Searching in Kuching

I really didn't want to step on someone's grave, but at some point the paved paths ended.  As I climbed up the hill of graves, looking for my great-grandfather, I had to navigate grass and weeds as the jungle tried to reclaim land in this cemetery in southwest Kuching. As I avoided a tombstone and strode into another landing of graves, I checked again with the Google maps pinned spot, sent by a man in Australia whom I'd never met, which indicated where my great-grandfather, whom I'd also never met, was buried. Even though it was before 10am, the sun was already searing and I'd worked up a sweat. There was not another soul in sight on this random July weekday. And then suddenly I saw the pink tiles that exactly matched a photo I was given and I saw amongst the faded Chinese characters my family name 李. 

I've been in some random places over the years, but this was random even for me. How had I ended up alone in a cemetery on the outskirts of the 10th most populous Malaysian city, a country on the other side of the world where I had no family? Well, apparently once, I did have family there.  I learned last year, in the course of Lee family reunions and talking about family history, that my great-grandfather had lived out his last years in Malaysia. I've long been fascinated by the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia, first writing about it here in 2015, but I'd never realized this had included my family. I was motivated to learn more about him, Lee Leng Jie, more from the historical curiosity rather than from a personal standpoint. Over the years I have surprised myself in evolving into a history buff and gained a decent understanding of the dynamics of East and Southeast Asia in the 20th century. But it is one thing to understand the macro forces, the start and end dates of wars and the names of the winning leaders. It's another thing to examine an individual life amidst historical backdrop, particularly when that individual shares your DNA.

Lee Leng Jie's son became my grandfather, the only grandparent who was alive when I was born. He passed away in 2020, but I had fortunately been able to see him in January of that year.  My grandfather was born in Shanghai. We always thought of ourselves as Shanghainese on that side of the family. He fled to Hong Kong after the Communists won the Civil War (1945-1949), and all five kids including my father were born in Hong Kong. But my grandfather never stopped traveling, and ended up living in Brazil, Sierra Leone and Cote D'Ivoire in search of work, before settling in southern California. When I came into the picture, he was already in a house in Orange County with a two door garage and laminated couches. 

My great-grandfather though was a mystery - my dad thinks he only met Lee Leng Jie, his grandfather, once. Over the course of the year, I learned he had worked for the government before the Civil War. Which government, municipal or provincial or national I'm not sure, but it was definitely the Kuomintang. I don't know what his life was like during World War II, which took place from 1937-1945 in China. I don't know if he was in Shanghai, which the Japanese occupied for nearly the entire war, or if he escaped to the interior. I don't know where he was when WWII ended and the Chinese Civil War sprung up in its place.

The Kuomintang would go on to lose the war to the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Somehow my grandfather and grandmother were able to board a boat to Hong Kong, but my great-grandfather would be arrested by the Communists. Somehow he was released and made it to Hong Kong, but the Kuomintang, who survived in Taiwan, were skeptical of his release. The story goes that he was not welcome in Taiwan and viewed with suspicion, he likely felt he had to watch his back in Hong Kong. So he somehow made his way to Kuching, Sarawak. Like Hong Kong, Sarawak was a British crown colony at the time, with Malaysian independence in 1963 still a decade away. I learned he had a whole family in Kuching - he must have left China with his new wife (not my great-grandmother) and at least one son. He taught at a Chinese school in Kuching. His son would marry a Chinese Sarawak and then go on to secondary school in Melbourne - and that's how I discovered I now have I half-dozen Australian second cousins. 

In July, my ultimate friend Bryan Chong, who is from Kuala Lumpur, brought my team to a tournament in his hometown. Having learned this Malaysian heritage story, it seemed if I was going to make the long journey to Malaysia it was requisite to make a pilgrimage to Kuching. This wasn't exactly straightforward - Kuching is in East Malaysia on the island of Borneo, while Kuala Lumpur is in Peninsular Malaysia, the mainland of Asia, where one could theoretically drive to Thailand and anywhere in Eurasia. In fact, when my great-grandfather arrived, Sarawak wasn't particularly close to Kuala Lumpur politically or culturally, and I think those residents would have been surprised to one day wake up in the same country.  But today it's an hour and a half flight on Air Asia and I may have been the only non-Malaysian on mine. 

