Rubber, Roots and the Tears of the Forgotten By Joseph Tek Choon Yee

I remember watching Roots, the 1977 television series based on Alex Haley’s book - the story of Kunta Kinte, the African man torn from his homeland and chained into slavery. His pain, his pride, his longing for home - all of it seared into my mind. It made me wonder about our own histories here in Malaya: who were the ones who toiled, who wept, who built the land we inherited?

Years later, while presenting a paper on plantation history at an ISP conference, a senior planter stood up during the Q&A. “Joseph,” he said, “you’ve spoken beautifully about European pioneers and Chinese entrepreneurs - and only a little about the Indians in plantations. Perhaps next time, could you also talk more about the South Indian workers — the Tamil labourers - who endured the hardest work of all?”

That question lingered long after the applause faded. Because even after three decades in this industry, I realised how rarely we give voice to those who came before - the nameless, barefoot men and women who tapped rubber, cleared jungles and carried Malaya on their backs.

And then, I remembered my late maternal grandmother.

She used to speak of them in half-whispers - not out of prejudice, but remembrance. Sitting by the window of our old wooden house in Jenjarom, she would chew betel leaf and murmur, “Ah Shek” (my nickname for being fair in complexion), “you don’t know how those Keling suffered.”

The Word and the World Behind It

The word Keling - once a neutral reference to an ancient South Indian kingdom - had, over time, curdled into something coarse, often used as an insult. But in my grandmother’s day, it was said more as description than disdain: a rural shorthand for the Tamil workers who filled the rubber estates, railway camps, and road gangs of British Malaya.

“They worked until their backs bent like old trees,” she said. “Even the rain could not wash their sorrow.”

Through her eyes, I began to see history not as policy or profit, but as people. People like Ravi - a name she often mentioned - a Tamil man who lived behind the estate line-houses, who left his village near Madurai and never saw it again.

The Journey Across the Sea

In the late 1800s, the British discovered that tin and coffee alone could not sustain their ambitions. Rubber - that miraculous sap feeding the world’s hunger for tyres - became their new gold.

The demand for labour was immense. Under the Indian Immigration Ordinance of 1884, recruiters fanned out across South India, promising work, wages, and a better life. Thousands from drought-stricken Tamil Nadu boarded ships bound for Penang, Port Dickson and Teluk Anson.

Many came under the indenture system; others through the kangani network - a chain of obligation that bound entire families to a single estate through debt and kinship.

But when they arrived, they found not paradise, but the relentless rhythm of colonial profit.

The Life on the Estate

Ravi would rise before dawn. He lived in a narrow wooden cubicle, a single oil lamp flickering against the wall. He walked barefoot into the mist, tapping knife in hand, cutting the bark of rubber trees with precision born of desperation. The white latex bled slowly into latex cups, drop by drop - like the measured tears of a forest.

He might have earned around twenty Straits cents a day - but after deductions for rice, salt, oil, rent, and advances, what he actually took home was scarcely half that. Even the doctor’s quinine could be charged to his account. For every day he fell sick, the debt deepened. (To put this in perspective: twenty cents in 1910 equated roughly to RM 12 today - barely enough for a bowl of rice and salt.)

The British planters praised the Tamil labourers as “industrious and docile.” My grandmother had two words - 可怜 (kělián), pitiful; and terpaksa, no choice.

She remembered them lining up at dusk, returning from the fields with their backs slick with sweat, their eyes empty. Some sang softly in Tamil hymns of home. Others sat in silence, their dreams folded away like the small cloth bundles they had carried from India.

Of Love, Loss and Labour

Among the workers was a young girl named Lakshmi. She planted seedlings in the nursery and shared her cooked rice with Ravi. My grandmother recalled seeing them talk by the river, laughing in that shy way only youth knows.

But joy was short-lived on the estates. Lakshmi fell ill - dysentery, they said. Estate hospitals existed, but care was basic; once convalescence ended, rent and ration charges resumed. One morning, she was gone. The kangani said she had been sent home. No one ever heard from her again.

Ravi grew quiet after that. He continued to tap the trees, but his songs faded. The jungle swallowed his laughter.

When I read Roots, I thought of Ravi and Lakshmi. They were not enslaved in chains, but bound by contracts and hunger - their freedom mortgaged to the Empire’s need for rubber.

