Durians Are Not the Only Fruit

by Wong Yoon Wah

  • • •

  Of the two Banir rubber plantations my family owned, one was contiguous with a durian orchard, a triangular area occupying one or two hectares, next to a big river, which was not suitable for planting rubber. It contained 50 or 60 durian trees and some other tropical fruit trees. As the plantation was remote, it was the most efficient use of labour to harvest all the varieties of fruit at the same time, thus they designed plantations so all the fruits on one plot would ripen at the same time.

  Because it lay between the big river and our plantation, the orchard appeared to belong to my family—but actually, we never found out who its owner was. All we knew was that during the durian season, he arrived on a small sampan from the opposite shore. Rubber tappers like us began work at six in the morning, and would often make off with the best durians by the time the Malay labourers arrived at seven. When I was in primary school, as soon as the air grew fragrant with the scent of durian, my mother would arrive home each day with a big sack of durians, and for the duration of the season we had fresh, free fruit every day. A durian eaten on the day it falls from the tree is especially fragrant; the next day, its flavour is much diminished. My family never let a durian sit uneaten overnight.

  I believe that while the British made their plans to grow durians, they must have asked experts to study the many varieties, collecting species from all over, and so the durian plantation near us had fruits of every description, round or oval, deep green or pale yellow, some as big as watermelons, others as little as a couple of fists. And their flavours also covered a huge spectrum, impossible to describe. My favourite memory is of the few trees on a slope by the river, which produced flat, oval fruit, scanty flesh of a pale green hue, sweet with a faintly bitter taste, which was hard to forget. Two other trees in the centre of the orchard were golden yellow inside; they had what was known as ‘dry yellow flesh’, which many regard as the finest variety of durians. We were so familiar with these trees that we knew the taste of each fruit, and when harvesting them, always picked the ones we liked best, ignoring the durians lying beneath less favoured trees.

  When I was a child, durians were practically our staple food. My mother cooked glutinous rice to eat with the durians—an especially tasty combination that often became our dinner.

  • • •

  The British colonies have disappeared, just like Banir vanishing off the map. I’ve heard that our rubber plantations and the orchard next door have been obliterated—soon after independence, they were sold to Chinese businessmen, who tore up the ground to mine for tin. The area has now reverted to tropical rainforest, as it was before the colonialists arrived.

  My best durian memories come from the colonial era. When I write about my memories of this period, the results are labelled ‘post-colonial literature’. And so I think my recollections in this area must be called the ‘Post-colonial Taste of Durians’.

  Banir Blues

  WHEN BANIR FIRST disappeared from the maps, it made me so anxious that I gathered all the maps in the house and examined them carefully. My panic was justified. In my entire collection, only one—bought around 1994 from Kuala Lumpur’s Popular Bookstore, with Chinese place names—contained the word ‘Banir’, and all its Chinese names were written the same way I remembered from childhood; a compendium of shared Chinese memories. In the years since then, I’ve read it frequently, and each time has brought with it many recollections.

  • • •

  Banir’s English rubber plantation headquarters consisted of a series of white buildings built in the European style, by the side of the main North-South trunk road. To their right was accommodation for workers in the rubber-processing factory. All the smallholders had to pass through this place, with its imposing white gates and the imperialistic air of belonging to our protector.

  Around six every morning, we Chinese people rode our bicycles to work on the land we owned, and each time we passed through those gates into the British company’s headquarters, its buildings and great flat roads were brightly illuminated, even though we were in the middle of a tropical forest, and electricity was not widely available in the 1940s. The European-style mansions and clubhouses, flooded with light, were like a child’s vision of paradise. After we had cycled past all that into the Chinese territories, the flat roads vanished altogether and we were back in a dark, primitive world. The winding roads were full of potholes, full of mud and tree roots that resembled giant snakes. Our bicycles bounced over them, and frequently tumbled over into the ditch, dragging us with them. At the time, how I hated the dark Chinese territory, and longed for the brightness of our colonisers.

  As an adult, when I remember this contrast, I can understand how the white people derived a sense of superiority, how they came to believe that colonialism brought culture and wealth, civilisation and light to the darkness of Nanyang. They wanted to rescue us from ignorance, poverty and backwardness. But we have grown up now and this is how we view this period: our colonisers stripped Nanyang of its natural resources, leaving behind only shady avenues, grand mansions and clubhouses.

