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By Root 4331 0

focus of much of urban life had gravitated towards the new Asian urban settlements on the fringes of towns such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Ipoh. They were at a safer remove from the settlements of Japanese, and closer to opportunities for small-scale cultivation and trade. They were worlds of constant change and movement, a place where migrants – often young, unmarried men and women – might lodge and begin to make their way in the towns. There was poverty, risk and danger here – armed men still roamed the streets – but also opportunity. The new middle class of clerks, skilled labourers and entrepreneurs could acquire some property and standing; in the war urban land was the surest form of investment. These settlements were villages within the city, but entirely adapted to it. For Mustapha Hussain, Kampong Baru, the Malay ‘New Village’ near the heart of Kuala Lumpur where he brought his family to live in a small room after he lost his job with the British, eking out a living as a seller of sotong bakar (highly-spiced grilled dried squid), was a place to regain some freedom. Although these village-cities were often a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, settlement demarcations became blurred. This was a rich environment where communities met, often for the first time, and with no language in common, learned to communicate, borrowing services, forging trust and, over time, sharing a popular culture.

One of the first writers to attempt to describe this was Chin Kee Onn, a Chinese schoolteacher from Ipoh who had worked for the Japanese military administration in Perak. His Malaya Upside Down, published in 1946 and reprinted twice in its first year, was a darkly humorous account of the tragedies, absurdities and social transformations of the war. It recounted events which people had witnessed only in fragments or heard through rumour. The war years, Chin wrote, were ‘a muddled hallucination conjured by some super-surrealist imp in which hordes of dwarfs suddenly became bloodcurdling ogres, turning everything topsy-turvy…’ Men of high standing, civil servants and lawyers, had joined the ranks of the urban poor. The emblem of bourgeois status, the neck-tie, was abandoned. In the Japanese regime, those who made money were not the tycoons ‘of the Rolls-Royce type. They were humble-looking and inconspicuous rice importers, fishermen, tobacco manufacturers, oil millers, hardware dealers and gambling-stall owners!’ Now status was entirely precarious: war was a great leveller. ‘The prevailing style of dress for men in this period’, Chin wrote, ‘consisted of an open-collar shirt with breast pockets, “shorts” or long trousers and rubber sandals or slippers, without socks.’71 This simple style was adopted by a new generation of young urban activists; and the open-necked, short-sleeved shirt became a uniform for would-be politicians. In the war, there was little privacy; in a time of informers, solitude invited suspicion; in a time of hunger, survival demanded that life be lived in the open. Thousands of women – refugees, mothers and children without a male provider, homeless Cantonese amahs, house servants and housewives – took to hawking in the streets and parks. Once it would have been shameful for a bourgeois to be seen eating in public; now everybody ate by the wayside, and mingled in the impromptu markets. People of all ranks approached one another with ease. The cosmopolitan energy of the village-city was turned inwards, and new solidarities were being formed across Malaya’s ‘plural society’.

And in late 1945, after the years of fear and austerity, and despite the continuing shortages, the cities and towns came dramatically to life. The barometers of urban life in Malaya were the Worlds, the amusement parks that were to be found in all the major towns. The oldest and most spectacular was the New World of Singapore: an open labyrinth of fantastical halls and pavilions, connected by alleyways of restaurants, hawkers and sundry stalls. There were theatres, nightclubs, dances, and open-air cinema that played continuously through