It’s a tale of a man from China who came to work in one of the Malay States in the Peninsula (not yet Malaya, let alone Malaysia), and his friendship with a monkey.
Though the story is centred around opium, it is not an exposition of the evils of opium or the far more loathsome iniquitous British drug traders, ranging from British Parliament, British merchants/traders in China, the oppressive and punitive Royal Navy gunboat tactics in China, and the British authorities’ licensing of opium dens throughout British colonies in Asia including the Malay Peninsula.
The story has to start with a non-judgemental understanding that it was quite normal for a Chinese in the earlier colonial days in the Malay Peninsula, especially an expatriate, to smoke opium.
While there are the rich who indulged in the drug, many opium smokers were the coolie class who nightly ‘chased the dragon’ to both ease the pains and aches in their body and to forget their unfortunate personal circumstances. Opium was to the Chinese coolies of early British colonial days in Malaya what toddy is to the poorer Indian Malaysians today, an analgesic or tranquilizer.
Let’s provide the man from China a name so as to render the story-telling easier – let’s call him Lee.
Like most, Lee came to the Malay Peninsula to seek his fortune. It could have been the allure of rumoured silver here, but which turned out to be tin. Thus the hope of finding wealth in distant land persuaded him to leave his family (parents, siblings, wife, perhaps even children) back in China and come to the Nanyang*.
* ‘Southern Ocean’ or South-East Asia, but sometimes referring more to the ethnic Chinese migrant population in Vietnam, Malaya, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, & Indonesia
It could have been the opportunity for profitable trading, or to offer his service as a specialist to the local Chinese community, as a teacher, traditional (herbal) doctor, mason, blacksmith, etc, or even just as a coolie (labourer).
After years of toiling in Nanyang, Lee was still alone, unlike some immigrants who married either local Chinese belles or native women. There was also a suspicion that he like many Chinese who ventured into the world outside China to seek their fortune, had abandoned their original dreams of returning ‘home’ with wealth (maybe because they didn’t make it?) and just wanted to live out their remaining years in his new found land.
He resided in a small but comfortable little hut near the fringe of the jungle, where at the end of the day, after dinner and a nice bowl of either tea or rice wine, he would relax in his chair on the veranda and puffed serenely at his opium pipe.
It was a lovely tropical rustic scene - an attap hut by a small bubbling brook which meandered by the edge of a largely virgin jungle that was teeming with birds, monkeys, butterflies and various types of insects. Their cries, whistles, screeches and humming underscored their presence. The stream was abundant with fishes, turtles, otters, eels and other aquatic creatures.
Sometimes Lee would see wild pigs, deer and tapirs grazing nearby. There were of course the obligatory slithery ones, while at night the occasional roars of panthers or even tigers could be heard alongside the more pathetic calls of wild cats, musangs (civet cats) or owls. In the twilight the bountiful swarms of glorious fireflies competed with his hurricane lamp to provide illumination during the evenings.
And as Lee puffed away, the rich fragrant odour of the smoked candu (opium) wafted away into the nearby jungle. One day, a more curious monkey, probably a long-tailed Macaque, caught its scent by the grace of a shifting evening breeze, and attracted, curiously approached the hut in anticipation of finding delectable food.
He sat on a mango tree next to the hut, watching Lee as he puffed away at his pipe. Lee was of course watching him at the same time as the monkey didn’t exactly arrive with stealth, swinging from rustling branch to rustling branch until he was comfortably perched on the tree.
After several minutes of curious observations by both sides, Lee got up, went into his hut and re-emerged with a handful of groundnuts (peanuts), probably imported from China as this was before 1940. Even though Menglembu is one of the oldest towns in Perak, existing as far back as the mid 19th Century (1850’s), Mr Lee Kit Yin, the founder of the famous Pagoda brand roasted groundnuts, only began producing Menglembu’s best known product in 1940.
