By 1888, when Penny Wong’s European ancestors were pushing into the Adelaide Hills, establishing farms and orchards, the British North Borneo Company (BNBC) had been established under a royal charter to exploit the region’s resources, with a concession granted by the Sultanate. Ceding land to the Europeans had become part of the accepted way of doing business in Borneo.
Wakefield and the founding fathers of South Australia had struggled with the problem of how to work the land without resorting to convict labour. The BNBC had the same problem – but it was in business, rather than governed by colonial idealism. The indigenous Dayak population was deemed unsuitable, and in any case there were not enough of them to build the railways and labour on the vast tobacco and timber plantations and in the tin mines. The company directors arrived at a different solution – the import of what were called Chinese ‘coolies’.
Between 1881 and 1941, there were three different schemes to bring in Chinese labourers. In the first, between 1882 and 1886, five boatloads of mainly Cantonese migrants were shipped south. The composition of the cohort was all wrong. The company had recruited shopkeepers and artisans, who proved unable to make their way in an undeveloped country. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the emphasis had shifted decisively to the Hakka.21
The word ‘hakka’ means ‘guest people’. It is a signal of their perpetual outsider status, both in China and in the many other regions of the world where, pushed out due to persecution and lured by opportunity, they have made their home. Less generous translations – ‘outsiders’, or words with a nuance of being unwelcome guests – are possible. Scholars suggest that the Hakka, despite their outsider identity, are not a separate ethnic group but Han Chinese who migrated from central to southern China, to the Cantonese areas of Guangdong, around the fourth century. As latecomers, they had to establish their communities on rugged, less fertile land. They were fringe dwellers and tenant farmers who over time established a distinct identity. They were proud, and could be prickly. It is said that although poor they were generally well educated, and often excelled in the imperial exams that were an essential requirement for advancement in China for many centuries. Hakka women were renowned for their stamina, and for doing strenuous farming work that in other communities was left to men. Hakka women did not bind their feet.
The Hakka are also notoriously political. For many centuries, they have been rebels.22
Confirming their outsider status, the Hakka of Guangdong in the late 1800s were largely Christian, and comparatively pro-European. Many had been converted by the Basel Mission, an evangelical missionary society that trained Dutch and British missionaries operating in India and China. In 1850, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom – a Christian oppositional state led by Hakka revolutionary Hong Xiuquan – sought to overthrow the Qing Dynasty in an event that became known as the Taiping Rebellion. The rebels wanted land socialisation, the abolition of foot bindings, and the replacement of Buddhism and Confucianism with a version of Christianity. Once the insurgency was quashed, the Hakka were brutally persecuted. A generation later, in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, an uprising against Christianity and European colonisation, most Hakka sided with the British. The patriotic Cantonese had even more reason to marginalise them. By the time the BNBC began offering free land to Chinese labourers, many Hakka had become religious and political refugees.
The Basel Mission ran a scheme for the BNBC in which the Hakka received passage and were leased land. Half of the land was devoted to cash crops: tobacco and rubber. The rest was available for the families to farm on a subsistence basis. Other workers, indentured to the British plantations, were treated like slaves. In 1891 most estates registered a death rate among workers of more than 20 per cent, with some as high as 40 per cent. Men and women were fodder for the economic machine of the empire. But the Hakka maintained connections with their families in China, and word spread fast. An old Chinese saying in Sabah is ‘the tai-pan [foreign business owners] treat us like dogs’.23 But the Hakka never accepted their subservience. Nor did they see themselves as inferior. That was not the Hakka way. British North Borneo soon found it harder to attract new migrants, which spurred an improvement in conditions. From 1921 Chinese settlers were encouraged to send for their relatives and friends back home, with the passage paid for by the company.
