Two years ago, the bishop of Penang opened Sybil’s case for canonisation, and since then, increasing attention has been paid to the war heroine’s bravery and incomparable contribution to the nation. “What I’ve written about her mother comes straight from the source. It’s something that needs to be recorded and not forgotten.”
This, along with the stories of many others, makes up the illuminating details of Ho’s most recent book, War-Torn Malaya: Memories of the Japanese Occupation. Published in April, the 150-page anthology collates testimonies from around 20 individuals who lived in Perak in the early 1940s.
Ho, a family physician by trade, began writing nearly 40 years ago, editing a medical journal for the College of General Practitioners in Malaysia. “They wanted me to create a column about doctors. So, for every issue I worked on, I submitted an article. Eventually, I compiled and published them as a book.”
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This was Doctors Extraordinaire (2000), a bank of biographies of medical practitioners before and after the early days of Independence. His following book, Doctors in the East (2001), focuses more specifically on the history of Chinese medicine.
“After editing the journal for 12 years, I thought, ‘That’s enough,’ and I started penning my own books. I was wondering what to cover and decided to write about my family. Generations: The Story of Batu Gajah is about my grandfather, how he came over and built a life here,” he says.
Tales of yore, particularly from his home state, have continued to be his literary focus: Ipoh: When Tin Was King (2009) tells of the capital’s thriving era; his fifth book, titled Phoenix Rising, Pioneering Chinese Women of Malaysia (2015), reveals the hardships and injustices overcome by an age of once-voiceless female figures.
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“You see, I am always in my clinic. My only references are journals and reports from the computer. I can’t write a book on something like travel because I’d actually have to travel! That’s why I confine my subject to history, where I can get my references from books, newspapers and whatnot,” he explains.
Dwelling on the past is precisely the strength of Ho’s corpus, all of which is well received for its thoroughness, considerate readability and willingness to shed light on the rarely discussed crevices of our nation’s most critical moments.
War-Torn Malaya is no different. Research began in 2008, when Lynn Hollen Lees, Professor of History Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, was a visiting fellow at the Perak Academy. “She mooted the idea of a Perak Oral History Project to interview people who had lived through certain periods like the Japanese occupation or the Malayan Emergency. We thought it was a good suggestion and started it. A group of us, members of the Perak Academy, tried to speak to everyone we could find who was alive during those times.”
Whenever the team received a lead, they would travel out to meet and hear from these survivors. Despite their age, the interviewees were mostly well-educated, English-speaking professionals, capable of vividly remembering and sharing what happened.
“These events occurred about 80 years ago; so many of them were teenagers," says Ho, adding that some 12 of them have since passed on. “I think it’s about time we told all their stories. There’s no point in just listening and leaving it at that. I had to do a lot of work — background reading and whatnot — but I knew I had to get it done.”
Each chapter covers a different person’s recollections through the lens of Ho’s contextual commentary, including points on the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army, the fomenting of racial tensions and the brutal treatment of men, women and children alike. Ho does not shy away from laying out the extreme conditions of war. But for all of the book’s grisly and challenging moments, the most potent is his unwavering commitment to honesty.
“I owe it to them to be truthful in their interviews, so I changed nothing. Their accounts were so varied. Some of them, the burdens their families faced from the Japanese were immense, while others worked for the military. Of course, they were young and didn’t know what the war was. It was just a job to them.”
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The testimony of Datuk Seri Dr Sambanthanathan Underwood was one such example. A child prodigy, he became adept at the Japanese language shortly after the invasion, narrowly escaped execution and became a lecturer for senior government servants. In his meeting with Ho, he even recounted that he had wanted to become a kamikaze pilot. “It was very surprising to hear, but he did say it. He was only 14 years old at the time and so smitten with the Japanese,” says the author.
Few were lucky enough to find merciful respite amid horrifying times. Others, like European planter G R French, watched a man get his eye gouged out and disembowelled before him. “They suffered during that period, even as youths. Mr Loh [Piang Wong] had to see his father killed by the Kempeitai and find his body floating on the river. It must have been very traumatic.”
Like many born in the wake of the atrocity, Ho grew up hearing anecdotes about it from his parents and friends. “I have to say that I benefited a lot from and was humbled by the project. It does change your perspective on what happened.”
How will our society shift as the generation that lived through those horrors dies out and those harrowing memories go with them? As vital as awareness is, acknowledgement and forgiveness are admittedly the purview of nations and their governments. These statements are real experiences first and historic resources second. Ho maintains that it is loyalty — not just to the truth, but to those who went through war at its rawest and most visceral — that shapes his work.
Though his sixth book is hot off the press and he has two more already in the pipeline, Ho laughs at the prospect of being called a writer. “I don’t think you could call me that. It’s just a hobby. I’m 80 years old; I have to do something, right?” His next work will focus on the rickshaw pullers of Malaysia and Singapore prior to the colonial ban in 1947, while his final one will explore the history of Papan, Perak, a former hub of wartime resistance.
Asked what the average person can learn from these snapshots of the past, Ho offers simply: “I don’t know. Even my generation had absolutely no idea what happened during those years. We were not witnesses. But it’s important to record it and let people make their own decisions. It is not up to us to tell them what to believe. We tell these stories to ask, ‘What do you think?’”
