Fleeing floods, famine, and crushing poverty, these illiterate people made the hazardous journey across the South China Sea to the rich equatorial lands they had heard about. It was mainly the men who came, often all the young men from one village. They arrived with nothing but the simple aim of making enough money to send for their families to join them. Traditionally viewed as semi-civilised peasants by the cultured overlords of the Imperial North of China, these Southern Chinese had, over the course of centuries, become expert at surviving in the most difficult of conditions. Their new lives were no less harsh, but here they found a place which offered hope, a place which could, in some small way, belong to them.
They called it, simply, Nanyang, the South Seas.
The Southern Chinese look markedly different from their Northern brethren. Whereas Northerners have candle-wax skin and icy, angular features betraying their mixed, part-Mongol ancestry, Southerners appear hardier, with a durable complexion that easily turns brown in the sun. They have fuller, warmer features and compact frames which, in the case of overindulgent men like my father, become squat with the passing of time.
Of course this is a generalisation, meant as a rough guide for those unfamiliar with basic racial fault lines. For evidence of the unreliability of this rule of thumb, witness my own features, which are more Northern than Southern, if they are at all Chinese (in fact, I have even been told that I have the look of a Japanese prince).
I have explained that my ancestors probably came from the South of China, specifically from Guangdong and Fujian provinces, but there is one further thing to say, which is that even in those two big provinces, people spoke different languages. This is important because your language determined your friends and enemies. People in our town speak mainly Hokkien, but there are a number of Hakka speakers too, like my Uncle Tony who married Auntie Baby. The literal translation of “Hakka” is “guest people,” descendants of tribes defeated in ancient battles and forced to live outside city walls. These Hakkas are considered by the Hokkiens and other Chinese here to be really very low-class, with distinct criminal tendencies. No doubt they were responsible for the historical tension and bad feeling with the Hokkiens in these parts. Their one advantage, often used by them in exercises of subterfuge and cunning, is the similarity of their language to Mandarin, the noble and stately language of the Imperial Court, which makes it easy for them to disguise their dubious lineage. This is largely how Uncle Tony, who has become a hotel tycoon (“a hotelier,” he says), managed to convince bank managers and the public at large that he is a man of education (Penang Free School and the London School of Economics), when really he is like my father — unschooled and very uncultured. He has, to his credit, managed to overcome the most telltale sign of Hakka backwardness, which is the lack of the “h” sound in their language and the resulting (and, quite frankly, ridiculous) “f ” that comes out in its place, whether the person is speaking Mandarin, Malay, or even English. For example:
Me (when I was young, deliberately): “I paid money to touch a girl down by the river today.”
Uncle Tony (in pre-tycoon days): “May God in fevven felp you.”
He converted to Christianity too, I forgot to say.
JOHNNY LIM WAS OBVIOUSLY NOT my father’s real name. At the start of his life, he was known by his real name, Lim Seng Chin, a common and truly nondescript Hokkien name. He chose the name Johnny in late 1940, just as he was turning twenty. He named himself after Tarzan. I know this because among the few papers he left when he died were some old pictures, spotty and dog-eared, cut carefully from magazines and held together by a rusty paper clip. In each one, the same man appears, dressed in a badly fitting loincloth, often holding a pretty woman whose heavy American breasts strain at her brassiere. In one picture, they stand on a fake log, clutching jungle vines; his brow is furrowed, eyes scanning the horizon for unknown danger while she gazes up at him. Behind them is a painted backdrop of forested hills, smooth in texture. Another picture, this time a portrait of the same barrel-chested man with beads of sweat on his shoulders, bears the caption, “Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic Champion.”
I’m not certain why Johnny Weissmuller appealed to my father. The similarities between the two are nonexistent. In fact, the comparison is amusing, if you think about it. Johnny Weissmuller: American, muscular, attractive to women. Johnny Lim: short, squat, uncommunicative, a hopelessly bald loner with poor social skills. In fact it might well be said that I have more in common with Johnny Weissmuller, for I at least am tall and have a full head of thick hair. My features, as I have already mentioned, are angular, my nose strangely large and sharp. On a good day some people even consider me handsome.
It is not unusual for men of my father’s generation to adopt the unfeasible names of matinee idols. Among my father’s friends, there have been: Rudolph Chen, Valentino Wong, Cary Gopal and his business partner Randolph Muttusamy, Rock Hudson Ho, Montgomery Hashim, at least three Garys (Gary Goh, “Crazy” Gary, and one other I can’t remember — the one-legged Gary), and too many Jameses to mention. While there is no doubt that the Garys in question were named after Gary Cooper, it wasn’t so clear with the Jameses: Dean or Stewart? I watched these men when they visited the factory. I watched the way they walked, the way they smoked their cigarettes, and the way they wore their clothes. Did James Dean wear his collar up or down in East of Eden? I could never tell for sure. I did know that Uncle Tony took his name from Tony Curtis. He admitted this to me, more or less, by taking me to see Some Like It Hot six times.
So you see, I was lucky, all things considered.
My father chose my name. He called me Jasper.
At school I learned that this is also the name of a stone, a kind of mineral. But this is irrelevant.
Returning to the story of Johnny, we know that he assumed his new name around the age of twenty or twenty-one. Occasional (minor) newspaper articles dating from 1940, reporting on the activities of the Malayan Communist Party, describe lectures and pamphlets prepared by a young activist called “Johnny” Lim. By 1941, the quotation marks have disappeared, and Johnny Lim is Johnny Lim for good.
Much of Johnny’s life before this point in time is hazy. This is because it is typical of the life of a small-village peasant and therefore of little interest to anyone. Accordingly, there is not much recorded information relating specifically to my father. What exists exists only as local hearsay and is to be treated with some caution. In order to give you an idea of what his life might have been like, however, I am able to provide you with a few of the salient points from the main textbook on this subject, R. St. J. Unwin’s masterly study of 1954, Rural Villages of Lowland Malaya, which is available for public perusal in the General Library in Ipoh. Mr. Unwin was a civil servant in upstate Johore for some years, and his observations have come to be widely accepted as the most detailed and accurate available. I have paraphrased his words, of course, in order to avoid accusations of plagiarism, but the source is gratefully acknowledged:
· The life of rural communities is simple and spartan — rudimentary compared to Western standards of living, it would be fair to say.
· In the 1920s there was no electricity beyond a two- or three-mile radius of the administrative capitals of most states in Malaya.
· This of course meant: bad lighting, resulting in bad eyesight; no nighttime entertainment, in fact no entertainment at all; reliance on candlelight and kerosene lamps; houses burning down.