Durians Are Not the Only Fruit

by Wong Yoon Wah

  Be that as it may, the Nature that Wong, I and others of our generation lived close to became increasingly parcelled, methodised. Even in Malaysia with her large forest reservations, the contact with dew, the sough of winds, the cool scintillating waters of a mountain stream, a drop of rain rolling off a yam leaf used as an umbrella, are reduced by an increasingly urban lifestyle, a gathering into small towns and the conurbations of expanding state and federal capitals. Texts like Durians Are Not the Only Fruit and The New Village that recount ‘Nature as nurture’, in a context of migrant history and coming to terms with the colonial and national hopes, re-construction and construction, are especially valuable as analysing the resulting complexity yields fresh ideas, definitions and paradigms relevant to various other areas of study.

  Wong’s essays have a rich, galloping descriptive power, construing subjects ranging from ‘The Queen and the Concubine’ (mangosteen and rambutan), ‘Smelly Beans and Question Marks, ‘Feed at the Raffles’, ‘Cathedrals of the Tropics’ (the rain tree), ‘The Oldest Rubber Tree, ‘Tembusu’, to ‘Return to the River of Fireflies’ and a series of Revisitings that conclude the volume. The satisfactions they give the reader apart, there are lessons both for the general reader and the student of cross-cultural studies.

  There are elements in that environment that yield fresh images, symbols and metaphors and some of the vagaries connected with how established, customary practices metamorphose, acquire new names and acceptance. A good example of this last is from the “Hakka dish that comes from leicha”:

  “From a simple Hakka beverage, it’s evolved into a delicacy; from a tea drink only seen in the homes of one dialect group, it’s become a symbol of our multi-cultural society, a fashionable food suitable for entertaining. The changes that leicha has gone through, from ultra-local to international, is a model of the spread of Chinese culture, and how it has been able to take root in foreign lands, melding with local customs while also showing how Chinese culture outside China can merge with Western elements to create something new…” (29–30)

  ‘Thunder in a Bowl’ traces the journey of names and changes that turned leicha into an international dish in the Chinese diaspora and beyond. We see how misreadings can, and do, take on a distinctive, vigorous, enterprising life of their own. Thus we have “thunder tea rice …an overseas Chinese speciality” (34) for which Wong reproduces a recipe as well as method of preparation. Additionally the style of preparation and presentation, as well as some of the ingredients, are traced to the circumstances shaped by colonial times. “Leicha sailed from Jieyang in Guangdong to Nanyang, where a different environment and post-colonial society transformed it from a drink to a filling meal for the working classes” (40). Such encounters leading to cultural fusion are readily and most visibly exemplified in food. Barring religious dietary restrictions, the boundaries and criteria here are dictated by taste, by preference. Thus the freedom to mix vegetables, meat, fish and spices and modes of preparation, all to better the results. Cuisines travel easily across cultures and geographies. To alter or to invent is to add. And the benefits move from arithmetic to algebra to calculus, strengthen the bonding multi-ethnic peoples. Wong notes a classic instance of how:

  “Tossing yusheng may sound like a Cantonese custom, but no one in Guangzhou or Hong Kong will have heard of it. It originates in Malaya and combines many cultures—acceptable to all, whether Malay, Indian, Arabic or otherwise. Nothing in yusheng could offend any particular group, as it consists mostly of local and imported vegetables and fruits, including shredded carrots and radishes, pomelo, fried dough sticks, and the fish itself, usually imported salmon or local mackerel. This has spread through the mass populace, becoming an important element of business, society and politics. The mixture of imported and local ingredients also symbolises internationalism, the arrival of people and cultures from all parts of the world.” (59)

  Thus the unique soft power is released and absorbed. This sharing is becoming a custom that embraces other significant occasions such as Hari Raya, Deepavali and Christmas, all of which have religious elements, thus fortifying and reframing goodwill in a vital area. It is clear in Wong’s work that the many traditions from China became pluralistic upon arrival in Southeast Asia, vaulting divisions of religion or ethnicity.

