Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2018. 219 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$17.73, cloth. ISBN 978-981-4722-92-6.
Ding Yan, a young woman from Jiangsu Province in northern China, newly married into a reputable scholar family, moves with her husband, Wang Fuwen, to Surabaya in the far reaches of the Nanyang. The year is 1929 and a job offer to run a school, even if it is at the edges of the Chinese world, is not to be lightly dismissed. However, once there, the couple realizes that the sugar businessmen sponsoring the school are in deep financial trouble. Their son is born in the midst of these severe uncertainties, and the couple decide in 1931 to work their way home to China.
The boy is Wang Gungwu.
The family has means enough to get to Singapore. While there, Wang manages to secure a job in Ipoh, up the western Malayan coast, as assistant inspector for Chinese schools. And so, it is in Ipoh that the boy grows up. Looking back eighty years later, his son would reflect on this decision to move to Ipoh: “In his mind, this was [a] staging post on the way to China. Little did he know that Malaya would be his and his wife’s resting place and China would become a long shadow for his son” (21). Malaya may have been his childhood home, but the family saga was always that they were working their way back to the motherland. Home, for him therefore, is “not here.” Against these sentiments, Wang Gungwu’s life story is set.
In many ways, his explorations as a young scholar would extend across exactly this geographical space—and deep into the past. No student of East and Southeast Asia since the 1960s has been able to avoid his informed writings on China’s past connections with its surroundings, and on those very surroundings.
Since he is generally known as a polite, polished, and private person, it comes as a very pleasant surprise that an autobiography now appears from his hand. First conceived and written for family consumption, this wonderfully affective volume is now available to the public.
Typically, what this humble professor and master historian gives us are narrations, not only of his formative years, but of those years illustrated by the political and economic calamities of the times and by the continuity and centrality of family life across generations.
By ending the story in 1949, what Wang Gungwu achieves with this rare gem of a book is to disallow his many scholarly accomplishments later in life to draw attention away from the prominence his parents had in his life, and the sense of history across space and time he was imbued with, through exchanges with his dutiful mother and through the character and choices of his relatively reticent father. Highly appreciative of his mother’s wish to educate him on his family’s values and history, Wang Gungwu includes in this book, and to good effect, sections from his mother’s autobiographical writings, translated by him.
What made him decide to share the story of his family with the rest of us amounts to a critique of the discipline of History in itself:
while we talk grandly of the importance of history, we are insensitive to what people felt and thought who lived through any period in past time. We often resort to literature to try and capture moments of joy and pain, and that can be a help to imagine parts of one’s past. But we have too few stories of what people actually experienced. Focusing on local heritage is a beginning. Encouraging people to share their lives might follow. I began to think that what I wrote for my children could be of interest to people who are not family. So I set out to finish my story and have taken it to the time when I left Ipoh in 1949 to study at the newly established University of Malaya in Singapore (1-2).
His mother’s influence on him was clearly strong, but as is often the case, the child looks back and wishes his father had allowed himself to be more intimate. There is a lesson here, even for the most dutiful of fathers among us, that our children need to be close to us as well.
But what I missed most of all was to hear my father talk to me about personal things, about his dreams and what it was like when he was growing up. I sometimes wished that he did not live so close to his ideal of a Confucian father and showed me something of his real self. I would have loved to know how he turned from child to adult in the turbulent times he lived through. Perhaps it is that sense of loss that has driven me to tell this story” (2). That longing was probably made all the stronger by the sense of being away from home. As he noted, “Ours is a first generation nuclear family (4).
Apart from the influence of family conditions, the early life of Wang Gungwu as told in Home is Not Here stirs deep reflection, directly or indirectly, on how people survived the chaos of that time period. Given the overwhelming concern of historical writing with nationalist matters in the 1950s and later, details of the lives lived by non-Europeans in the late colonial era are often simplified into tropes. For this last reason, Wang Gungwu’s reflections on his early life and on the travails of the people portrayed in his book, hold hidden value not only for scholars, but for young people of our times.
Ending the book in 1949 does suggest the beginning of a new era—for him and for the region. His family’s return to China had not worked out and they had had to move back to Ipoh by the end of 1948. Wang Gungwu then entered the newly opened University of Malaya in October 1949 in Singapore, and there a reorientation of his mind began. But as we know, and as he would certainly agree, in reality, breaks and continuities are not all that easy to distinguish from each other.
Ooi Kee Beng
Penang Institute, George Town