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Book Review
From clerical desk to race horsesThw story of Batu Gajah's immigrants |
WITH THE TIN RUSH the Chinese population in the Kinta valley rose from 8,900 in 1879 to 58,587 in 1891 and the immigrants continued to flow from the poverty stricken areas of south China. Most were under the control of gang masters, remaining poor and destined to be the working class of British Malaya. Some however saw a way out of their misery. They sent their children to school to learn English. This is the story of one such person who won the coveted post of English clerk and rose to become a wealthy man. In 1902, Ho Yuk Phooi, whose mother worked as a servant in Taiping, joined the clerical service of the FMS as Third Clerk. With his English qualification (Standard VII) as well as an elementary knowledge of Chinese he was paid $30 a month. Promoted to the grade of Second Clerk in 1903 and posted to the Batu Gajah Sanitary Board he earned $60 a month. He climbed to the post of Grade III clerk, a pensionable job but failing eyesight forced him to leave the government service in 1914. He was 32 years old. Ho Yuk Phooi's mother saved enough to set up her own medicine shop. When she died she owned several shop houses in Taiping As a registration clerk Ho Yuk Phooi had the advantage of familiarity with land questions and the title to lands. He applied for a block of mining land, an application which was readily approved, very likely because he was no stranger to the land office. He then got another piece of land to plant coconuts. He was following in the footsteps of two other government clerks, Ho Pak Leng and Ahmad bin Taib, who were to become prominent in the Kinta valley. He became a rich man with race horses and was, as town headman, the top man.. Ho Yuk Phooi's son too worked at the Land Office. His marriage to Khee Yueh Kuen, a local born like him, produced five children, one of whom a doctor Ho Tak Ming has written this book about his grandfather and Batu Gajah. It makes compelling reading, because apart from the rags to riches stories, he has collected an immense store of information about salaries, schools and the life and times of those days as well as sketches of the English colonials who ran the business of empire in the Kinta valiey |
| The people that Ho
Tak Ming describes had no thought of dying in Kinta Valley; all they
wanted to do was to make enough to go back home to a comfortable old
age and to own an auspicious burial plot. Typical is the story of Khi
Nin, a successful miner, who partnered the Mandailings in mining ventures.
He married a local girl and gave up the idea of returning . His youngest
was to become the mother of the author This book, and Ho Thean Fook's ‘God of the Earth,' with its tales of the turn of the century immigrants over in Papan, tells us much about the others - the farmers and mining coolies and many others in humble occupations who brought forth from the earth its riches.. The people we meet in the two books think only of survival and climbing out of poverty, had no eye on politics, and would have been shocked to be described, as Mustapha Hussain has done, as ferocious dragons ready to devour a nation, aggressively claiming equal rights with the Malays and even demanding recruitment into the Malay Administrative Service.# Lim Kean Chye Generations The story of Batu Gajah by Ho Tak Ming Perak Academy 2005 |
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| _____________________ The Penang File Issue 49 |