  All this is the result of different peoples settling with their culture in a rich tropical environment. It creates a reality which, when it enters literature, is for Wong a form of ‘magic realism’ (see M. H. Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms, 1993) rising out of:

  “the tropical rainforest, Nanyang and colonialism…three conditions—natural, cultural and political—that have given rise to our version of magic realism…causing the region to possess a mysticism that mingles with everyday life…the plants and animals found here, all have a surreal feel to them.” (45)

  Art, including literature, imitates life. But art, too, imitates life. On the level of community, the one truly fascinating result is the Peranakans. They adopted much that was Malay: language, cuisine, the dondang sayang, the pantun, chewing serai, wearing the sarong and baju. But they maintained a core Chineseness despite assimilating much from the other. They provide a unique instance of cross-cultural assimilation. As Wong reminds us, when the Chinese set down roots in a strange land, intermingling with the local customs and culture, the results can be magical too.

  These broad sweeps of mind and imagination engaging with the immigrant experience are complemented by insights useful for understanding the reach and vitality of language, a matter of first importance in the creation of a literature. We know that languages appropriate each other. In this regard, English owes some of its richness to the number of languages it has taken from. But more important,

  “Language contains elements specific to place and culture. The Chinese diaspora, responding to a changed environment, have had to alter the structure of their language in order to truly reflect their new experiences and the world around them. This has created something called huawen, the Chinese language, instead of zhongwen, the language of China.” (32)

  So too the term for Chinese immigrants overseas:

  “Overseas Chinese, ethnic Chinese, huaqiao, huayi, huaren, haiwai huaren, Chinese diaspora, and so forth. Each term has its merits, and also its limitations. The Chinese identity is constantly changing…” (43)

  Apart from such re-orientations, honing of terms and labels—for classificatory accuracy—and the warp and woof of individual essays, the reader soon notices that most of Wong’s most acute comments and tight phrasing are directly related to the comprehensive intensity of observation. The pucuk paku has a special place in his poetry and essays. He watched it grow, harvested and ate it regularly, and liked it. He obviously had studied its structure, texture, and especially the tip of the stem, the part that uncurled as it grew, in all this responding to its suggestiveness.

  “Whether while picking, washing or cooking the plant, or even when it’s served at the table, you can’t help noticing its elegant structure, its intricate, enchanting patterns. Naturally, this fern has made its way into their artwork, especially their tribal handicrafts. In 1974, when I returned to Singapore from America, I noticed pucuk paku in the forest beside Nantah, in the vegetable market, even growing amongst the grass by the stream that flowed past my house. I’m always moved when I encounter the question mark of this fern, its interrogation of the earth and its inhabitants. I couldn’t resist composing a poem in its honour:” (65–66)

  There is a great deal of Wong history here. But before unravelling it, here is the poem he wrote:

  1.

  As a child

  The December monsoons

  Brought daily storms.

  Ferns like children released from school

  Raised both hands high in question marks

  In valley and marshland

  Wading across water,

  Children anxious about the homework in their schoolbags,

  The ferns cling tightly to thei
r queries of the earth

  Afraid the floods will wash them away.

  2.

  Before dinner

  A great pan of fried pucuk paku

  Reaches from the morass of Malay sauce

  Holding up giant question marks

  And the whole family

  Out of all the food before us

  Most loves to pluck the question marks with our chopsticks And devour them

  Because when the British or Japanese ruled us

  The towns and jungles of Nanyang

  Had too many tragedies with no answer. (66)

  What Wong has to say stresses the broad suggestiveness of this humble plant. It is able to generate complex responses and draw in the broader context of village life as well as history, precisely because Wong himself has journeyed through all these areas: Malay sauce, British and Japanese colonialism, the precarious life of the fern with which he empathises, the way they bob and weave in the wind, suggesting children released joyously from school, all generated by the question mark that is the end of the pucuk paku. Wong has selected from the full content of his life, invoked by this reconnection. The moment is layered, moving from past, present and the future, which is there because he will encounter this humble plant again. The plant is featured in the design for the black ceramic pots famously produced in Kuala Kangsar. For Wong, the design represents a “journey of vegetation from nature into art, and thus a powerful symbol of Malay culture”. (67)

