knew then that these names were not given at random, like Tom, Dick and Harry.  I knew that parents went to Chinese astrologers or soothsayers or necromancers to choose names for their children, giving the former the precise time and date and month and year of birth, so that the man with knowledge of fortune-telling could determine under which of the five fundamental elements the child was born.  These elements are, as stated in the Three Character Classic that I learnt off by heart in my Chinese school, water, fire, metal, wood and earth. These five elements and the two basic principles of Yin and Yang representing Feminity and Masculinity by their interplay in all possible combinations brought about creation and the myriad forms of life on this earth.  This was the theory of the early Chinese cosmogonists who like their counterparts in Babylon, Egypt and Israel studied the heavenly bodies and determined the planting and the harvesting seasons and made the calendars; but not satisfied with this, they transcended themselves by their imaginative theories of creation, not dreaming that one day Charles Darwin would, demolish them with his theory of evolution. In my case my soothsayer was satisfied from the details my mother supplied that I was born under the element of fire and so he chose a deep pool of water to counterbalance the burning heat. 
 
 
 

While travelling on one of the cable cars of the Penang Hill Railway some time in November 1968 I happened to sit by a Japanese tourist.  After a short exchange of conversation, he asked me for my name,  I proceeded to write it out in English. He too, like that English hostess, wasn't satisfied and asked me to add the Chinese version, which I was then competent to do.  The reaction from him on seeing the Chinese version was one of unrestrained admiration, nodding again and again his head and smiling.  He even went to the extent of taking my photo to show his folks ocular evidence of having met the Clear Pool of Claremont. 
 

"What is in a name !" was a common jibe in England when I was a student there but I would  not make such a derogatory remark about Chinese names. #

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Lim Cheng Ean's Hardwick
In later years the British colonial administration in a surprise move appointed Cheng Ean a relief magistrate for Georgetown, a post hitherto reserved for whites only. Already a hero to the locals Cheng Ean's popularity was boosted when he paid the fines of those who could not afford the penalties that the law demanded that he, as a magistrate,  should impose. Once more he made the headlines. 

When the Japanese invaded,  he, with the help of policing done by the former volunteers from the SS Volunteer Corps under their commander Lim Khoon Teck, was able to restore order in Ayer Itam to which the population of Georgetown had fled.  When the Japanese administration took over they appointed him Judge of the civil division which continued to administer the law of the Straits Settlements.

After the war a delegation of the Malayan People's Anti Japanese Army called on him to thank him for his work in preserving order in Ayer Itam. A few years later the British asked him to consider the award of an OBE but he rejected the suggestion

Post Merdeka Penang, however, refuses to honour its most famous son; while there are roads named after Phuah Hin Leong and Lim Cheng Teik, not one sign bears his name

These notes were made towards the end of his life at "Claremont", Penang Hill .#

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