The Machinery of Exploitation

By the early 1900s, Indian labour had become the backbone of the Malayan plantation economy. They built roads, railways and estates. The kangani acted as middleman, recruiter, and enforcer — controlling wages, advances, and punishments.

The estates became miniature kingdoms. The planter was ruler; the kangani, his steward; the workers, his subjects. The structure ensured compliance, not dignity.

When rubber prices rose, work quotas often increased. When prices fell, wages dropped. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, daily pay on many estates fell to barely twenty cents. Families starved quietly in their cubicles while the latex still dripped faithfully from the trees.

The state records were meticulous: pounds of rubber produced, cost per acre, yield per tapper. But there was no column for broken hearts.

The Weight of a Word

The word Keling haunted me. I began to hear it in the careless banter of childhood - used without thought, stripped of history.

But to my grandmother, it was never casual. It carried the echo of Ravi’s song, the cough of the sickly Lakshmi, the cries of children born in line-houses. She knew some of these people - not as “others,” but as neighbours, fellow sufferers under empire’s great machine.

“Don’t mock them,” she once said. “If not for them, the roads you walk, they would not exist.”

Her wisdom cut through the fog of inherited prejudice. It taught me how language can both wound and redeem - how memory, if tended, can humanise what history forgets.

The Legacy of Survival

After the Second World War, many Tamil families remained. They had known no other home. The estates became communities, their temples small sanctuaries of faith amid alien soil. Their children went to Tamil schools; their grandchildren spoke Malay and English.

They became teachers, clerks, soldiers - no longer “coolies,” but citizens. Yet the shadow of their ancestors’ toil still clings to the soil.

Even today, if you walk through an old rubber estate at dawn, you can almost hear it - the tap of a knife, the drip of latex, the hum of a distant song in a language that carried both prayer and pain.

The Reckoning

When that planter asked his question, I thought of how we in the industry speak so easily of yield, mechanisation and sustainability - but seldom of the ghosts beneath the trees.

The workers were the invisible roots of the plantation world. Without them, Malaya’s economic miracle would never have taken shape. They were not slaves, yet not free; not citizens, yet indispensable.

Their story, like Kunta Kinte’s, is one of dislocation - of people uprooted from their soil, planted elsewhere for the benefit of others.

The Visit Back

Years later, I visited an old estate near Banting. The rubber trees stood like ageing sentinels, their bark scarred from decades of tapping. The line-houses had been replaced by concrete quarters. A Tamil woman swept the yard.

I asked if there was still a cemetery nearby. She nodded and led me to a clearing by the stream. There, among the ferns, were small mounds of earth, unmarked and forgotten. She whispered, “My great-grandfather was from Madras. He died here. Never went home.”

I stood there in silence, thinking of Ravi, of Lakshmi, of all the nameless thousands who came with nothing but faith and hunger. The forest was quiet, save for the faint drip of latex into latex cups - steady, mournful, eternal.

In that sound, I heard both Roots and our own roots - the stories of Indians, Chinese and countless others who came to this land; tales of bondage and resilience, cruelty and grace, exile and endurance. These were not merely migrant journeys, but human odysseys - of men and women who crossed seas, planted hope in foreign soil, and built the foundations of a nation long before we called it home. Their sweat watered the fields of rubber, tin and rice; their hands raised the railways and roads we now take for granted. 

To remember them is not to dwell on sorrow, but to recognise that Malaysia’s story - like Roots - is born of pain and persistence, suffering and solidarity, and the quiet, enduring faith that from hardship, dignity can still grow. In truth, one could almost transpose the characters of Roots onto our own soil - replace Kunta Kinte with the Tamil labourer stepping off a steamer in Penang, his chains exchanged for contracts, his homeland fading behind him. The same story of uprooting and endurance unfolds here - not on the plantations of America, but in the humid stillness of Malaya’s rubber estates, where the struggle, the sorrow, and the search for freedom took a quieter, yet equally human form.

And I heard again my grandmother’s trembling voice: “Ah Shek, remember - this land drank many tears before it bore fruit.”

When I left the estate, the sun was setting over the horizon, staining the sky the colour of burnt copper. The trees cast long shadows across the road, and for a brief moment, I imagined I saw them - the silhouettes of men and women in Malaya walking home after a day’s toil, their laughter mingling with the wind.

History may have forgotten their names, but the earth remembers their footsteps. And so must we.