  The mind playing upon subject and theme and the metaphors embedded in them, such as the durian, the saga tree, or the neat determination of marauding ants, are released in both the poetry of The New Village and the prose of Durians Are Not the Only Fruit. The vividness of his accounts, whether the focus is the Nyonya dumpling, the rain tree, the tembusu or the rubber tree kingdom, constructs both connotative and denotative responses. Items such as the tree taken from nature become correlatives. They are then manipulated to modulate and extend significance, as for instance, references to old, dignified trees which stand as guardians of our history.

  “Full of the spirit of our native soil, the two century-old tembusu trees in the Singapore Botanic Gardens continue to withstand tropical rainstorms. They’ve seen the end of the colonial era, independence, urbanisation, global warming. And they will continue to watch as the land around them changes, because they have another hundred years to live.” (132)

  The remarkable point about these essays is not that each succeeds vividly in delivering what it sets out to do, whether growing up in Perak, the hierarchy of fruits, re-visiting a colony of fireflies, or the insect and plant life of Nantah’s Yunnan Garden, and how each has impacted his life. It is the embracing spirit at work, a special learning and doing. Firstly, through acute, sensitive observation, it consolidates that compressive sense of seasonal time and place, turning them into continuities and into home. Secondly, it converts observation into understanding and then distils it into exemplifying metaphor and symbol. The issues and pressures generated by the Emergency (1948 – 60)6 interfered with and distorted daily rhythms, and spawned suspicion of the Chinese, especially those in the countryside, thus fuelling racial and other tensions. It was traumatic for those like the young Wong, pitched into a colonial world, in a conflict that was not quite war, and not quite peace.

  EDWIN THUMBOO

  Department of English Language and Literature

  Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

  National University of Singapore

  1. Given its propensity to state, illustrate, discuss and urge a point of view, the word ‘essay’ has been used by other media: the photographic essay, the pictorial essay and the film essay.

  2. This phrase is taken from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in The Sacred Wood. It would be intriguing to consider what could be subsumed under ‘the mind of East Asia’, or ‘the mind of South Asia’, each inspired and dominated by Chinese and Indian history and cultural influences respectively.

  3. Pollard, D. E. ‘The Chinese Essay.’ In Encyclopaedia of the Essay, edited by Tracy Chevalier, 374. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997.

  4. This is in sharp contrast to the Indians, whose migration was more global because it followed the roots of the British Empire: to South Africa, the Caribbean, including the British Guiana, Mauritius, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore and Fiji.

  5. They could be moments of epiphany, Bible-inspired or based on other intense, life-shaping experiences.

  6. The Emergency, or the Anti-British National Liberation War according to the Malayan Communist Party, was declared in 1948 after three European plantation managers were killed in Perak. Other attacks soon followed, the best known being that in Batang Kali, Selangor. This was because on 12 December 1948 unarmed villagers were shot by British troops during a counterinsurgency operation.

  Translator’s Note

  IN ONE OF those coincidences life sometimes throws up, my mother was born in the same small town as Dr Wong Yoon Wah—Temoh, in Perak, about 50 kilometres from Ipoh, so unimportant today that the KTM train goes right past it without stopping. I have been on that train, chugging along at a stately pace from the crumbling grandeur of Ipoh’s Majestic Station Hotel, which looks like someone put a scale model of Singapore’s Istana over Ipoh train station and then didn’t maintain it for forty years. As we passed my mother’s hometown, I tried to see as much of it as I could, but only got an impression of coconut trees and faded clapboard houses. My grandfather had a shop near the station, my mother once told me, but I couldn’t work out which building it might have been. Perhaps it’s no longer there.

