Author David T.K. Wong recalls colonial education in Singapore: ‘there was a lot of revisionism’
Now based in Malaysia after many years in London, the Hong Kong-born writer talks about the different stages of his eventful life
A wartime refugee educated at Stanford, he was a journalist, a Hong Kong civil servant, and ran trading firm Li & Fung before becoming a philanthropist
Wrong side of history I was born in 1929 in Hong Kong. My parents divorced when I was three. My mother remarried, and my father got involved with another woman. On my father’s side, I’ve got six siblings. Although I was born in Hong Kong, I spent very little time there as a child. After my parents divorced, I went to stay with my maternal grandparents in Canton. When I was five, I went to stay with my paternal grandparents in Singapore, where I went to a missionary school.
It was a colonialist education and I learned all about the British Empire and British history. I learned about the European glories and explorer James Cook, but nothing about the Ming dynasty and the Chinese admirals who sailed all over the world. Brought up as colonial subjects, there was a lot of revisionism to overcome. The empire was not interested in giving the local people a decent slice of their culture and history – all that I was taught, I had to unlearn when I grew up.
Curious beginnings My (paternal) grandfather (Wong Wan-on, who was born in Hong Kong) was a revolutionary. He raised money for the revolution in 1911 and was a friend of Dr Sun Yat-sen. He had many cupboards full of books in the house. Even before I could read or write I was interested in those books and would pull them off the shelves and look at the pictures.
There were lots of anthropology books with pictures of naked people from Papua New Guinea and elsewhere, and African women with elongated necks. It struck me that in these early-19th-century pictures of dark, naked men and women there was always one white man in rather outlandish clothes. I thought it rather strange – they are all human beings but different. Those books sparked my curiosity about the world.
Pillar to post When I was 12 (during the Battle for Singapore, in February 1942), I was evacuated to Australia as a refugee on the deck of a British minesweeper with some members of my family. I know what it’s like to be poor. I got my clothing from the Red Cross and some help from relief agencies. I started working when I was 13, as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant in Perth. I’ve written about this in the first and second of my memoirs, Adrift: My Childhood in Colonial Singapore (2015) and Hong Kong Fiascos: A Struggle For Survival (2015).