An intriguing question is how Chew in his retirement became involved in Hakka community affairs. The Fui Tung Onn association which he helped to establish in 1971, was formed a few years after his retirement. As children growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Kuching there was little doubt in our minds that father had always taken an interest in his dialect group community of Sin Onn Hakka. This interest in the Hakka community did not just evolve in the late stages of his life. Nor did a sense of being Hakka become just apparent in his post working life. Vivid memories of my older siblings are of
23 See footnote 4.
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throngs of people, a number of whom spoke Hakka, visiting the family house at night to seek father’s help and opinions when he was a government servant.
People would also visit him in the office too. He had a civic sense of duty to give help to those who approached him for assistance, and in the author’s possession are letters from people who acknowledged receiving his assistance, and notices of people who borrowed money from him. It would have been a natural progression for Chew to get involved with the Fui Tung Onn association when community elders mooted the idea of forming an association in 1971. His motivation and intentions to help lead the community, and of helping people would have come from his sense of public duty. He could also be following the tradition of his father in the homeland village in Dongguan. Chew’s father was from the thel fong (first branch) and he assumed a leadership role when assisting co-ethnics to migrate to Sarawak in the early 20th Century.24
Chew was already well known among the Chinese including the Hakka when he was a court interpreter and later on when he was the Registrar of Trade Unions and Societies. He had expertise in how associations were set up, their rules and benefits especially in newly independent Malaysia where adherence to rules and the letter of the law had become important. He was aware that an association for the Sin Onn Hakka would benefit the members and their children. The spirit of mutual help towards co-ethnics for Chinese migrants and their descendents in adopted and new settings like Sarawak had
24 See footnote 4 and 7.
a strong tradition which Chew was knowledgeable on. Chew had written in an undated manuscript, from his days as a Registrar of Trade Unions and Societies:
That the Chinese have a natural flair for organisation work is evident from the number of guilds (known in Chinese as hong), associations and societies which came into existence long before the outbreak of war and which still exist today. Many of these are well organised and in a sound financial position.
In an earlier part of this paper, the author maintained that Chew straddled between the cultural and linguistic English and Chinese speaking worlds in Sarawak due to his command of English and Chinese, including the Hakka dialect. In dealing with the vexing question of identity which is multi-layered in a multi-ethnic setting like Sarawak where identity can’t be neatly pigeonholed, Chew in his working career might have demonstrated more of himself as a dedicated colonial civil servant displaying a strong sense of loyalty to the colonial masters he was serving. The demands of work and that of raising a big family of thirteen children might have prevented him from asserting a Hakka identity or be actively involved with the Hakka. While he could read and write Chinese fluently, as well as speak Hakka, I suspect that he had a stronger preference for the English language, and he subscribed to English newspapers and listened to English radio broadcasts. In 1971, freed
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from the demands of work and with most of the children already grown up and working, Chew might have found that he had the time to devote himself to Hakka interests.
Readers might be curious to know more about the family’s Chinese and Hakka identity. Due to his English education and a life long career working with British civil servants, Chew put us, the children, through English schools, and encouraged us to go abroad to English speaking countries like England, Canada, New Zealand and Australia for our tertiary education. We did not speak Hakka fluently like our parents. Father preferred to speak in English to us while our mother, a Hakka herself, spoke to us in both English and Hokkien. None of the children learned and took up Chinese like our father. This fact of the children’s non-fluency in Chinese and limited fluency in Hakka did not however diminish Chew’s interest and commitment to his fellow co-ethnics as demonstrated by his involvement with the Fui Tung Onn Association.
As one of the founder members of the Fui Tung Onn Association for Hakka Sin Onn, Chew was Vice President and English Secretary for fund raising for various years between 1971 and 1981, and when he fell seriously ill in 1983, he had to relinquish his role and involvement with the association.
He had a membership number of two, the number one member being a government minister, James Wong Kim Min (Wong 1983 and Yong 1997).
Chew was one of the principal donors of the association and was among a select few persons who each gave $1000 to the association. It was no small
sum of money in those days as he was just a government pensioner. In rather glowing language, the Fui Tung Onn association penned its tribute to William Chew25:
Mr Chew was a righteous person who treated others with friendliness and politeness. Well-versed in Western and Chinese culture, dedicated to societal welfare and charity institutions, Mr Chew was held in high esteem by others during his civic service.
In particular, in his capacity as one of the founding members of the Fui Tung Onn Community Association, Mr Chew contributed enormously both in finance and resources in his effort to fund-raise for the establishment of the association. Mr Chew was the Vice President of the association from for a number of years between 1971-1981. He was also an executive member of the Sarawak Civil Servants Association, secretary of the Prisoners Welfare Association and secretary of the Sarawak Badminton Club.