  • • •

  Banir’s rubber plantations, whether owned by the British or Chinese, used double rows of pineapple plants as a way of demarcating territory. This arrangement became significant, by unintentionally creating yet another crop for landowners. For example, a three-hectare square requires several hundred pineapple plants to border it. As a child helping my mother with her work amongst the rubber trees, my happiest memories involve coming upon ripe pineapples (with stealing durians from the neighbouring orchards in second place). In order to avoid the troublesome trip home every day, many Chinese built a small attap house on their land and lived there. Outside there would always be a small yard for growing vegetables. And so several people spent their whole lives within the rubber plantation. This was a masterstroke on the part of the British—in order to make you spend your days producing the rubber that was so commercially valuable at the time, they provided you with a formless cage, and in order to stave off hunger, you voluntarily stayed inside it.

  Several of the hectares my family owned bordered the British rubber plantation. I often stood behind the row of pineapples, watching the white man’s trees. Sometimes I even walked amongst them, enjoying the sensation of freedom and comfort. They’d used herbicide to eliminate all the weeds, and only fallen leaves lay on the ground. The tree trunks were smooth and shiny; as soon as the labourers broke the bark, they’d use plant medicine to stop it from scarring. Back on the other side of the border, the Chinese trees were choked with weeds growing practically to the height of a man, and dead or half-collapsed trees were simply left to rot. Of course, the many hues of mould and moss on a dead trunk, like a rainbow, were fascinating to a child. Out of greed, many tapped their trees even when damp from rain, leaving the trunks wounded and badly scarred.

  Standing on the boundary between the British plantation and my family’s land, I yearned to be at the centre, and hated the periphery with a passion. The centre was a symbol of modern life, while the margin was backwardness. These fallen trees, the hill-mounds of white ants, cogon grass—all of these spoke of how the people of Nanyang required modern Western financial and management knowledge, and needed to be rescued from our ignorance and poverty.

  Today, I live at the heart of society, but often force myself to dwell at the margins to think. The periphery is a place of reflection, bringing a double perspective—a site of rejection and opposition that offers you another choice.

  • • •

  Banir has disappeared from the maps completely. Many years ago, when I drove northwards through Malaysia, I passed by it, and discovered that the majestic gates had disappeared, the European-style plantation offices and magnificent white mansions and factories had been burnt, a symbol of the success of the anti-colonial and anti-Western imperialist movements. The shady roads, the opulent bungalows, the wide rubber fields—all have now been swallowed by the tropical jungle. The train station to the
west of Banir is also fast disappearing beneath the weeds, because the train no longer stops at Banir—there are too few people here, and there’s no longer the need to transport rubber and tin. This is an abandoned colonial plantation; it’s a desolate scene that has appeared in many places post-independence, as if in mockery.

  My Marginal Home

  MY WHOLE LIFE has been inextricably linked to marginality. Every place I’ve lived, both geographically and culturally, as well as my viewpoints and the literature I research, all of them rest on a border. And so my poetry and essays are a recollection of a life lived on the margins.

  My grandparents emigrated from China to Nanyang during the Qing Dynasty. My parents were born in colonial Malaya (present day Malaysia); I was too, in 1941, in Temoh, Perak. This small town sits on the west side of the mountain range that cleaves Malaysia from north to west, on the fringes of the primeval jungle. In the past, because it was on both the North-South trunk road and railway, and on the border of Kinta Valley with its tin-mining and rubber-tapping activities, most people knew or had been to this place.

  About six miles to the north lay Kampar, a centre of commerce, while the government seat of Tapah was six miles to the south. We went to Kampar to see movies, buy Western goods, go to school or see the doctor, while our parents had to make the trip to the colonial government offices in Tapah to pay property or land taxes or apply for various official documents. When I was 12, my mother brought me there to get my identity card, and I also received my citizenship there. Mandarin and Chinese dialects were seldom heard there; everyone spoke English or Malay. As a child, I envied the people living in that centre of power. The commercial centre was attractive too. We visited Kampar, but when the delicious food had been eaten, when the movie ended, when our classes were over, we had to return to our home on the border, where there was nothing but the river, vegetable farms, tin mines, rubber plantations, and the troops keeping order for the colonial government.

  Outsiders refer to Temoh as ‘Sixth Mile’, because we were so marginal, so unimportant, that everything about us had to be defined in relation to the centre. Geographically, commercially, officially—we were on the border, and few people lived there permanently. When I was a child, the number of residents was so small that we practically all knew each other. In secondary school my life was mainly in Kampar, but having to return home when the sky turned dark gave me a sense of being banished to the fringes.

  Being born and growing up in Temoh gave rise to a sense of exile and alienation, not to mention inferiority and deprivation. In order to watch a movie, learn to use an English typewriter or obtain certain documents, I had to take a bus through the hilly rubber forest, to the commercial or governmental centre six miles away where they spoke a higher-class language—and then afterwards return to the border. Many of my classmates were from Kampar, and looked at me with pity. Sometimes there were night-time events at the school, and because the last bus to Temoh left at eight, I had no choice but to stay with one of them. On these occasions, I felt keenly that they were at the centre and I was just a satellite, as if something was being kept from me.