JT

Tears in the Tropics: Chinese Settlers Who Tilled Malaya By Joseph Tek Choon Yee

I grew up in Jenjarom during my early childhood - years that have never quite left me. Somehow, the sights, the scents and the sounds of that little town still return, as if memory itself refuses to fade. Our shared house, modest and wooden, stood amid neat rows of vegetables and cassava. I remember, as a boy, watching Chinese farmers bent over their plots from dawn to dusk, seven days a week, their straw hats glistening under the Klang sun. They worked as if time itself had forgotten to rest. My grandmother and mother often spoke of hardship, of the early years when even rice was rationed, and the only certainty was toil.

I still remember how life was then - when our toilets stood outside the house, raised on wooden stilts, with a rough plank floor and a single hole that opened into a bucket below. It was primitive by today’s standards, yet it was simply how things were. Every morning, before the sun climbed high, a man would come by with his cart to collect the filled buckets. We children would hold our breath as he worked, yet there was no disgust in his face - only familiarity. Later, I learned that he used the contents as fertiliser for his vegetable plots, where choy sum and kangkung grew lush and green. In its own humble way, nothing went to waste then - not even what we tried to forget.

Life was tough, yet the spirit of community thrived like a stubborn flower pushing through gravel. There were no gates, no high walls or padlocks - only open doors, open hearts. Neighbours would wander in without knocking, bringing plates of kuih-muih still warm from the steamer, their laughter filling the air long before the aroma reached you. I can still taste those steamed tapioca cakes - soft, golden and lightly sweet - their fragrance mingling with the smoky scent of firewood from nearby kitchens. We had little, but we shared much. In those simple gestures lay a kind of wealth that no progress has ever quite replaced.

Those images stayed with me - the creak of wooden wheelbarrows, the sound of hoes striking the soil, the smell of burning brush at twilight. At that age, I didn’t yet know that I was witnessing the tail end of a story that began generations before - when the first Chinese settlers arrived in Malaya, chasing a promise both cruel and kind: land to till, a life to claim.

River Settlements: Of Pepper, Gambier and Dreams

Long before rubber ruled the land, the Chinese had already carved civilisation along Malaya’s rivers. In the mid-nineteenth century, Johor’s Kangchu system opened river valleys to Chinese headmen - pioneers who brought labourers from the Teochew and Hokkien coasts. They cleared forests for gambier and pepper, planted, boiled, dried, and traded under a structure both feudal and free. 

The Kangchu (港主), literally “masters of the riverbank,” were elected leaders of these riverine settlements - part administrator, part entrepreneur, sometimes called Kapitan. Through their networks, labour, trade, and governance flowed as one, forging a uniquely Chinese frontier tradition.

Among those early arrivals, history could have placed Ah Kong and Mei Lan - a young couple from a village in Fujian, drawn by rumours of rich soil and steady work. They came not for gold, but for ground - a place to root their children’s future. Their smallholding was a clearing beside a sluggish river. Each dawn, the air thickened with smoke from boiling vats of gambier. The riverbanks buzzed with barter, prayer, and hope.

As Tan Pek Leng wrote in Land to Till: The Chinese in the Agricultural Economy of Malaya (2008), “The Chinese did not simply transplant their labour - they transplanted an entire system of community, credit and cooperation.” These were not mere farmers, but nation-builders in miniature.

When the Forest Turned to Fields

As gambier exhausted the soil, the planters turned to new crops: tapioca, pineapples, vegetables - and eventually, rubber. By the 1910s, Ah Kong had learned to tap latex, one careful diagonal cut at a time. His wife Mei Lan tended rows of leafy greens between the trees. Together, they turned jungle into geometry, hardship into habit.

They lived without Sundays or safety nets, yet their dignity was immense. The children went to Chinese school, their fees paid in coin and latex sheets. When the Great Depression came and rubber prices collapsed, the crops in between - chilli, long beans, sweet potato - kept them alive.

I think of them whenever I recall the women of Jenjarom’s early mornings - my mother’s generation - carrying baskets of vegetables on bicycles, balancing toil and tenderness. Their backs stooped not from weakness but from devotion. They lived with quiet pride, as though they knew that every stalk of kangkung was a prayer for tomorrow.

War, Wire and the Malayan New Villages

The war years tore everything apart. Rubber trees stood untapped; farms were looted; sons disappeared. During the Emergency, thousands of Chinese villagers were uprooted and resettled behind barbed wire into what the British called “New Villages.” Yet within those enclosures, something remarkable happened: despair gave birth to industry.

