COMMENT | Ah Li lands in Malaya. Many of his friends have died on the ship from China due to starvation, illness and diseases. Ah Li rushes back to the ship and shouts to his shipmaster to pass him his pouch.

His shipmaster throws it to him and calls him a forgetful fool. This pouch carries Ah Li’s clothes (few good, many torn), preserved vegetables and a photograph of his family.

Well-built men with palms as coarse as the soil tie ropes around Ah Li’s wrists and push him to see his new master. The master calls Ah Li and his friends “zhu zhai” (piglets) whose bondage is for three years to pay off the debt of the ship voyage, food and accommodation. This is the “credit-ticket system” to work in the British colonial capitalist economy in 1917.

Many Chinese like Ah Li were eager to get out of the shackles of poverty and instability in Qing China. Ah Li saw the abundant job opportunities in the resource-rich Malaya as a promise of a new life. After saying goodbye to his family for the last time, he took a one-way ticket to Malaya.

But Ah Li did not know this was a slave system. Work conditions were unbearable, abuse was unfettered and the pay was unacceptably low. Each day, Ah Li and his co-workers rise before dawn and work 15 hours a day, sleep on wooden floors that break their backs, and eat food more aptly served to dogs. The slave system resulted in many deaths and escapes among workers.

The only Chinese who profited from this system were the small number of tin mine owners and rubber estate holders. Most of the Chinese who worked as “piglets”, like Ah Li, spent their lives at the lowest rung of society.

Fraud, deception and intimidation extended Ah Li’s bondage to five years, and when he finally escaped this system, he used the little money he earned to start planting sugar cane, pepper and vegetables.

Fortunately, the land was fertile and traders favoured his honesty. In a few years, he earned enough money to bring the rest of his family over. Modest and simple, his new life in Malaya began.

The Chinese label

Ah Li is my great-great-grandfather. His story is the story of many Chinese who eventually settled down on this land.

When they decided to emigrate to Malaya, they took a gamble to cut off ties with their birthplace. They looked forward to making a home in Malaya and learning the new ways of the land.

When Malaya negotiated the terms of independence, many Chinese looked at the homes they had built and the friends they had made in Malaya and decided to join the common destiny of a new nation. They then renewed their vows together again as Malaysians in 1963.

But many generations later, the Chinese label never ceases to be a mark of misleading privilege. The common assumption is that most Chinese are rich and we can therefore determine the fate of a people by the race they were born. Poor Chinese were marginalised and forgotten.

The justification of race-based economic policies have always avoided the inconvenient question of the poor Chinese. When asked about it, most policymakers simply shrug and consider their marginalisation a price we have been forced to pay. The idea is that since some Chinese earn relatively more than the other races, it is presumably reasonable to consider the whole Chinese race as being economically comfortable.

When I think of poor Chinese, I think of my relatives who still live on thin wages in the suburbs of Perak. My uncle Soon’s house is made of wood washed by decades of rain and storm, with walls furnished only by photos of Ah Li and his wife – yellowing bases in coal-black frames.

When I told my uncle that we could change this country for the better, he turned his head away from me before puffing incessantly from his hand-rolled cigarette. He threw the cigarette butt to the floor and stepped on it with some force. He nodded repeatedly before he turned his wrinkled face to me and said, “Good, good.”

Uncle Soon continued, “See there, that piece of dead steel is all I could afford,” and pointed to his old motorcycle. “See this house – this dirty, broken, desolated house! I have lived here for 62 years and this is all I eat every single day!”

He lifted the bowl of plain porridge slightly and slammed it onto the table. “Who asked me to be poor and Chinese? Make a change all you want, but the Chinese poor will always stay on the fringes of society with no one to care for them.”

He rubbed my skin with his crooked fingers and said, “Look at your colour, you will never be one of them”...