By the beginning of the 1930s, after half a century of continuous assisted immigration, there were 27,424 Hakka and 12,831 Cantonese in Borneo.24 Together, Chinese migrants and their children may have accounted for nearly a quarter of the population. The Cantonese settled in the towns as merchants and artisans; the Hakka worked on the land and the estates. By now the Hakka were influential.25 Their dialect had become the common language for the Chinese in Borneo. Their concerns were at the centre of political life. Their people sought opportunities for education and began to take up posts in the colonial administration. Today, Chinese make up almost one-sixth of Malaysian Borneo’s population, but have much larger social and economic influence than those numbers indicate.
Exactly how Penny Wong’s ancestors fit into this history is not known. Her grandmother was illiterate, and her father does not write Chinese script. Few written records were kept by those that preceded them. Almost an entire generation was wiped out in World War II, robbing their descendants of oral history.
A family tree of her father’s patrilineal lineage shows the first known male ancestor as Wong Ling Kay, Penny Wong’s great-grandfather.26 Her father, Francis Yit Shing Wong, believes this man was a fisher who for many years travelled between southern mainland China and North Borneo before settling on the island. If this is accurate, on this side of the family Penny Wong is of Cantonese descent. But her most powerful understandings of her Chinese ancestry concern her Hakka grandmother, Lai Fung Shim, the second wife of her grandfather, Wong Yew Chung. Lai married at a time when it was normal for men to have at least two wives. Some might call her a concubine but, says Penny Wong, ‘that is a very Western concept. In the Chinese tradition, the first marriage is the arranged marriage. The second match is for love.’ The family lore is that Lai was the love of her husband’s life. Of Lai’s ancestry, little is known. She identified as Hakka, and it is almost certain she was descended from those brought out as part of the colonial project.
World War II saw an end to mass Chinese migration to Borneo. In late 1941 the Japanese invaded. Borneo was only a small part of what amounted to a Japanese empire, but it is known as its most terrible. The experience of Australian prisoners of war in Borneo – sent there by the Japanese to build an airstrip – is part of Australian mythology. The Sandakan death march, in which 2000 weak prisoners were forced to trudge along 260 kilometres of jungle tracks, is ‘the greatest single atrocity committed against Australians in war’, according to the Australian War Memorial. Of about a thousand Australians forced to make the trek, only six survived.27
The sufferings of the local Borneans have not made it into the Australian history books. About 16 per cent of the population were killed during the occupation.28 The Hakkas bore the brunt. Before the war, true to their pro-British history, they had raised funds for the war effort, donating to the Spitfire Fund. Now, colonised by these new masters, they began to organise. Within six months of the occupation, they had formed a society: the Salvation of Overseas Chinese. Its inaugural meeting was held in the house of Wong Yun Tshin, then working for the Jesselton Ice and Power Co., a de facto electricity board.29 (It is unlikely that this Wong is a relative of Penny. Wong is a common name.) Wong became the treasurer of the association. When the Japanese announced a plan to conscript Chinese men for military service and force Chinese women into sexual slavery, the society began to plan a rebellion. It was an extraordinary effort. Against the odds, the uprising succeeded in taking back Jesselton (Kota Kinabalu) from the Japanese, holding it for days. The recapture was brutal, the consequences awful. Entire village populations were killed. Many were tortured, which resulted in the uncovering of incipient plans for anothe
r rebellion. This, too, was ruthlessly put down through summary execution.30
Francis Yit Shing Wong, Penny Wong’s father, was Lai Fung Shim’s second-eldest child. According to his birth certificate he was born just before the Japanese occupation, on 25 July 1941. In fact, he believes he is at least a year or two older, and the certificate a later fabrication. He has dim memories of the war, more than would be expected if he was an infant. His main memory is hunger. Another is the strength of his mother.