In those years, Ah Kong and Mei Lan might have rebuilt their lives yet again - planting vegetables within the wire, selling them by daylight, dodging curfews by dusk. The New Villages became crucibles of resilience, where families learned to live under suspicion but never surrendered their work ethic.

Family, Faith and the Field

In those families, women carried the unspoken burdens. Mei Lan would have risen before dawn to light the stove, pack food for her husband, and later sell vegetables in the market. Their sons learned to tap trees; their daughters to stretch every ringgit. They rarely said “I love you,” but their hands spoke it daily - in rice cooked, debts paid, children schooled.

When one of their sons left for Singapore to work in a factory, they wept quietly but said nothing. “He must find a better life,” Mei Lan would whisper, even as her own heart broke. Such stories are not unique; they are the invisible architecture of this nation’s prosperity. Behind every concrete suburb today lies a vanished plot once tilled by people like them.

The Land and What It Gave Back

By the 1960s, many smallholders joined the government’s replanting schemes. The second generation began moving to towns, chasing education and factory jobs. Yet Ah Kong refused to sell. “Land,” he said, “has memory. It remembers those who loved it.”

When Mei Lan fell ill, he stayed beside her through the night. She asked softly, “Do you think the land still knows our names?” He looked toward the rubber trees and nodded. After her passing, he planted a jackfruit tree where she used to hang her baskets. When the fruit ripened, its sweetness filled the air like remembrance refusing to fade.

Echoes in Jenjarom

Even decades later, as I drove along the paths of Jenjarom, I could still sense that lineage - the same quiet dignity in the faces of old farmers, the same smell of rubber smoke and earth. I saw the legacy of Ah Kong and Mei Lan in every wrinkled hand that guided a hoe, every child who now drives past the land their grandparents once cleared with machetes.

Our little town has grown, but the essence remains: industriousness, thrift, humility. The vegetable plots of from my childhood memories were more than livelihoods - they were lessons. The farmers taught me, wordlessly, that purpose is not always found in titles or trophies, but in constancy - the willingness to rise, again and again, when the world forgets you.

Coda: Roots That Remember

History records the colonial planters, the politicians, policies, the prices of tin and rubber. It counts estates and exports, production and profit. But between those lines - unprinted and unnamed - live the unwritten farmers: men and women like Ah Kong and Mei Lan, who bent under the same sun that shone on the masters’ verandas, and who quietly held up the nation’s backbone.

When I think of them now - the farmers of Jenjarom, the ghosts along the old kangchu rivers, the women balancing baskets of vegetables on bicycles that rattled through the dawn mist - I see faces weathered yet unwavering. Their hands were cracked, but their hearts were whole. What united them was not race or creed, but faith - faith not merely in God, but in the stubborn grace of labour itself. Faith that the land, though silent, would one day speak for them, and that their children would walk freer, learn better, live gentler.

They endured flood and famine, war and curfew and cruelty, yet still found time to plant flowers by their doors. They carried hardship lightly and gratitude deeply. Theirs was not a life of complaint but of constancy - and in that, a quiet nobility that modern times too often forget.

Among the Chinese, there’s a long-held saying that the Hokkiens are among the most hardworking, prudent and thrifty of all - the kind who turn sweat into savings and labour into quiet wealth. Old folks used to joke that beneath every Hokkien’s bed, beside the tampoi (those trusty porcelain urinary containers of yesteryear), lay hidden gold bars wrapped in cloth. I can’t say I’ve ever seen one myself - not a glint of gold under any bed I’ve known - but if such tales were true, every ounce of it would have been deservingly earned with sweat and tears. Their wealth, if any, was not flaunted but forged - a silent testament to endurance and the dignity of toil.

In the end, I realise I am not simply writing their story. I am returning to where it all began. For in their worn hands and gentle smiles lies the shared heartbeat of our nation: proof that Malaya was built not only by policy or power, but by the perseverance of those who asked for nothing except a fair day’s harvest. And perhaps, through these words, the land finally remembers and in remembering, speaks.

JT

from ABCDEFG to PQRSTUV

J is in town again: this time for his longest period yet (4 weeks) on a long term visit pass and already warmly welcomed at the airport with passport less entry! Both he and M are slowly and surely taking progressive steps to staying together, just like J & N who exchanged vows earlier this year. 

