Wong Phui Nam

WONG PHUI NAM (1935)

Economist & Poet

Date of Birth: 20 September 1935

Place of Birth: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Education: Batu Road School & The Victoria Institution;

The University of Singapore (B. A. Economics)

Phui Nam's father, Wong Tak Wah, was of Peranakan stock - a fourth-generation descendent of a taikong (captain of a Chinese junk) who settled in Malaysia after his ship ran aground near Malacca and got damaged beyond repair. His mother was a first-generation Malaysian Chinese, the daughter of a boatman in Canton, who was merely a child when she came to Malaysia as a "package" along with Wong's maternal grandmother's sister who was destined to wed a tin miner. After his marriage to Phui Nam's mother, Wong decided to distance himself culturally from his roots. Wong, who was "more Cantonese than the Chinese" died in April 1944 during the Japanese Occupation, five years after his wife passed away of kidney failure. Phui Nam was four years old.

Till today, he still has nightmares "of coffins tipping over."

"There used to be what we called a death-house on Jalan Sultan. It was a hospice. The dying were upstairs. The dead were downstairs. I remember seeing all these dead bodies -- and then my mother. It was a shock."

His father's body was kept in the same death house.

"I was sleeping... At that time, we lived on Galloway Road. Relatives suddenly arrived. In the dark, my brother took me to the death house. All those bodies again..." 

He recalls an episode in his past when his family was in mortal danger:

"My father was an ARP, an Auxiliary Reserve Policeman. We were going to Singapore... we reached Johor Bahru, but then had to run into the jungle. Near Ulu Tiram, we had to make a whole circle back around to avoid them... It's true, they used to throw babies up and bayonet them. I remember dead bodies littered on the roadside."

At one time, one of his sisters was nearly taken by soldiers.

"She was dragged out, my stepmother bargaining with them, we were all there -- but then, the officer suddenly blew a whistle, and the soldiers left."

On the streets, Phui Nam recalls that someone -- anyone -- could be suddenly asked to stand on a piece of rubber wood, and hold their bicycle up in the sun for hours.

"Recently, I was in Mid Valley Megamall. I heard a group of Japanese men talking behind me, and I got the shivers." 

Eighth of 11 siblings, Wong Phui Nam had his early education at two Chinese school in Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown. He later joined the Batu Road School and from there went on to the Victoria Institution in 1949. While he was there in the morning, he was attending private classes in classical Chinese in the afternoon, boning up on Tang Poetry and the Three Character Classic. He was also interested in music and took up violin during his schooling.  He was equally adept at sports on the V.I. field where he actually broke the school high jump record during the 1954 School Sports and was secretary to Loke Yew House which he represented in swimming and table tennis. By then, Phui Nam had dabbled in poetry but had not shown his works to anyone.

At the University of Malaya in Singapore, there was active discouragement towards writing poetry by his western lecturers due to him presuming to use the English language as a medium. Still, Phui Nam was inspired by the Singaporean poet Edwin Thumboo who has just published his first work Rib of Earth and so he began to read whatever he could lay his hands on. In addition, Phui Nam was the editor of the student journal The New Cauldron and was later responsible for two anthologies: Litmus One: Selected University Verse, 1949-1957 and Thirty Poems.

On graduation, Phui Nam became an Assistant Controller of the Industrial Development Division of the Ministry of Commerce in Kuala Lumpur. He had a stint in Bangkok as an economist later on and after completing that, he joined the MIDF where fellow Victorian Tun Ismail Mohamed Ali was chairman. He left after ten years for a private company, and eventually joined the Malaysian International Merchant Banking Ltd. After he retired in 1989 as a general manager, he wrote a poetry column for The New Straits Times and taught briefly at a private college. He is currently a training and marketing consultant in a private company.

As early as the 1950s, Phui Nam spoke of the poet's dilemma—whether, in his words, one "just wrote poetry, or a poetry identifiably Malayan." Wong believed that the language was at its best when the poet was attending to his or her response to the "sum total of conditions under which we as Malaysians live." In the preface to his first and landmark volume of poems, How The Hills are Distant, he attested that "these poems need to be written. They are of a time, of a place, of a people who find themselves having to live by institutions and folkways which are not of their heritage, having to absorb the manners of languages not their own."

Most of the poems Phui Nam wrote during the sixties first appeared in Bunga Emas, an anthology of Malaysian literature edited by fellow Victorian T. Wignesan. Phui Nam's poems have also appeared in Seven Poets, The Second Tongue, The Flowering Tree, Young Commonwealth Poets '65, Poems from India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaya. He was also published by literary journals like Tenggara, Tumasek, South East Asian Review of English.

His mature poems are regarded as among the best Malaysian poems in English, unsurpassed in their eloquence and linguistic richness. Most of them are contemplative and draw their images from the local landscape. Phui Nam's poetry explores the experience of living in multi-cultural Malaysia. According to him:

Before the British set up the country, Malaysia was a totally agrarian society. Suddenly we get this commercialism and development of plantations to supply a metropolitan power. Even for a writer in Malay, whether he is a Malay or a non-Malay, he has to reinvent the language. All the more so for Indians and Chinese. For a Chinese, when we write in Chinese, we cannot pretend that nothing has happened and try to write Tang poetry. So for us to write in English, we are exiled three times, culturally and spiritually from China, culturally from the indigenous Malay culture and then writing in English. We cannot claim that it is a tradition. I would say we have appropriated the language. So, in a way, it is a much more interesting medium to work with the language against the tradition.

Phui Nam's poetry contain traces of abandonment, loss, death, and a greater quest as main themes which Associate Professor Mohammad A Quayum noted originated from "anxiety in the young boy which eventually filtered into his early poems". Such rude awakening in childhood might well have found new oxygen in some of his bitter allusions to the birth of a country that held out hope to be "all things to all people" -- and then didn't, and rots instead. Many of the poems of Ways of Exile seem sick with disappointment. 

However, in 1971, in a paper on "sectional and national literatures" presented originally in Bahasa Melayu at the Kongres Kebudayaan Kebangsaan, Llyod Fernando (novelist, playwright, and former Head of English Literature at Universiti Malaya) wrote that all of Phui Nam's poetry deals with "preparations for a kind of self-renewal. They take place in a luminous world just behind the scenes and are more related to a cryptic mood, rather than to the common processes of thoughts." Of Remembering Grandma and Other Rumours (1989), Fernando reckoned it "one of the first efforts" to get to grips with -- rather than moan about -- the "detribalisation" anxiety that has dogged the Malaysian writer for years."

"...the thematics of estrangement and exile found in Wong's earlier work -- familiar topoi of the diasporan culture of Malaysian Chinese -- are clarified in recurrent, one might say obsessive symbols of pathology."    ~Chin Woon Ping, on Remembering Grandma, 2001

"...bleak preoccupations with physical and spiritual decay, death and possible resurrection."     ~Robert Yeo, Singaporean playwright

"Dark and wonderful, especially his new work."                         ~Eddin Khoo, critic, poet and arts-activist

Bibliography

1. (1968). How The Hills are Distant. Tenggara, Department of English, University of Malaya. (Prose poetry)
2. (1989). Remembering Grandma and Other Rumours. Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore.
3. (1993). Ways of Exile. Skoob Books Pub. Ltd.
4. (2000). Against the Wilderness. Blackwater Books.
5. (2006). An Acre of Day's Glass: Collected Poems. Maya Press.
6. (2006). Anike. Maya Press Sdn. Bhd. (Play directed by Jo Kukathas & Zalfian Zufi)