They were living in Sandakan. Francis’s father and most of the family had died, probably of beriberi and malnutrition, leaving Lai Fung Shim responsible for raising five children: Francis, his infant sister Sau Ying and brother Yit Hing, and his siblings by his father’s first wife, half-brother Yet Leun and half-sister Sau Yu. He remembers his mother having a cut on her leg that wouldn’t heal due to malnutrition. She would drag herself across the ground in search of food. Francis recalls being bitten in the face by a starving dog after he was told to guard some coconuts. With no medicines to treat the wound, it became dangerously infected. One day he was sitting by the road when a Japanese soldier noticed his swollen face. The soldier picked him up, put him on his bicycle and took him to a clinic, where the wound was treated. The soldier gave him a meal, returned him home and visited over the days ahead to dress the wound. Francis thinks this soldier probably saved his life. The lesson he drew, and passed on to Penny, was ‘God may send an enemy to save you’.31
Only the male children survived the war. In these desperate circumstances the two sisters, mere infants, were abandoned by the side of a road. The hope was they would be taken in by another family that could feed them. Penny Wong is reluctant to have this fact printed. ‘People will judge. And you can’t judge what happens in that kind of deprivation.’ At different times, the family has searched for them, without success.
Lai rarely spoke at length about what she had been through, but her characteristic response when anyone complained was, ‘It can’t be as bad as the war.’ Wong feels the impact of this family memory. She refers to an ability to put aside her emotions, acquired partly at her grandmother’s knee and partly through her experiences following the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the bullying at school. It is, she says, ‘a habit or capacity which is not necessarily emotionally helpful but is quite useful’. When things are challenging, ‘I just focus on doing for a bit. Doing what needs to be done. I feel later.’
It is normal in Chinese culture to show respect for elders, but in the Wong family it went further. Lai was not only the head of the family in which Penny grew up, but its saviour. She was venerated not only by her own descendants but also by her stepson and their families. She particularly loved Penny, the first female grandchild. Toby and Penny grew up calling her ‘Poh Poh’, their beloved grandmother. Only in adulthood did Wong realise that her full name – Penelope Ying-Yen Wong – had been chosen at her grandmother’s request. She is named after Lai’s first daughter, Sau Ying: the girl abandoned by the roadside and never heard from again.
Asked whether she identifies, on her father’s side, as Malaysian, Chinese or Hakka, Wong is momentarily stumped. She dismisses the Malaysian identity. The culture in which she was raised was far removed from that of mainland Malaysia. The nation was barely a decade old when she was born. ‘I grew up thinking of myself as half-Chinese and half-Australian,’ she says. The Chinese identity does not imply any yearning for or loyalty to the present-day nation of China. Rather, it is an ethnic and cultural identification.
Her life story, and the way she talks about herself, makes another conclusion tempting. It is to her Hakka heritage that she frequently refers. This is both implicit and explicit. Within the family, it is said that Penny has inherited her grandmother’s determination. It was her grandmother whom she referred to in her maiden speech, describing ‘Madam Lai Fung Shim’ as ‘humble and compassionate but the strongest person I have ever known’.32 The words ‘guest people’, with all their nuance, resonate with Penny Wong’s childhood feelings of alienation. The Hakka are the strong, hardworking outsiders, the perpetual ‘guests’ who, with generations of discrimination and persecution behind them, have learned to show a tough face to the world. Through talent and determination, they end up at the centre of history. They initiate change, and they refuse to be only victims.
In these characteristics, along with the known facts of her ancestry, Penny Wong is surely Hakka.
*
In 1945 Sabah was liberated by the Australian 9th Division – the Rats of Tobruk – through three seaborne invasions involving more than 80,000 soldiers. To the Borneans the British were their former colonial masters, but the Australians were their liberators.