Though I cleared customs upon landing in Kuala Lumpur, I was required to through immigration again in Kuching, alongside everyone on my flight. "Why do we have to show our passports for a domestic flight?" I asked the immigration officer. "Because this is Sarawak. We have our own history with Rajah James Brooke," was the officer's reply that attempted to summarize 200 years of history and identity. The reply references a white British mercenary who ended up controlling Sarawak from Kuching and establishing a hereditary dynasty of Brooke Rajahs, objectively a wild story. But I don't have the time or expertise for all that.

Kuching is a river town, centered on where the Sarawak River comes from deep in the Bornean jungle widens as it nears the ocean. I stayed near the old town waterfront, and arrived just in time to capture some of the fleeting sunset. At the waterfront, the river was spanned by a lovely curving bridge. From the bridge, I could see neon lights from the waterfront, mosques with their elegant minarets, and wide tropical trees.

North of the river was the state assembly building, a prominent angular building with a nine pointed-star form crowned by a sweeping umbrella roof, proudly displaying the yellow Sarawak flag and conspicuously lacking the red white and blue Malaysian flag.* In the tropical twilight cool, I could feel energy emanating from the jungles and mountains of the interior mixed with the bustle of the old waterfront. I found myself suspended amidst the familiar and the unknown. As I continued walking through alleys in Kuching's Chinatown, my perceptions kept deviating between parts of Malaysia that feel foreign and those that felt strangely innate. I had an epiphany of the contradictions and paradoxes that make up the modern and historical Malaysian state.

The next morning I took a grab to the closest food spot I could find near my graveyard Google Maps pin. I spoke to my driver in English, then Mandarin before he settled on Cantonese upon learning I had come from Hong Kong. Ironically I had understood his English and Mandarin perfectly well, but his Cantonese had all sorts of inflections that I struggled to interpret. He told me he also spoke Malay, Hokkien, Teochew, Hainanese and "Henghua" which I had never heard of before - and it's a rare occasion when I hear about a Chinese language for the first time. I've heard multilingualism like this amongst Chinese Malaysians a lot, although that shouldn't make it any less impressive. I explained my quest and he asked me what Chinese ethnicity my great-grandfather was. There's a Hokkien cemetery, a Hainan cemetery, Cantonese cemetery and a Christian cemetery all in this area he explained. Cemeteries were mostly ordered by ethnicity. I had no real response. Was there a Shanghainese cemetery? Not that my driver knew of. I wondered what languages my great-grandfather spoke before he arrived here, and what he spoke in Kuching. Did he feel alone, isolated from his community? Surely he had to not only get used to this new tropical country but also learn about these other southern Chinese communities.

I got off at this small "warung" off the road  - basically a standalone semi-outdoors hawker stall - called "Little Coffee House". My breakfast was tea tarik and Sarawak laksa**, a much more lime-forward version of the more famous Singapore laksa. It was extremely flavorful and a fantastic meal to start the day.

And then I started walking off the busy road and into roads that were half jungle. Graves quickly emerged, with the first ones being Christian with prominent crosses. The names were a mix of Malay and Chinese names, with an occasional Portuguese and English surname thrown in. I kept walking past Chinese cemeteries, with not a living soul in sight and only the chirping of jungle birds and the fading din of traffic breaking the silence. The sun was getting punishing. I reached my great grandfather's cemetery and walked up and down. Most graves featured a birthplace in Chinese, and I could read provinces like 江西 Jiangxi， 湖北 Hubei， 湖南 Hunan，浙江 Zhejiang. Not being one of the main southern Chinese ethnicities, my great-grandfather had been grouped into folks from other provinces of China. These are still all considered southern Chinese provinces, but quite distinct from the coastal ones - none of them would have a large enough diaspora in Malaysia to merit their own cemetery. I walked right onto the Google maps pin, but of course the GPS technology is not so precise and Lee Leng Jie was nowhere to be found. I scrambled up and down, looking for tiles and steps that dirt and vegetation was hiding, gingerly stepping around gravestones. Finally I noticed the pink tiles that matched a picture I had been sent. 

And here was my great-grandfather. A picture of him at the top revealed a man with glasses with a wider face than mine, but with some features that I abstractly recognize in my dad. I can't claim to have felt a direct emotional connection to a man I never met and barely knew anything about, but there was something metaphysical there. This surreal feeling set in with the heat, that somehow in this East Malaysian field, there was a direct blood relation to the man buried in the ground and the sweating American guy standing over, who would later blog about this in English.

The gravestone is all in Chinese, listing his year of death as 1968, and his birth town as Xiangtan, Hunan. I had been vaguely aware that he was from Hunan. Despite our family identification as Shanghainese, the Shanghainese roots run just one generation deep. It made me think about how quickly identities can change. In fact, our family's native languages changed each generation, from Hunanese (Xiang) to Shanghainese (Wu) to Cantonese (Yue) to English.

I paid my respects with bows and incense sticks. I wish I had thought to clean up the stone and remove some of the weeds. Who knows how many more years it would be before a descendant reaches that stone again?

My next visit was to the Lee Clan Association. I had hoped to find some primary sources to learn more about the life of my great-grandfather, though with my limited time in Kuching my expectations were low. The Lee Clan Association was my best bet, but I wasn't sure what I was doing when I found it above a working mechanic's garage. I walked up to the third floor and opened an unlocked door into an empty banquet hall. "Hello?" Someone answered from a corner office and I was relieved to find someone who worked there. I explained my story to him, wrote down my great-grandfather's name. "When did he live in Kuching?" the man asked. "He died in 1968. I'm not sure when he arrived." The man laughed. "This association was setup in 1995." I was on a fool's quest to find a needle in a 60 year old haystack. I felt a little bit ridiculous for attempting this haphazard archival search, but it satisfied my desire to give it a real try.

I went back to the old town and found the Chinese History Museum there. The museum was only three rooms, but it gave me a lot of new context on the migrations to Kuching. There was a lot of depth on the southern Chinese languages and dialects that ended up in Kuching and into the brain of my Grab driver. I learned that Heng Hua 興化  is a language from Fujian province, like Hokkien and Fuzhou, but not mutually intelligible with either. 

I still don't know why my great-grandfather ended up in Kuching, or what his life was like there. But learning about the history of the place and visiting it in person, I can make some conjectures. He probably arrived tired, having lived through two major wars, imprisonment and betrayals. He probably knew someone in the city and got a job as a Chinese teacher at a secondary school. He was probably ambitious in his youth, but would have wanted to settle down in some peace in Sarawak. The years he was in Kuching were eventful in their own ways, with some anti-colonial insurgencies, some communist movements, and Malaysian independence in 1961. I suspect he had opinions but didn't want to get too involved, exhausted from a lifetime of political upheaval. He probably learned Cantonese from his time in Hong Kong and used that most of the time in Kuching. He probably missed the food and climate of his youth, but adjusted. Given our family history, he probably picked up other languages too, whatever could help him connect with people. He raised a new family in Kuching, and his children would finish their education in Australia after his death. 

* A Sarawak / East Malaysian independence movement has gained some steam in recent years. I see parallels in its origins to independence sentiments in many places including Alberta, Canada. They've got lots of oil and don't feel represented by the federal government in Kuala Lumpur. 

** which Anthony Bourdain called "breakfast of the gods" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcpO3IHDeSI