The official title of this book is 梁典：跌宕一生的矿家传奇. It is written in Mandarin by Chew Moh Yuen and then translated into English. The content was garnered through interviews with Leong Tian’s remaining children (mostly in their 80s and 90s), and visits to Ipoh (Malaysia) and Jiaying (China) to gain cultural and historical insight into Leong Tian’s life.
The book is a labor of love by my grandaunt Leong Fun Chin and her family. She was the seventh daughter of Leong Tian and had always wanted to consolidate collective memories and lessons from the past.
梁典 Leong Tian is the life story of an individual who was born in 1886, when China was still under the Qing Dynasty. Writer Chew Moh Yuen has provided context to his biography by including rich historical descriptions of the immigrant/slave-trade experience in British Malaya. She explains the culture and migration patterns of the Hakka people in China in that century, the Japanese Occupation, political involvements with Sun Yat-Seng, as well as the development and demise of the tin mining industry.
Leong Tian’s story starts in a village in China, where he lived until he was 16. His family was dirt poor and he left to go to Malaya younger than was usual(on his mother’s insistence), to avoid a potentially dangerous village dispute. In 1902, he arrived by boat to the world’s tin capital at that time – Ipoh. Tin mining then was a hazardous job using primitive tools, but he managed to survive and eventually start his own mining company. With some luck, the land he leased yielded a large amount of tin and he became very wealthy. He grew his family of almost twenty children in a comfortable family home until the Japanese Occupation in 1941. While his family survived the Occupation, the Japanese destroyed most of the wealth he had accumulated and left their family home in shambles. He struggled to rebuild his wealth after the war ended in 1945, but within ten years his health failed and he passed on in 1956.
These are the remains (ruins) of the home that was never finished and never lived in.
I have heard snippets of this story from my grandmother (who has also passed), and I remember these stories ending with a sigh and a head shake. While the family was thankful to have even lived through the Occupation, the family life they had known had been wiped out, never to return. Leong Tian also had a dishonest brother in his home village, and was crushed to find that the ancestral home that he had been paying his brother for (over a long period) was just a shell.
Having read this biography -based on the memories of my grandaunts and granduncles- in English (I’ve only heard it in excited Hakka) and in a more chronological form (I’ve only heard them as random cautionary tales), I now understand my grandma’s life experience and her relationships differently. There is a reason why her siblings were/are so close, why some of them didn’t want to visit Japan, why they had lots of fruits trees and enjoyed certain flowers, why they supported education in different forms and why my grandma corrected the Chinese characters that I wrote in my letters to her.
It is also worth noting that besides Leong Tian, his wife was also a hardy character said to be extremely virtuous and diligent, despite being abused as an adopted child. My grandma often sighed in admiration and sympathy when she spoke of her mother, who birthed all 18 children at home and worked incessantly around the house and later on her deceased husband’s company. Later in life, her mother had insisted on equal rights for her daughters to go for further studies, even though the culture then and Leong Tian’s will had stated otherwise (thought to be a mistake as he was also a strong believer in education).
Ultimately, I am glad these stories have been collected. Leong Tian was one of hundreds of thousands of hard-working tin workers that have passed through Malaya, but to his children, he and his wife are legends that contributed to the bedrock of their principles, for which they will always be thankful.
Dad made many such donations, but he preferred to remain anonymous. As a result, most of these acts of charity were not recorded.
Leong Siew Chin
P.S. This is by no means a story of sighs. Written with many years of hindsight, it is illuminating and inspiring.
