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In the crucibleA Straits-born Chinese discovers himself
by Lim Ewe Hock
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In the crucibleA Straits-born Chinese discovers himself by Lim Ewe Hock |
| A hybrid I SEE MYSELFf as the final picture that you get after putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. And the pieces that go to make up the final picture of myself belong to three main sets which may represent my Chinese blood, my English education and my Malayan breeding. Feeling as a Chinese, thinking in English, I see life as a Malayan. I seldom write and when I do I write in English. I converse in Chinese with my elders, in English with my boss, in a hybrid Chinese-English with my friends. As a child I belonged to the East; as a man I am lost to the West. Between childhood and manhood there was a struggle between the Chinese blood in me and the English education I had received. My Chinese blood made me ambitious, idealistic, dissatisfied; it made me imaginative, daring and unafraid. I saw into the future and planned ahead. But my struggle was hopeless from the beginning; my education taught me to be a clerk, the spirit of the times put its shackles on me, the economic and social condition drew me inevitably and relentlessly into clerical drudgery. I learned how to make a living but I was not taught how to live. For, with western education, I became more apish than the apes; I grew rich in learning (of a sort) but I became bankrupt in the spirit of my fathers. I became a creature of content, smug with ease, complacent in mediocrity and the blood that flowed in me lost the heat that moved my forefathers out to this country as pioneers in the face of unknown dangers. My flesh turned soft and my spirit became as water, for life with me was me long round of dances and drinks, of clubs and u'ards, of dancers and dices, of messes and mah-jongg, of horses and harlots. I learned the vices of the West; I forgot the virtues of the East. When life should be the bridge to a goal I made it the goal itself, and so I lost my manhood and became more animal than man. I was neither atheist, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhist nor free-thinker. I was just myself. Literature, music, art, science and everything that did not come within the daily round of my pleasures, was beyond my interest. My books gathered dust on my bookshelves. I had become the child of my besotted age. |
| Servile.
arrogant With my education had also come an inflated self-respect. Some people call it the White-Collared Mentality. I prefer to use its true name which is Vanity, the daughter of Servility. For, I blush to say, it was because I was servile that I was arrogant. I was all smiles before my superiors; I was all airs among my inferiors; my respect for the foreigner amounted almost to hero-worship; my disrespect for the native bordered almost on contempt. I deemed it a great favour and an honour to be able to rub shoulders with my betters, to smile and smirk, to drink and dine with them and to sing paens of praise to them. Thus I became more fawning than the spaniel. But, with all my constant, conscious attempt to please, I found that I never really belonged to the upper crust, and my pride was hurt. So to recover my ego and my manhood, I strutted more and more among my inferiors. Thus from a dog I turned into a peacock. With education also, my head grew big and I found it difficult to shake my monstrous cranium except upwards and downwards. So, it became a habit with me whenever I dined to nod a peaceful and an inevitable Aye. In this respect, I was most agreeable. I agreed with everyone, good, bad or indifferent. All the opinions which I expressed were someone else's which I passed off as my own. In my club, I could talk hours together on nothing; at table, I always thought so because other people thought so or because I was told so and thought I must think so; at home, I said so, and so and so. I out-parroted even the parrot. I had an empty brain and a rattling tongue. The one was filled uiih Annie and Jennie and how they could dance, with this film and that and how MacDonald could sing and Crosby croon, with silly and trivial items of news, scandal and gossip; the other retailed this mass of knowledge for hours on end. I was in this respect more Malayan than English. With too much reading of Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse I grew myopic. My mind's eye also became shortsighted. My imagination had died with my imagination. It was natural for me to see no further than my club and my cards, my mess and my mah-jongg. I was blind to the future; I spared little thought for China, less for Britain. My body lived in Malaya but my heart was in myself. Given my daily round of amusements I cared little what sort of country my children would have to live in. I read the papers, that is, the sports page, the entertainnient columns, the local items of marriage and separation, of court cases and suicides. Hut I never bothered to think why there were separations and suicides. The march of events in Europe that did not affect my life to any great extent, never interested me. Of the proceedings in the Legislative Councils I cared less. I was contented to leave other people to do the planning for the future of my country. I was satisfied to sit on the fence and watch life flow by in the town and the villages but I never saw the undercurrent of poverty and penury, struggling for existence. So long as I had my full three meals a day, I remained blind to the want and misery around me. Like the snail drawing its head into its sequestered shell, I confined myself to my pleasures and was oblivious to the struggling world outside. I could not even live in harmony among the people of my own race. My selfish pride made me believe that it was other people who could not live in harmony with me and not I with them. In this respect I was the child of my fathers. I was the symbol of my race. |
It was only through a baptism of war and suffering that I regained my soul and returned to the East. I recovered my sight. I can see now that my country is Malaya, though my blood is Chinese and my education English. And that I have an active part to play, however small, in the rebuilding of a new and better Malaya for my children's children. And that I can only play my part if I clear the cobwebs from the mind and confine my servility and arrogance, my smugness and self-centredness, to the limbo of forsaken sins. And that I must live in friendliness with my superiors and my inferiors, with the people of my own race and the peoples of other races in Malaya, before I can in any way help in the rehabilitation of my country and homeland. And that the "old order changeth, yielding place to new." # _______________________ - - - This article by Lim Ewe Hock created a sensation when it appeared in the Penang monthly, Monsoon, in March 1946. The young lawyer had nicely captured the mood of the English educated of the Straits Settlements in the immediate post-war period, when their secondary arrogance was severely dented by the ignominous collapse of their British masters. Indelibly stamped with the terrible lessons of the war, they began to ask themselves the urgent question: Who are we?. |
| ______ INDEX Point to the article that you want to read, and CLICK Index
page A Baba examines himself
Baba words Book
review Food guide
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Editorial consultants: Mr and Mrs
Lim Teong Beng |
| ___________________ The Penang File Issue 35 |