The Fui Tung Onn Association has an interesting past and its late formation in 1971 was explained in the Association 12th anniversary publication. The authorities refused to allow its formation previously in the 1930s due to the fact there was already an umbrella organisation for the
25 Fui Tung Onn Community Association 12th Anniversary souvenir magazine (1983: 46) ( 馬來
西亞砂朥越古晉惠東安公會成立十二周年紀念特刊). I would like to thank my brother-
in-law, Tee-Siaw Koh for his help in translations from this magazine. I have also benefited from many discussions with him.
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Hakka, the Hakka Association, which the Sin Onn Hakka were encouraged to join. The persistence of the Sin Onn Hakka to have their own association finally paid off in 1971. A perusal of the association’s activities shows that it has similar social and cultural objectives to that of other Chinese associations in Sarawak. When this particular Fui Tung Onn Association magazine was published in 1983, the Hakka were already Malaysian citizens and an examination of the activities and write-ups in the publication showed a concern with the next generation and with education. Education was seen a path towards social mobility and my father and other Hakka who attained senior posts as government servants were regarded as role models in the write-ups on them. Father did not hold any official position in the association after 1981. In 1983 he was struck with cancer and he died on 29 January 1985.
Figure 10: The Fui Tung Onn Association Committee, 1971. William Chew is seated third from the right.
Epilogue
“The past is forgotten often, but the present is important. Tomorrow is even more important.”
26This biography, written thirty years after the death of my father, is not for self serving purposes of writing a personal family history although it does achieve this personal objective, but rather to share the story of my Hakka father who lived at a unique period of Sarawak’s history as a civil servant, a calling which I would dare say he did his best to fulfill in the tradition of service to the public and the government of the day. He wrote to daughter Eleanor Pau on 28 December 1980, “My twenty seven years of service with the Sarawak government has not been in vain. My five years of English education plus some years of self study enabled me to contribute something useful to society.”
When he died on 29 January 1985 from a short illness, there were throngs of kin, people who knew him including those from the Fui Tung Onn Association who came for the funeral wake. Wreaths from kin, associates and friends filled up the family living room where father lay in wake, and with insufficient space, flowed outside the main door of the house and onto the car porch. A few days after the funeral, the family received a telephone call from
26 Letter from William Chew to Eleanor Pau (daughter), 28 December 1980.
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the office of the Sarawak governor, the late Tun Abdul Yakub (1928-2015), with the governor requesting a visit to the family house to pay his last respects. This visit confirmed to the family that father had indeed made his contributions to society with this form of recognition from a personage holding the office of governor, who was for a time the chief executive or Chief Minister of Sarawak from 1970 to 1981. Father in his working life would have provided assistance or come into contact with many people from all walks of life.
William Chew rose from the ranks of the civil service from being a court interpreter to senior positions as Registrar of Trade Unions and Societies, and Deputy Commissioner of Labour. He worked mostly during the era of the colonial period, with a brief period in independent Malaysia from 1963 until 1968. Although he made his mark as a civil servant and served the colonial government with dedication and loyalty, he did not neglect the Sin Onn Hakka community which he came from, where he played a role in forming and leading the Fui Tung Onn Association. In conclusion, Chew’s life and work straddled between the linguistic and cultural worlds of the Chinese, in particular the Sin Onn Hakka, with that of a public career under a British colonial and later Malaysian administration.
References
Interviews with Chew Kee, Chew Hon Sang, Chew Sak, Gordon Chong and Shim Pan Chi, January-March 2003.
Primary and Secondary Sources
Chew, Daniel, Personal Collection of Letters, Newspaper Clippings and Photographs.
Chin-Chan, Ann, 2013, From China to Borneo and Beyond. Auckland: Ann Chin-Chan.
Chin, John, 1980, The Sarawak Chinese. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.
Digby, D.H, 1980, Lawyer in the Wilderness. Cornell, Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program.
Fui Tung Onn Community Association 12th Anniversary souvenir magazine, 1983. Kuching: Fui Tung Onn Community Association. ( 馬來西
亞砂朥越古晉惠東安公會成立十二周年紀念特刊 )
Kee, Howe Yong, 2013, The Hakkas of Sarawak: Sacrificial Gifts in Cold
War Era Malaysia. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Pringle, Robert, 1970, Rajahs and Rebels. London: MacMillan.
Porritt, Vernon, 2004, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Sarawak,