The Storyteller from Signal Hill

(Several years ago I was involved in a community project in KK. An important part of this project was collecting stories from members of the public to compile into a book. I met and spoke to a number of people who graciously shared their stories. One storyteller was this guy who also showed great interest in the old pictures we stuck on the walls of the Gaya Street shops. That was how I found him--- looking at the pictures.)

Francis—born on Signal Hill in 1945, at a time when Jesselton had been reduced to smoky piles of rubble—has enough stories to keep his listeners enthralled from morning till nightfall and still the telling would not be done. However, the stories need to be coaxed out of him but once he’s convinced he has an interested listener, the words tumble out effortlessly.
                                    

                                             

                                  

Even his name has an interesting tale. His father, also named Francis, gave the same name to two sons and also named his daughter Francisca!

“My father named us after his favourite saint,” he explains, “Saint Francis of Assisi.”

Francis’s grandfather and his wife were among the Hakka families recruited by the North Borneo Chartered Company to start farms in North Borneo. They landed in Kudat but made their way to Jesselton where Grandfather Chong became a trader dealing in sundries and selling them to the local community including the Bajau fishermen in Jesselton.

                                             

                                    

Francis spent his early childhood on his grandmother’s farm and among the families of Hakkas who cultivated vegetables for the market and grew rubber on Signal Hill.  These were deeply religious people who, along with Grandfather Chong, built a church on the hill. It was a Basel Mission Church and it doubled as a school. It was where Francis had his early education before he moved to Sacred Heart Primary School and later to Sabah College.

His father was a high court clerk who was proficient in Malay, Chinese, Kadazan and English.  His office, on the hill near the Atkinson Clock Tower, had a magnificent view of the town and the South China Sea. As a government servant, he was provided with quarters so the family need not live in the attap-roofed, zinc-walled houses built on stilts over the sea where, on windy days the houses shook and during high tides the walls were slapped and hit by incessant waves.

“My father’s government house was one of several arranged in neat rows near the beach in Tanjung Aru,” Francis says. “It was spacious and although all the government houses were built of attap and kajang there were no cases of fire.” Perhaps people were more cautious then, knowing the fragility of their situation especially when there was only the Armed Constabulary to turn to when there were fires because a fire brigade was non-existent.

What does Francis remember most about living in the kajang houses?

“I could hide in the attic,” he says. He smiles broadly before he continues. “The toilet… well, it wasn’t really what you’d call a toilet today. Each house had an outhouse some distance from the living quarters. There was a bucket placed underneath a hole and every morning a man we called Ah Pak would remove the bucket and pour the waste into another pail. Then he had to clean the empty bucket with water before replacing it in the outhouse. I was told he was paid three hundred dollars although I had no way of finding out whether it was true or otherwise.” He shook his head as though he couldn’t believe that there were people who didn’t mind working as a shit collector.

In Jesselton itself, latrines were built directly over the sea and narrow timber catwalks connected them to the land. Passing boats could be rowed very near the latrines and many townsfolk were known to sit nervously in the cubicles because they could not dismiss the possibility that a passing boatman might just use an oar or a pole to poke him in the rear just for fun.

There was a time when one latrine was painted white and another, some distance away, was red. No one now remembers why there was a white toilet and a red toilet. Perhaps one was for males and the other for females? Or it was convenient to tell a family member: "I’m at the red latrine if anyone looks for me”!

Francis himself worked at various jobs that included living in the wild and collecting soil samples as a Junior Agricultural Assistant. He later became a policeman but left the police force so he could go on his own adventures and chase dreams instead of law-breakers.

The Red and White Tea Set

Photo credit: Sabah State Archives

As the Sentinel No.13 clickety-clacked to town Katie and her best friend, Esther, discussed how they were going to spend the lovely afternoon. There were things to see and friends to meet and maybe they could even watch one of those talking movies!

The mile-long trip from the station at Karamunsing took them past the mangrove swamp; past the houses on stilts connected to each other with a maze of rickety catwalks; past the police station and the jails and clumps of coconut palms on South Road; past the raintrees standing at the edge of the padang. Then there was the long, final whistle from the front of the train and it was time to get off. A glance at the quaint clock tower near the railway station told the girls it was a little after two.

Photo credit:: Sabah State Archives

                             


The coaches disgorged the passengers; tired mothers with sleeping babies strapped around their chests; traders with boxes and sacks; kampong folks with their bananas and bundles of vegetables; hawkers loaded with rattan baskets filled with snacks: boiled eggs, steamed corn, rice dumplings bound in bamboo leaves and sticky, angpow-red rice cakes sitting on bits of green banana leaves.

Neither Katie nor Esther wanted any of the snacks. They were going to have long, cold drinks—a glass of orange squash perhaps, or some lemonade with chunks of ice floating to the top of their glasses and sipped slowly through a straw. Off they went along Birch Street and into Market Street which would take them past Bond Street straight to the sea. But their favourite coffee shop was at Bond Street and that was where they went before they paid a visit to the store run by a Japanese man called Mr. Sakai.

The girls knew him well and Katie had visited him at his house (with a couple of other friends) where Mr. Sakai had made them take off their shoes on the stoop and insisted they put on slippers in the house. Mr. Sakai had a two-storey shop at Market Street. He operated a photo studio upstairs and ran a sundry shop downstairs where he sold everything under the sun: rice and salt; dried fish and rainbow-coloured sweets; slippers, dainty handkerchiefs and pretty paper umbrellas of mint-green, or drenched in pure sky-blue, or pink like the blush on a geisha’s cheeks.