Borneans were left with a ravaged country. Roads, buildings and communication links had been destroyed. The BNBC lacked the resources to rebuild and handed North Borneo to the British Crown, which was preoccupied by its own post-war reconstruction. The young Francis Yit Shing Wong relied on a war victim fund for his early education. His mother worked as a domestic servant for a British family to support him and his brothers. It was always clear to him that the only path to improve his life was education: ‘I had to do well to get out of the level of poverty … Circumstances make you the man you are. You have to give your best.’33
A photo shows Francis Wong, aged about fifteen, beside his mother. She is diminutive – a tiny woman in a patterned dress, the wartime trauma only a few years in her past. She is unsmiling, but he perches on the arm of her chair, bounding with optimism and energy.34 Another shows him grinning broadly. The resemblance to Penny is striking.35
He was a scholarship boy, a border at the Sabah College Hostel, and by 1961, at the nominal age of twenty, a prefect. The hostel warden’s written reference described him as having ‘character and bearing’, making him a ‘leader among his fellow students … He is a young man who has a high sense of duty, which, I am sure, will bear him in good stead in the walk of life he may choose’.36 Another reference, written by the headmaster of his high school, records him as having impressed with a ‘discerning mind and a sensible approach to study’.37 These references were written with a purpose. Francis Wong had applied to come to Australia to study under the Colombo Plan. It was to be the transformative opportunity of his life.
The first Colombo Plan ran for thirty years from its inception in 1951. At its core was a scheme in which the most academically able from emerging Asian and Pacific nations were sponsored to study in Commonwealth countries. It was not only philanthropic. Part of the motivation was an attempt to win the hearts and minds of young professionals as a safeguard against communism. In 1961 Francis arrived in Australia and enrolled in the recently established Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Adelaide. His student records show he was admitted on the strength of his school marks and a post-school certificate course.38 He passed most of his subjects with credits or distinctions, and in 1965 was approved to do honours. He was by now something of a star, promoted as an exemplar of the Colombo Plan. The Advertiser carried an item headed ‘University award to Asian’, reporting that he had ‘distinguished himself’ by being recommended for the James Hardie Prize in architecture.39 He was written up in the Sabah press as ‘a future Sabah architect’ who had done ‘very well in his recent third-year examination’.40 His honours thesis was a proposal for a technical college in Sabah. He explained in his thesis report that there were no facilities for higher education in Sabah.41 Francis Wong was an optimist. His experiences in Australia had convinced him of the benefits of education, and of globalisation. Now, he was determined to make a contribution to the future of his country.
Jane Chapman must still have been grieving the death of her parents when, sometime in the early 1960s, a friend who was studying architecture at the University of Adelaide introduced her to Francis Yit Shing Wong. It apparently never occurred to Jane to allow race to be a barrier to love. Jane, according to Penny Wong, has never been racist. ‘You know, some people have
it, and some people don’t have it, that sense of difference. She just doesn’t have it.’ As for her sisters, ‘They loved Dad.’
Jane and Francis married before he had finished his degree. Jane changed her name to Wong and travelled with him back to his home. Staying in Australia was never an option for the new couple. The White Australia policy was still in force. Even if Francis had been able to find a way to settle in Australia, he was the hope of his mother, the consolation for all she had suffered, the realisation of a better future.
Francis Wong’s degree was conferred on 10 May 1967, by which time the student who had entered university as a British subject in the protectorate of North Borneo was a citizen of the newly formed country of Malaysia. He was part of a generation of returning Colombo scholars, many of them with European wives, who saw it as their mission to rebuild Sabah and help to form the new nation.
In this new Malaysia the Chinese professionals of Borneo were at a triple disadvantage. First, they were remote from peninsular Malaysia. Second, they were mainly Christians in a Muslim-dominated nation. Third, the constitution gave ethnic Malays preference in education and employment. Chinese-Malaysians were second-class citizens. In this context, according to a history of architecture in Sabah, Francis Wong was ‘the epitome of the manner of cosmopolitan, professional free-thinker, and agent of modernisation that the Australian training program had sought to produce’.42 An Australian education, together with the fact that Colombo Plan students were selected purely on academic merit, was credited for infusing Sabah architecture with an egalitarian spirit and ‘a peculiarly Australian preoccupation with fair play and the levelling of the field through rules of order and due process’. This was ‘a hedge against possible political pressures and restrictions in a context of growing nationalist and racial chauvinism’.43
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