I am not sure whether groundnuts, especially the baked or roasted kind, would be a staple food of monkeys, but Chinese Malayans have, for some reasons or other, believed that it was so, though today we know that monkeys feed on a diet of grubs, insects, bird eggs, reptiles (even small snakes) fruits, flowers, leaves and roots (groundnuts?).
Anyway, Lee left the nuts on a tree stump near the mango tree, about 3 to 4 metres away from where he sat. Monkey (let’s call him that, and he was a mature male) carefully descended from the tree to take the groundnuts. The offer and acceptance of groundnuts, with the occasional substitution of bananas, fruits, bread, rice, etc, continued for weeks.
Each time Lee left the food, he would straightaway walk straight back to his chair, and once seated, puffed away at his opium pipe, while Monkey would cautiously approached the offerings. Initially the simian would snatch at the gift and swiftly scamper back to the safety of the tree before eating it, but soon he was bold enough to enjoy the food at the tree stump.
It was only a natural development of their daily social interactions that one day Monkey was waiting on the veranda for Lee to return from work in the evenings, showing no signs of animal hostility. Lee was cautious enough not to take the relationship for granted, fully aware Monkey was an untamed creature of the Wilds. Then weeks later, Monkey was taking the food directly from the hands of Lee, and eating same while sitting on the veranda beside Lee in his chair.
Inevitably Monkey showed great curiosity in Lee’s opium smoking, even climbing up on to Lee’s shoulders to have a closer look and smell. As would have it, Lee, perhaps lonely and bored, decided to both experiment and satisfy Monkey’s curiosity by gently puffing out smoke into Monkey’s face.
The simian must have liked it as he continued jumping onto Lee’s shoulders when the latter was smoking. Eventually Lee offered the curious simian the pipe, still glowing with the smouldering candu. As they say, Monkey saw, Monkey did. After some initial coughing starts, Monkey joined Lee in their evening puffs. The man-monkey partnership in ‘chasing the dragon’ in the evenings went on for years.
One day Lee received sad news in a letter from China. An earthquake (subsequently claimed by the Chinese as being greater than 8 on the Richter Scale) had hit Ningxia province in Gansu region in December in the previous year, with aftershocks continuing since then. Nearly 250,000 people perished due to collapsing buildings and landslides. More than half of Lee’s family including his parents, all seven uncles and four of his elder brothers died. He was the remaining eldest of that unfortunate family. The remaining family members urged him to return to take charge.
It was by then late June, a lengthy 6 months after the tragedy before the letter reached him. It was not an unusual interval given the confusion in the aftermath of the earthquake and at a time when letters arrived in the Nanyang by the proverbial/paraphrased ‘slow boat from China’.
Once he got over the shock of the tragic news, he knew that the decimation of his family required him to revise his original plan to remain in the Malay Peninsula, so he made inquiries as to the earliest boat to China. He booked a passage on the first available one (a Chinese junk) which would set sail from Penang in September, two months away.
While he was finalizing his affairs for his departure he realized with enormous sadness that he couldn’t possibly take his companion, Monkey, along with him to China. Monkey was a denizen of the Wilds; for a start, how could the creature even survive the several weeks on a boat at sea? Lee spent hours pondering on what he could do for the by-now opium-addicted creature, knowing that he would never ever return to the Nanyang because of both his family requirements and his age.
Once he decided on a plan, the best under the circumstances, he did two things: first, he bought a fairly large quantity of opium, and second, he stopped smoking the drug but instead converted the method of consumption into taking opium pellets, one on each evening. His changed his drug habits purely to train Monkey into taking the opium by daily pellet rather than smoking it, because Monkey would not be able to handle the pipe by itself. He had two months to do so.
In the meantime he set about rolling the huge chunk of opium into pellets. Working furiously each night, he set a final target by end of September of at least 1,000 pellets (about 3 years supply) besides those to be consumed daily by him and Monkey until he left.
Each night as he rolled the opium into pellets and stored them in a container, he would guide Monkey into taking only one from the container for its daily needs.