Photo credit: R.Chin

That day Katie and Esther found Mr. Sakai carefully unpacking a ceramic tea set. His eyes sparkled as he held up a saucer to the girls.

“See what has just arrived from Japan,” he said. “Have you ever seen anything as beautiful?” It was square-shaped with the corners cut off and the trim alternated with white and red. On the white parts were drawn a filigree motif in gold. It reminded Katie of her parents’ bright red dragon tea set and she fell in love with it.

“Five dollars… special price for a special girl,” Mr. Sakai said. Katie smiled and shook her head as she fisted what remained of the two dollars her mother had given her. Five dollars was a lot of money. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the tea set. All through the day and on the bus home her thoughts kept going back to that red and white tea set!

As soon as she reached home Katie told her parents about Mr. Sakai’s beautiful tea set. Maybe her father understood how much she wanted it. Perhaps he wanted to show that nothing was too much for his little girl when he gave her five dollars so she could go back and buy that lovely tea set.

Photo credit: R. Chin

                                         
It was to be one of the last things Katie bought from Mr. Sakai’s shop and she has kept it all these years because it is a reminder of a time when Jesselton was a peaceful little town; the time before the war broke out and before Mr. Sakai changed completely from being a nice shopkeeper at Market Street to a fierce kempetai everybody feared and hated. Katie treasures the tea set especially because it reminds her of her father and his unique way of making her feel loved and special.

What shall I say about Mingo?

What shall I say about Mingo?

His name had been mentioned in the same breath as our most famous—and infamous!—politicians. But until recently, I knew practically nothing about this man. Not even his real name. To me he was just Mingo, the great cartoonist; Mingo, whose fans followed his caricatures avidly during the state election campaign of 1976 and collected them to stick onto office walls or to paste in scrapbooks or to pore over with friends during coffee breaks. 

Now I know more about him than I do my next door neighbour or even my MIL!

I’m reading his book—lent to me by his daughter, a new friend—in which he has scrawled a poignant dedication: This book is for you to read and keep, to remember me by. Love, Daddy

One of Mingo's cartoons in his "Mingo's Meanderings".

And just the other day, I had the pleasure of being invited to meet Mingo himself! When I told my friends my unexpected good fortune, one said, “I love Mingo cartoons. Would love to meet him. Any chance?”

No chance, sorry! Oh, well... maybe. 

We talked about the good old days. In August 1946, Mingo left Singapore where he grew up, and after enduring a lengthy eight-day boat trip as a deck passenger, he landed in Jesselton. The town, the new capital of North Borneo, had been razed to the ground the previous year. Mingo described what the town was like in his book and I’ll copy an extract for you in a while. First, let me tell you what he said about coffee drinking and coffee shops in the good old days.

“The towkays were Hainanese or Foochows. Not Hakkas. In the coffee shops, they had this huge copper pot where water was always kept boiling and constantly being replenished. The towkay used a big metal dipper to take the hot water.

When the towkay made coffee, he always poured more water than the thick cup could hold so the water overflowed into the saucer. Everybody drank by pouring the coffee into the saucer and blowing at the hot coffee before sipping it. The coffee was poured into the saucer little by little until the cup was empty. No one seemed to drink from the cup itself!

The towkays were experts at preparing soft-boiled eggs. They scooped boiling water from the big pot, poured it over the eggs and always produced perfect eggs with cooked whites but in the centre the yolks were still soft.”

Mingo mentioned about the strong sense of community among the Chinese towkays. “When one of them was in trouble because of debts or other ill-fortune,” Mingo said, “the others would rally behind him by lending their hands, by contributing money towards a fund to pay off their friend’s debts and to provide him with capital to revive his business.”

I am amazed and touched by the people’s spirit of community and their feeling of brotherhood. These characteristics have been illustrated in other instances among the Chinese of Jesselton.

And now a short excerpt from “Mingo’s Meanderings” about Jesselton after WW2.

“The town had been hastily rebuilt with two blocks of 10 units two-storey, and four blocks of ten units single-storey shophouses, built of bakau round timber for the frame, sawn plank walling and attap roofing. The floor was lined with planks. These buildings were meant to last a year or two when the permanent structures would be going up to replace them, but they lasted almost ten years. When the attap roofs deteriorated and leaked they were conveniently covered over with thin, galvanized, iron corrugated sheets. Rainwater, collected from the roof and stored in metal drums was used for drinking, while the brackish water from open wells in the open courtyards of the shop was used for bathing and washing.

Two public latrines built over the sea served the whole town. Each of the ten compartments had a seven by sixteen inch hole through the plank floor. It was quite a thrill to watch the fish snatching at the tasty morsels during high tide, and crabs daintily picking at the solid pieces at low tide. I used to feel quite nervous when fishermen in their row boats passed too close below to the building. What was there to prevent them from poking a pole through the hole?”


So what shall I say about Mingo? I think he is very brave; the type who faces adversities head-on and who gets up every time he falls; the type we'd want to have on our side. He's also a fine painter and an amazing cartoonist whose works have appeared in our newspapers. He has other accomplishments, of course, having designed many of the buildings in KK and making contributions to the local communities but I'm not listing his achievements here. 

Note: I feel privileged to have been given a peek into “Mingo’s Meanderings” because, for personal reasons, the author doesn’t want to have it published.