  My mother wasn’t in Temoh all that long, but still, it’s where my grandfather collaborated with the Japanese occupiers and where my grandmother died and where all the things happened which ended, one way or another, with the family coming to Singapore. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t left for another country, if part of the family were still in that tiny place instead of having thrown in their lot altogether with the big city. My mother doesn’t know anyone there any more, but I’d like to see where she spent the first part of her childhood, how they lived. My aunt had a pet goat. It was that kind of place.

  This is the side of Southeast Asia that Dr Wong describes, with a particular emphasis on the villages and rubber plantations of Perak where he spent the first two decades of his life. This is a place away from shopping malls and candy-coloured condominiums. Another what if: Say the last 50 years of explosive economic growth hadn’t happened. Where would Singapore and Malaysia be? It’s a salutary reminder of how far we’ve come, to read Dr Wong’s account of a childhood spent not taking electricity for granted, relying on fighting fish for entertainment and firewood for heat. Yet at no point does he seem unhappy or deprived—this is just how his childhood was, and bits of it sound rather magical. He spent many hours in a rambutan tree, eating all the fruit within reach. I don’t know anyone who’s done this.

  I am writing this on a computer that I can’t imagine living without. This is an alarming thought, the extent to which I have organised my life around a metal box full of wires (and, via the Internet, to many other metal boxes full of wires). Someone told me most of the Internet is stored in a warehouse somewhere in North Carolina. I don’t know enough about technology to gauge if this is true, but it made me realise how little I actually understand about the world I inhabit. The world of Dr Wong’s childhood was significantly smaller than mine, but he understood every square inch of it.

  In anatomising the culture of Singapore and Malaysia, Dr Wong Yoon Wah takes the unusual approach of turning his gaze away from the people of Nanyang, and examining instead what surrounds us: the fruits we grow, the food we eat, the trees and animals that thrive in our midst. Along the way, he throws us fascinating cultural insights—how ‘thunder tea rice’, which contains neither thunder nor tea, acquired its name; how early settlers used the rain tree to tell the time; how the behavi
our of ants can tell us when a monsoon is about to arrive.

  What defines who we are as a people? Dr Wong implies that instead of a single answer, we owe our identity to the things around us. He takes us through each in turn, examining its meaning from a whimsical perspective: humidity, durians, Nyonya dumplings, rubber trees, mosquitoes—each element of life in the tropics is gently prodded and dissected.

  • • •

  When I told my mother I was translating the writing of someone else from Temoh, she got quite excited and wanted to know all about Dr Wong. In such a small place, she must have known him. I started by saying he’d gone to Peiyuan Secondary School—and her face fell. Oh, she said, that’s one of the Chinese schools. I wouldn’t have met him, then. We all went to the English schools.

  This illustrates the deep fault lines that run through Singaporean and Malaysian society. Even between two people of the same ethnicity, other markers such as education and language can present an insuperable boundary. It’s easy to imagine how many divisions there are in countries which successive waves of immigration have filled with a population diverse in any number of ways; harder to come up with ways of bridging these gaps.

  While writing this translator’s note, I started imagining what would happen if my mother actually met Dr Wong. Would they get on? What language would they even speak? He knows English, of course, and my mother has Cantonese (but not Mandarin)—would that be enough? And would their memories of Temoh have anything in common?

  My mother will not, before this, have been able to read any of Dr Wong’s essays. Will they be more accessible now that they’re in English? My job as translator is only to move them from one language to another—but this project, more than any other, has reminded me that my work is about much more, that texts exist as part of cultures and mindsets and all kinds of other patterns of thought, and those can be much harder to make explicable to outsiders.

  What I enjoy about Dr Wong’s writing is how he focusses not on these divisions, but rather on what brings us together. He enjoys talking about fish, and how it crosses boundaries; no religion has an objection to it, whereas other meats can be problematic to one group or another. In a way, that’s all we can hope for in society, finding enough common ground that we can function, groping our way towards accommodating each other’s differences.