  Going repeatedly from the margin to the centre and back again led to my perceptions, thoughts and imagination moving from inside to out and back again, whether I was observing something, considering it, or simply making it up.

  • • •

  My first home was on the fringes of Temoh, a wooden attap house on the bank of Temoh River. It had a roof of palm-like attap leaves, cut from the trees that grow by the riverside, woven together in such a way as to keep heat and rain out. This was the most common type of roof seen in the villages and towns that surrounded the cities of Malaysia. When it rained, we could distinctly hear water droplets striking the roof, which had the additional benefit of cooling the house. Later, as an adult, I realised that a common trait of those who grow up in the borderlands is the ability to withstand wind and rain.

  Whenever I went out or travelled to school, or returned home from the city centre after classes, I had to follow the tarmac road and cross the bridge over Temoh River. As a result, that road, that bridge, the stretch of dirt road afterwards, all reminded me daily that I lived on the fringes of Temoh town. Coming from Kampar, I had to pass through two town centres before reaching home—reminding me every day of my life that my destiny was to live on the margin of the margin.

  When I became an academic, investigating the centre and periphery in literature, I was actually describing the circumstances of my childhood, not just certain terms used in post-colonial literary theory.

  • • •

  My family had another attap hut in the rubber plantation we owned about three or four miles south of Temoh; the area was called Banir, also located along the road running north and south through Malaysia. Because British investors had once planted swathes of rubber trees in this area, the non-express train stopped here. Today’s maps often don’t even bother marking its location. We owned several hectares of rubber plantations as well as this house, on the boundary of the British landowner’s original grounds. I was in primary school at the time. When I first saw the British rubber plantation, everything in such neat rows, not a stray plant visible, each tree upright and luxuriant, I fell in love with its order. The Chinese plantations, by contrast, looked half-dead, the ground choked with weeds, the tree trunks heavily scarred from being tapped too often. In order to get to our trees, we had to pass by the British rubber company’s magnificent offices, uniformed men guarding their gates. During the Emergency, when the British were at war with the Malayan Communists, there would even be tanks here sometimes. Small landholders like us were reliant on the roads and bridges built by the British to pass through the jungle, and also enjoyed the protection of the British troops. As a child, I felt that the British colonialists, with their knowledge and technology, were bringing light to the dark corners of my country.

  The companies arriving from overseas were large and centralised, while the smallholders were backward in their planting and processing methods, inevitably getting squeezed on the margins, reliant on the centre for survival. My parents acknowledged and respected the business methods of the British. The so-called British hegemony brought about by their superior economic and military power was not just something I learned about in post-colonial theory, but was the reality of my childhood experience.

  • • •

  When I enrolled in Huamin Primary School in Temoh, and subsequently in Kampar’s Peiyuan Secondary School, I thought I was entering the centre, but each time I was disappointed. Both my primary and secondary schools were on the fringes of the rainforest, far from the city centre. Peiyuan was situated high on Kampar Hill, a half-hour walk north along Gopeng Road. En route we’d have to pass by the English-medium Anglo-Chinese School, whose buildings were on both sides of the road. Each time I saw the English school students, they had a kind of pride that made my heart go hollow. The English school was right in the city, while we were up a hill on its periphery. I sensed at the time that Chinese school students were accorded a lower status, and the relative distances of these two schools from the centre seemed symbolic of our differing positions within British colonial society.

  Peiyuan’s location in the suburbs of Kampar made its students feel endangered, rejected. Anglo-Chinese students, secure in the heart of town, were spared this feeling. We were on the fringes of the rainforest, with no access to the material civilisation of the town centre, giving rise to a variety of extreme thoughts. We were engaged in anti-colonial activities and student movements to keep Chinese education alive. In order to fund school-building, we raised money everywhere we could, and organised small study groups. If we were free in the afternoon, we worked on our English and Malay. We had more room for thought to develop. Between 1929 and 1930, Lao She visited Singapore from England. At the time, the bastion of English-medium education in Singapore was Raffles Institution in the city centre (where Raffles City is located today), while the Chinese High School was loc
ated far away on Bukit Timah Road, then a locale considered to be the distant countryside. No wonder Lao She was startled to discover that our Chinese school students had already developed revolutionary ideas whilst in secondary school. The secondary school, and even university, students he encountered in London had not yet developed such thoughts.

  In colonised countries, where the native people are pushed to the extremities, are neglected, even rejected, this ultimately gives them the space to develop resistance to hegemony, creating a language that encompasses many cultures.