In fact, this is the first time our F6 team gathered since the wedding over two months ago. With all of these milestones, it’s only natural that I also think about mine.

My weekend walks (often for two hours) afforded me ample time to think this through carefully. In my case, the milestone I am approaching - just as the young ones step into their 2nd act - is my third act. The key is not about simply letting go and doing nothing. That is the surest path to purposelessness, boredom and perhaps dementia. Yes, it’s a retirement (from one stage of life) but an entry into another one filled with new adventures. It is joyful indeed that, at this age, I am still able to go on new journeys and discover what mysteries there are still in store. 

Maya Angelou famously said, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.”. So let me start there… where I have been. 

Its never easy summarising 58 years but the long walks helped me frame this. In all these time, I have climbed seven pillars: ABCDEFG. 

A is for Academics; and not just the classical primary, secondary and tertiary schools but rather lifelong learning. It’s been quite a journey from caning at the first day of school to Cambridge to fulfill a childhood dream of learning!

Bohemian - rhapsody of rebellion, a maverick not afraid to colour outside the lines: not a prefect, still a leader with stripes to prove it

Confidence plus communications (despite my lisp) coupled with charisma and courage (including the certainty that I should take 1 step back to go 2 step forwards) 

Dreams - in the long car rides to Batang, I would stare out of the window and daydream. That dream became D who made them come true, including to develop houses and homes for us all to grow in.

Excellence - esp in my career. I really only understood what it meant to be world class when I was asked to help another country with their National IT Agenda. What a path it has been from Malacca to Singapore/Bangkok/Zurich to KL/Korea/China.

F is for family and friends and I count myself lucky to still have a handful of these to hang out with anytime we want. Indeed, the best ones were made back then.

G: I could be obnoxious and bask in the fact that I lived up to my zodiac animal, the Goat. But no, I don’t think I have been the greatest of all time. God is. And I am grateful that I had the opportunity to receive his blessings when I was at my lowest with a paralysed hand. 

Having done all of the above what’s next? 

First the numbers have to add up. The young ones told us oldies about FIRE: financially independent, retire early. I think we got the first part and so it’s now on to the next. Is it late or early… while we hope to have a good health span and yes, we hope this is early enough.

Over the next 3 years, as J, N & M serve out their bonds, I will also see out my time as a full time executive. I will then move into my PQRSTUV phase.

Purpose, and after profitable years past, will now be for People & Planet.

Questions remain. My intellectual curiosity remains. So I will keep searching for answers and not just doing so alone but rather, I will pose questions to my network and together we can answer some of them, whether informally in chats or recorded for posterity on Spotify and YouTube.

Relationships with family (of course one longs for grandchildren to dote on, including to pass on life lessons to, not to mention finding that one who inherited the chronicler gene) and friends (including or particularly with those that need repairing). I have taken stands all my life and it’s inevitable that I have also stepped on toes. 

Stories, which I hope to tell in a book, in a screenplay or perhaps in a movie! 

Travel … but not in snippets of sights and sounds but rather in journeys extended by long walks, wheels over rails and gliding over water (WWW).

Unfinished business - whether on boards or with clients and colleagues or with my car collection and generally tidying up all my collections

And finally to V. I think I have this far led a voracious, sometimes volcanic, sometimes valiant but always a visceral life (my wife calls me boomz as I always fill up the room). As you can tell though these are emotive words though they thematically belong to the vivid end of the spectrum. If not for my dear wife, the love of my wife, who balances my universe… I would not have had the opportunity to do all I have been able to and more importantly, I would not have learnt how to be vulnerable, to be vigilant and to be virtuous (nice connect to the last letter of my current act).

I hope my next act will be several decades long. I hope to be in good health to enjoy them all. And most of all, I thank God for the opportunity to plan this and to be able to look forward to the mysteries ahead and may they unfold slowly for me along the way ahead.

a trilogy of poems, united

It is said that before entering the sea

a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,

from the peaks of the mountains,

the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,

she sees an ocean so vast,

that to enter

there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.

The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.

To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk

of entering the ocean

because only then will fear disappear,

because that’s where the river will know

it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,

but of becoming the ocean.

Kahlil Gibran

Credit: Hemaraj Laten

 

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.

Rumi

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?

Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,

(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman