Author: CHUNG Yoon Ngan
Date: 05-31-05 10:26
“A‰iŒ³
My village under Japanese occupation
===========================================
我愛我的馬來亞,
馬來亞是我家鄉;
日本來了成苦海,
如今人民受遭殃;
全馬人民怨聲起,
團結一致打日本.
I love my Malaya,
Malaya is my home,
Since the arrival of the Japanese
Malaya has become a sea of bitterness,
Now everyone suffers,
The people of Malaya are angry,
Unite as one to oppose the Japanese.
A patriotic war song
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One day, Guanlin was summoned by the Japanese District Commander to Batu
Gajah to attend a meeting. Guanlin, the village head of Kampong Sayap, attended
the meeting in due course. In the meeting, that was held at the District
Office, Guanlin found out that he was not alone. All the town mayors and
village heads of the whole district were there. Before the meeting, the
Japanese taught them how to pay respect to their Emperor by telling them
to face the east and bow three times. The meeting was about the establishment
of a Jikeidan force (Home Guard 家鄉自衛團) in every town and village. The
mayors and village heads were told that special police uniforms, batons,
berets and changkol sticks, but no guns, would be provided by the Japanese.
Guanlin was ordered to form a Jikeidan force of thirty members in Kampong
Sayap. The purpose of organizing a Jikeidan force was to fight the communists.
However, the Japanese did not know that most of the people were the supporters
of the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA).
The night after the Qing Ming Festival (清明節), April 5th 1942, Guanlin
called a meeting of the villagers and he asked the Zu Zhi or the Malayan
Communist Party to send a representative to the meeting. The meeting was
held in his shop. Guanlin told the villagers about what the Japanese wanted
him to do. He asked the Zu Zhi representative to appoint the leader, the
deputy leader, and the people to serve in the force because Zu Zhi ruled
Kampong Sayap since the British were defeated and the Japanese were not
regarded as the rulers but invaders.
A few days later, Zu Zhi appointed Chong Kimloy (張金來) the commander,
Chen Hilao (曾喜老) the deputy commander of the Kampong Sayap Jikeidan force.
Twenty eight men were appointed to the force. Yueming, the second younger
brother of Guanlin was also appointed as a member of the force. Once a week
members of this force went to attend military training at the Batu Gajah
barracks' military training field (now it has been converted into a golf
course). The instructors were Japanese and the translators were Malay policemen.
They were taught in Malay language. Actually, they were spying for the
Zu Zhi. Every member of the force was told by the Zu Zhi to collect information
about the Japanese soldiers in Batu Gajah.
Members of the Jikeidan force began to call their leader Chong Kimloy, Da
Tou Kim (大頭金) or the Big Head Kim. Everybody in the village began to
call him by his nickname which stuck with him until he died of old age,
many years later.
The nickname of Chen Hilao, the deputy commander, was Mao Mao Bing
(無毛兵) or Bald Soldiers. This was how he derived this nickname. When Japanese
troops first landed in Lumut, a small harbour in the southern coast in the
state of Perak, they cycled to Batu Gajah where there was an army barracks
which the British troops had abandoned. The Japanese did not use the track,
a short cut from Siputeh to Batu Gajah. Instead they went from Pusing to
Batu Gajah because they wanted the residents in Pusing to know that they
were the new masters. While they were passing through the road near Kampong
Sayap Chen Hilao was tending his vegetable garden near the road. He saw
many Japanese soldiers riding bicycles on the road. Some of them were not
wearing helmets or hats and Chen Hilao saw their hairless heads. That evening
he told his friends about them. Hearing his story his friends all laughed
because they did not believe him as they themselves had yet to see a Japanese
soldier. So his friends nicknamed him Mao Mao Bing (無毛兵) or the 'hairless
soldiers'.
It was lucky that Guanlin still owned the coconut plantation. Every three
or four months he employed a few Indians to harvest the coconuts. Since
the Japanese had confiscated his lorry he relied on a Sikh's bullock cart
to transport his coconuts from the plantation to his rubber-smoke-house
which was idle as his rubber dealing business had stopped. Members of the
Chung family would remove the husk of the coconuts and cut them into two
halves to dry in the sun for a few days. Then they removed the coconut meat
from the shells and dried them under the sun for several days.The dried
coconut meat became copra. Guanlin again hired the Sikh's bullock cart to
carry his copra to Pusing to have the copra squeezed into coconut oil by
Mr Zhang's compressing machine.
http://yn.chung.id.au/CoconutPlantation.jpg
This time Guanlin did not sell Mr Chong the copra but paid a fee for using
his machine. Guanlin opened his shop to sell his own coconut oil and the
residue of the copra. The coconut oil was used for cooking and lighting
lamps at night. The copra residue was used to feed the pigs and fowls. The
coconut husk could be used to make brooms as well as to be used as fuel
for cooking. Ermei used the coconut shells as fuel for cooking. During the
Japanese occupation many people could not afford to buy china rice bowls
so they used coconut shells.
CHUNG Yoon-Ngan (鄭永元)
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