They say a creature can sense what’s going on with a companion, as most dog lovers would swear. Somehow Monkey, by then converted to daily pellet taking, sensed Lee’s despondent mood and knew that the happy times were about to end.
It could also have been the fact that each night as he went about making the pellets, Lee talked sadly about the necessity of himself returning to China, and his apologies for being unable to take Monkey along. The lugubrious mono dialogue, its melancholic tones and the disconsolate tears from Lee’s eyes as he whispered wistfully to Monkey were perhaps sufficient telegraphic messages that something sorrowful would happen.
Or there was already a bond between man and beast, so much so that Monkey could feel or read Lee's mood in ways that we could never fathom.
On the fateful eve of Lee’s departure, he gave the entire stash of more than a thousand pellets in a container to Monkey with advice, and told the simian that he was leaving the following morning. Did Monkey understand the Chinese speaking human? Who knows, but Lee later recalled that he observed tears in Monkey’s eyes. The creature understood their relationship was to end. That night Monkey disappeared into the jungle with the supply of opium pellets.
Next morning as Lee with a very heavy heart was about to leave the hut for the last time, he saw Monkey up in the mango tree. It broke his heart as he realized the simian was waiting for him, because Monkey had never arrived at the hut in the morning.
Monkey then leapt down and approached him, and that was when he saw it was carrying a short stick about half a metre in length. It was knobbly and of some indeterminate wood species. Monkey handed the stick to him (actually pressed the item into his hands), and with a heart-wrenching last look, disappeared into the Malayan jungle. He never ever saw Monkey again.
Obviously it was a farewell gift from his erstwhile companion. Lee was touched by the almost human gesture and vowed to respect Monkey’s gift by bestowing upon it an honoured position in his house in China.
And a couple weeks later, we have Lee in the junk sailing between the Philippines and what today is Vietnam. It was September, the horrendous month for typhoons. That year, there was to be no exception to the seasonal climatology for the South China Sea region as a frighteningly ferocious typhoon hit the junk.
‘Twas much later, after the junk had escaped the wrath of the typhoon and just before it made land at Hong Kong, that the junk captain sent his crew to inquire from the two dozen or so passengers which of them had any unusual artefact, of amuletic or talismanic properties, and that he was prepared to pay a large sum for it.
When a few curious passengers asked why he inquired into the presence of such an item he revealed that he thought they would perish in the storm as the typhoon was the strongest he had seen in the 30 years he sailed the seas; but he was amazed with stunned wonderment when the junk sailed through it as if it was shielded by some strange divine force. The vessel appeared completely unaffected by the fury of the surrounding raging typhoon, its mountainous waves and fierce winds, indeed as if it was sailing on calm waters in an isolated bubble totally divorced from the storm raging just outside the apparent sphere.
The captain could not explain the strange but beneficial phenomenon which had kept his junk and all on board safe, except to attribute it to some unknown divine or magical intervention. He wanted whatever it was that protected the ship from nature’s fury.
Lee wisely remained silent, thinking to himself that the staff was what his village required to protect it from the devastating earthquake. At that moment he thought of Monkey and murmured a silent word of thanks to his old friend for gifting him with such a wonderful talisman.
Like us, he wondered about the strange forces of Nature still unknown to us, and the wisdom and knowledge of creatures like Monkey, which we puny humans dismissed so arrogantly. Years later, he wondered too, with tears in his eyes, how his erstwhile companion, Monkey, had fared. His story came back through relatives to Malaya and thus Ginny's dad.
Today, somewhere in China there is a family with such a talismanic tongkat (walking cane), though we do not know whether Monkey still exists or there is another monkey such as the one which gave the tongkat to Lee.
2 comments:
Maybe this Monkey is a relative/follower of the legendary Monkey God, u know, the one from the children classic Journey to the West, where the Monkey God went from a Taoist sage to achieving Buddhahood in the end.
Monkeys, smart creatures they are.
;-) if Monkey was, then he's a Malayan disciple or relative of Sun Wukong
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